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Behind the Numbers: an EMARKETER Podcast
What Everyone Is Talking About at Cannes 2025 | Behind the Numbers
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- [00:00]
Marcus
Are your brand campaigns as effective as they could be? If you're only getting insights when the campaign is over, then of course the answer is no. To make better campaign decisions, you need real time measurement. You need lucid measurement by sint. Discover the power of real time brand lift measurement@cint.com insights. That's cint.com insights. Hey, gang. It's Friday, June 13th. Jasmine, Sarah, and listeners, welcome to behind the Numbers, a new marketer video podcast made possible by sint. I'm Marcus, and today we'll be discussing the conversations we are expecting to hear at Cannes this year regarding advertising's past, present and future challenges. Joining me for that conversation, we have our VP and principal analyst covering social media based in California, it's Jasmine Emberg.
- [00:50]
Jasmine Emberg
Hey, Marcus. Hey, everyone.
- [00:51]
Marcus
Hello there. We're also joined by our principal analysts covering retail and commerce media living in New York, it's Sarah Marzano.
- [00:58]
Sarah Marzano
Hi, Marcus. Thanks for having me. Of course.
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Marcus
All right, today's fact. So do you guys like. I think this is most people, but do you like the smell of freshly cut grass?
- [01:14]
Sarah Marzano
Sure do.
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Marcus
Yeah, I did until reading about this. Yeah. Here you go, world. Yeah, that's right. I'm dragging you down with me.
- [01:22]
Sarah Marzano
Okay.
- [01:22]
Marcus
I could keep this a secret and let you enjoy the pleasures of the smell of freshly cut grass, but I'm not going to. So smell isn't just an accidental byproduct of cut leaves. There's actually some evidence to suggest that plants are deliberately emitting volatile compounds in response to damage. So when they're being cut, they're panicking. Basically, Jez Ford of Science Illustrated wrote that the smell of fresh cut grass is actually a warning signal being released by plants under attack. The pheromones emitted when grass is cut are known as GLVs, green leaf volatiles that act as a distress signal or warning call.
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Jasmine Emberg
That's actually very sad.
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Sarah Marzano
So sad.
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Marcus
Yes.
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Sarah Marzano
You just ruined everyone's.
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Jasmine Emberg
I did not want to know that.
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Marcus
That's right. I'm so sorry. I feel terrible for being never going.
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Sarah Marzano
To get my innocence back.
- [02:18]
Marcus
Nope, it's all gone. How does that happen? One study showed that corn plants released GLVs when predators chewed on them, which in turn made other corn plants produce substances which made them less tasty as a defense mechanism. And Louis Vilazon of BBC Science Focus explains that wild tobacco plants emit a certain GLV only when they are being grazed by caterpillars. And that acts as a signal to attract nearby bugs that prey on caterpillars. This one.
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Sarah Marzano
This one was done, but fascinating.
- [02:49]
Marcus
Yeah.
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Jasmine Emberg
Marcus, how do you choose your facts of the day?
- [02:53]
Marcus
It's a great question. I normally just choose it based on what I think about in. In life. This is how I spend my life. I just walk around and I'm like, I wonder why that's like that. And then I go find out about it and spend. That's most of my job. Sure will be pleased to nurse about half of what I'd spend my time anyway. You're welcome, folks. Today's real topic, the most interesting conversations we expect to at Cannes 2025. All right, 2025 marks the 71st annual Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, held between June 16 and June 20. Thousands flock there every year to talk about advertising's challenges, past, present and future, including two of the folks we have with us today. For this episode, we decided to take a look at some of the most interesting sessions being put on this year and talk about a few of them. One of the sessions is titled Pas de publicite. Merci no ads, please. The session description outlines how advertising used to entertain, inspire, and even be welcome. Today, it's blocked, skipped, and avoided. How did it become the guest nobody invited, and how can we change that? That's one of the questions that they're going to be answering in the session, and another of the questions they're going to be asking in that session is, can advertisers create powerful popular brand narratives when media fragmentation means no two people experience the same content? Jasmine, can they?
