By Dewi Paulino, SVP of Marketing, Affinity Solutions
Every year, the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity becomes a referendum on where the industry’s attention is going. This year, that attention was firmly on AI: agentic commerce, conversational advertising, and what happens to brand allegiance and advertising measurement when machines start making more of the decisions. Affinity Solutions actively participated in the conversations on the ground, and a few sentiments stood out.
AI Without Outcomes Is Just Noise
One of the clearest themes to emerge from the panel, The AI Advertising Era Changes the Game — Are You Ready?, hosted by DoubleVerify, featuring our CCO and CMO, Damian Garbaccio, alongside leaders from Comcast Advertising, OpenAI, Microsoft, Amazon, and PMG, was a warning against mistaking efficiency for strategy. CMOs are being measured on revenue growth, not cost savings, and CFOs can cut costs on their own. If AI isn’t helping marketers sell more, it isn’t doing its job.
Other insights from this panel:
The Best Proxy for a Purchase Is a Purchase
Damian made the case that as AI accelerates decision-making, the goal of marketing isn’t changing, the ability to optimize toward it is. Intent signals and behavioral data get marketers close, but deterministic transaction data closes the loop. Real purchase activity, measured continuously rather than just assessed at the end of a campaign, is what allows for ongoing optimization instead of retrospective reporting.
Brand Matters More, Not Less, in an Agentic World
As AI agents increasingly do the shopping on a consumer’s behalf, the panel weighed in on what happens to brands. The consensus: it becomes more important, not less. Nobody asks an agent for “shoes.” They ask for a specific brand, size, and model. Brand preference becomes the entry point into agentic commerce, which means the work of building that preference doesn’t go away. It gets more consequential.
For me, the jury is still out. I think it depends on where the consumer is on their journey. If I already know the brand I want, AI simply helps me get there faster. But when I’m solving a new problem—like my current house renovation—I start with the outcome, not the brand. I’ve been using AI to design my dream bathroom, discover new wallpaper styles, and find retailers that carry similar designs because I’m not familiar with specific brands or shops. That raises the bar for marketers. Brands need to be associated with the needs, values, and aspirations consumers share in their AI prompts so they show up at exactly the right moment.
AI Models Trust Reddit. That Should Give Advertisers Pause
Several panelists pointed to Reddit as an increasingly important signal for AI models trying to determine what’s authentic. But that signal can be gamed. If platforms can be seeded with planted narratives or AI-generated content, the data feeding optimization and measurement is only as trustworthy as the sources behind it, a consideration advertisers will need to factor into how much weight they put on any single signal.
Data Quality Is the Language Agents Speak
The panel’s closing thread tied it together: as AI increasingly mediates discovery and purchase decisions, the richness, freshness, and structure of data will determine which brands get surfaced and which get left behind.
A Few Conversations Worth Watching
Beyond the panel, the Affinity Solutions team sat down for a few conversations worth a watch:
Hot Yachts featuring Dewi Paulino, SVP of Marketing, Affinity Solutions and Edwin Wong, Head of Global Measurement Science, Uber Advertising
What happens beyond the platform? Edwin and I explored why advertisers are demanding a broader view of measurement and how Affinity and Uber Ads are partnering to meet that need, starting with a preview of a recent joint study showing a 27% incremental lift in sales across all platforms for QSR brands using Uber Eats Sponsored Listings.
Fireside Chat featuring Damian Garbaccio, Chief Commercial and Marketing Officer and Dawn Lee Williamson, Chief Revenue Officer, Comcast Advertising
In a conversation with Jackelyn Keller, CCO at Marketecture Media, Damian and Dawn discussed how Affinity Solutions and Comcast Advertising are partnering to bring purchase-based precision targeting and measurement to premium video.
The common thread: how partnerships rooted in real purchase data are helping marketers move beyond modeled estimates and measure ROAS against what consumers actually bought.
Where the Unfiltered Conversations Happen
The panels and recordings tell part of the story. The rest happened in between. The Ad Age Lawn Party, which we co-sponsored with Stackline, drew a packed crowd for an afternoon of conversation, cold drinks, and ice cream, which felt especially well-timed given the blistering heat in France.
Disco Daze, the yacht party Affinity Solutions co-hosted with DoubleVerify, brought a live set from Sophie Ellis-Bextor and Richard Jones (Me & Mrs. Jones) one of the highlights of the week.
And dinners with clients and partners delivered the kind of candid, unhurried conversations that don’t happen over Zoom.
These are the moments when the relationships that drive the industry forward actually get built.
The Big Takeaway
Every conversation this week, on stage and off, pointed to the same underlying challenge: marketers are under more pressure than ever to prove what’s working. That’s the problem Affinity has been built to solve since day one. Helping brands move beyond assumptions and understand what happens after a consumer is exposed to an ad, from planning and activation through measurement and optimization.
The Croisette will clear out. The momentum won’t.