- [04:32]
Jasmine Emberg
Yes. But I do think that some advertisers will need to rethink what powerful and popular mean in this new environment. And all of them are simultaneously going to have to be more nimble and more deliberate in their approach. And what I mean by that is, as our media usage has just become so much more fragmented as well as curated and heavily tailored to our interests, mass media has lost a lot of its relevance and obviously a lot of its trust as well. So if you're thinking about brands that are trying to build strong narratives in this context, they should probably focus less on casting as wide a net as possible, which is traditionally how we think about popular narratives, and more on identifying both the right audience and the right message and then finding the correct voices, whether that's creators, influencers, or, you know, anybody else as well as the creative that can then speak to that audience rather than to everybody. And that's true even if you're thinking about, like, big cultural events which still have mass appeal because we're watching them in so many different ways, whether that's on social media, whether that's on streaming or podcasts. And so in kind of this context, it means that advertisers should be designing for adaptability. They might have to have multiple expressions of their work, but at the same time they also have to ensure that they're maintaining consistency in terms of their brand voice and brand message. So long story short, yes, absolutely. They can continue to craft powerful popular storytelling, but the approach has to change somewhat from how it was done previously.
- [06:19]
Sarah Marzano
I think that's absolutely right. When I was kind of mulling over these topics, I approached it from the perspective of retail media, which I'm sort of want to do. But I think I would argue that advertisers actually today have more opportunity than they ever have before to tell really cohesive stories that feel relevant to the audience that they're reaching. And a lot of that is powered by what, how effective we're seeing retailer data in terms of creating audiences that are meaningful and targeted and the increased use cases we are seeing for deploying that data off of retailers owned and operated digital ecosystem. So thinking through off site campaigns and even bringing retail media data storytelling into physical stores where the majority of purchase decisions do end up being made. So I think it really will behoove advertisers again to stay on top of the sort of offerings their retailer partners enable and also retailers to continue building and iterating on their capabilities to this effect. But I think we're actually at a really exciting time in terms of being able to tell these really holistic, cohesive stories.
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Jasmine Emberg
Yeah, yeah, I think so too. And one of my big talking points overall has been that consumers navigate the world and the digital world and the physical world seamlessly. Right. Where moving through different channels, whether that's TV again, social podcasts and even physical stores like you brought up, Sarah, seamlessly. And we're not necessarily thinking about how we are engaging with the brand, but brands really don't have that same seamless, holistic experience. And many of them still need to catch up and ensure that they are providing that consistency as consumers are navigating these different channels. And I think that's kind of the moment that we're in right now in terms of trying to figure that all out.
- [08:06]
Marcus
So follow up question for you both, because people are, things are fragmented right now. I'd be surprised to hear that. And there was, we did a survey this spring, it was looking at where people search for things and most people go to Google and then to Amazon, but then there were 20 to 40% of people in each of these different groups saying that they go to TikTok, to Walmart, to AI chatbots, to Instagram, to Facebook, to YouTube, to bunch of different places. So people are. Are looking for things in a lot of different places. And you just mentioned the way that people view events of significant size, something like the Super Bowl. It's this huge audience, which means, okay, I can get to all those. Those people at once as an advertiser, but they're watching it in. In different ways. They're watching it on cable, they're watching it through streaming, they're watching it later on YouTube, they're looking at clips on social media. My question, I guess, Jasmine, I'll go to you first. Do you expect more or less fragmentation in the future? Will AI kind of bring things into just one chatbot most people go to and social media platforms, maybe people will start to consolidate those as well in terms of where they spend their time, or do you expect more fragmentation?
- [09:19]
Jasmine Emberg
I think it's fragmentation and convergence together in one. And so when you're thinking about it from the advertiser perspective, I mean, what we're starting to see, and obviously I'm coming from the social, social media angle, because that's what I cover, but we're starting to see, for example, advertisers taking TikTok, like creative or social video. Creative, and thinking about how to bring that to ctv. And so, yes, you have this fragmented media landscape, but as marketers and advertisers are catching up to the way that consumers are behaving, we're also going to see naturally this convergence. Right. So it's really kind of twofold. It's two parallel but opposite trends happening at once.
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Marcus
Yeah. Sarah, what do you expect?
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Sarah Marzano
No, I think more or less. That's absolutely right. I think we're going to continue to see top retailer websites be popular destinations for starting product searches. I think that's going to continue. And I have optimism that the long tail of retailers can continue to capture more of those eyeballs via differentiated product strategies. But I think there's also something to be said for the need to sort of really think through the difference between someone who is arriving at a platform with a specific product or use case in mind, versus some of the arenas where passive discovery happens. Right. And the different types of tactics that need to be deployed depending on sort of how and when you're reaching the end user.
- [10:37]
Marcus
Yeah. Let's move on to another one of the panels at Cannes this year titled A New Era of uncertainty finding success in riskier times. You might be shocked to learn that things feel a little bit crazy out there at the moment. Tariffs have been thrown around these past few months by the US ranging from 10% all the way up to 145%. After the April 2 tariffs hit the S&P 500, it fell over 10% in just two days, marking its worst week since the 2020 COVID 19 crash and wiping $3 trillion of value just completely off of it. And the University of Michigan's Consumer Sentiment Index has gone from one of the highest rates since the pandemic in November to a historical low in in April. Sarah, I'll start with you for this one. What is the best piece of advice you've seen, read, thought of for advertisers as they try to negotiate their way through what seems like a minefield of tariff related challenges?
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Sarah Marzano
Sure. And this is good timing because I just published a report on our anticipated impact of tariffs on retail media link in the show notes and one of the things that we sort of come back to is the fact that retail media, because of its culture, close ties to performance marketing and its ability to show clean attribution and conversion, is actually positioned quite well to weather times of economic downturn or uncertainty because we know advertisers turn to performance tactics right during those times. But I think one of the pieces of advice that I sort of can't say often enough or loudly enough is that it's really important not to neglect those brand building tactics. Right?
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Jasmine Emberg
That was mine, Sarah.
- [12:28]
Sarah Marzano
That's how you know it's good advice, right? But I think it's I for me in retail media, right? I think we're actually just moving out of this era where everything was sort of concentrated on lower funnel on on site activations, on advertisements that were happening really close to the point of purchase. And we're seeing retail media really grow up and evolve to play a part in some of those brand building and upper funnel initiatives. And what I don't want to see is for that momentum to slow down. So I would urge retailers to continue investing in these upper funnel capabilities and I would encourage advertisers to continue really thinking through strategically your mix and not over indexing on performance tactics.
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Marcus
Jasmine, I would go to you now.
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Jasmine Emberg
But well, I have a second one too, but just to kind of echo some of Sarah's comments. I think you know, the way that I wrote about it in my report on tariffs and the impact on social Another shameless plug here is that people aren't going to buy your product, tariffs or not, if they don't know who you are. And so that's why it's so important, even in times of economic uncertainty or when budgets are tight, to continue those brand building and awareness and brand loyalty campaigns, which social media is really great for because they have this very holistic experience with organic marketing as well as creators and influencers combined of course with performance marketing and paid media solutions. But the second piece of advice is actually something that I heard on Tuesday when I was at the Information's Creator Economy Summit and it comes from the CEO of Dude, Perfect. Andrew. Yeah, and it's a take really on what brands and advertisers should be focusing on. And I agree with it. And he said that creators and influencers can be particularly powerful partners in this time of economic volatility because it's so difficult for a lot of brands to plan ahead. And it's true, creators by nature are more nimble, they're more flexible than traditional production studios, meaning that they can turn around content or ad creative much more quickly and cheaply. And this is actually something that we saw during the pandemic. As production studios were closed down, a lot of brands turned to creators and influencers. They saw that those campaigns were really working as well. And so the practice obviously stuck. And so kind of bigger picture and all of that. It's one of the reasons that I think again, influencer marketing is going to be one of the more resilient marketing channels to tariffs and to overall economic uncertainty this time around.
- [15:00]
Marcus
Yeah, it seems like the message here is don't just retreat, maybe audit your ad spends because there are a lot of opportunities to still reach people. Yuri Worms, one of our analysts, was writing about search advertising being a pretty safe bet as we all know, but we just did some scenario based forecasting and he was saying that year on year growth for a moderate tariff scenario will still get 7% growth out of search this year. Worst case scenario we had it going down to 3%. So still obviously a safe bet for search as well. But not just search, plenty of other options as Jasmine and Sarah just outlined. Let's end with one final session here. So AI and the future of Creativity. This session can's looking at the real world impact AI is having on how we live, work and create and how to try and resolve the tension between technology and human creativity and the opportunity potentially that that might present. Jasmine, how in your opinion, will AI impact advertising and marketing over the next 12 months? The session was looking at five years, but that's hard to figure out. So we're going to just do a year.
- [16:12]
Jasmine Emberg
I mean, 12 months is hard to figure out too. I mean, I remember I was at Cannes. Well, I'll say that I'm very interested to hear what the conversation around AI is like this year at Cannes because I was there in 2023 when it was this unbridled excitement. 2024, it was still excitement, but a little bit more muted. And we were starting to talk about issues like governance with AI. And so given kind of all of the economic uncertainty and all these other big challenges within the ad market, I'm very curious to you kind of hear what people have to say about AI today. But to answer your question, one of the things that I've been thinking about recently in terms of how AI is going to reshape marketing and advertising is the rise of digital clones, largely within the conte of influencer marketing, but also just, you know, more broadly in ad creative. And I was doing some research for a report I wrote on this recently and what it found was that most creators and influencers are already open to licensing their digital clone to brands, in part because they're looking to reduce burnout. Being a creator is much harder work than it may look like, and also as they're looking to scale their businesses. But there are still a lot of concerns about the misuse of their AI likeness or potential damage to their reputation. And I think critically they aren't willing to take a pay cut for it. And that runs contrary to the accepted narrative that the use of AI will make developing ad creative much cheaper. Because at least in this instance, you know, brands really shouldn't expect cost reductions. That said, eventually that could change. And overall I do expect that digital clones or AI twins or AI avatars or whatever you want to call them, will play a bigger role in marketing and advertising over the next year or so, especially as we're seeing more creators, influencers, celebrities and thought leaders develop AI versions of themselves. And if I can have one more shameless plug, seems a lot of control. I'm actually sitting down with Deepak Chopra and his business partner Punacha Machia to talk about Deepak's AI clone. Digital Deepak and their new venture Cyber Human AI which helps helps health and well being experts create AI twins. So if you are going to Cannes, stay tuned for that.
- [18:33]
Marcus
Very nice. I'd be mad if it wasn't so relevant. Sarah.
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Sarah Marzano
I just keep wanting to make a joke about if we can have AI clones to be on the podcast, but Then I feel like you're really never going to. What are you doing?
- [18:44]
Marcus
My job relies on this. Trying to get me fired?
- [18:47]
Jasmine Emberg
No.
- [18:47]
Sarah Marzano
Nothing can replace you, Marcus.
- [18:49]
Marcus
That's not even remotely true, but thank you. Good to save.
- [18:53]
Sarah Marzano
Okay, what was the question again? Hang on. Okay, got it. I'm back. I'm going to talk a little bit more about retail media's evolution beyond on site placements, beyond sponsored product listings, because I think it's one of the most exciting arenas in retail media today. But it's also opening up a need for a lot of new content, particularly as retailers think about activating their data and assets in off site environments. Right. There's a lot more need for things like co branded creative and I'm excited to see what AI can unlock in terms of building dynamic and differentiated content in a hopefully less cost prohibitive way.
- [19:37]
Marcus
Very nice. Yeah, two great predictions for what we might see over the next 12 months or so. One of the things that jumped out to me was this idea of behind the scenes AI is probably going to be more palatable, at least in the short term because I think we saw a lot of people rush to put AI everywhere and then they saw some of the backlash from consumers and people being a bit freaked out by that. I don't think that means that people have stopped working on AI as much as they were before. I think what they've done is they've said, oh, actually we'll do it over here where people can't see that we're using it. Some research here, close to half of us consumers think brands that use AI generated content in their ads come across as fraudulent according to Tenuity's Public Perceptions of AI in Marketing survey. So I think that's one way. And then the other thing I was thinking as well is how marketers shifting use of AI because we've heard a lot in this report from Basis in March showing that a lot of people are using it for ideation, for research, for content creation, but fewer than half of ad professionals using AI to streamline workflows. So I think people thinking about how AI marketers in particular how AI could make their day more efficient or try to solve some of those more monotonous tasks. But that's all we have time for, unfortunately. Thank you so much to. I would say to both of you, but Sarah nearly got me fired. So mainly to Jasmine. Thank you to Jasmine.
- [21:06]
Jasmine Emberg
You're welcome.
- [21:06]
Marcus
Exclusively.
- [21:07]
Jasmine Emberg
Thank you.
- [21:07]
Marcus
Thank you for nothing, Sarah.
- [21:09]
Sarah Marzano
Goodbye everyone. My last time. My last time.
- [21:11]
Marcus
My last time too. We're getting replaced with AI. You're like, oh, you can't replace you and Marcus Stewart. It's like, challenge accepted. You watch me. I hope everyone enjoys can. Who's going? And thanks to the whole editing crew and everyone for listening in to behind the Numbers, any marketed video podcast made possible by sint. Subscribe and follow for new episodes and leave a rating and review to keep this podcast going. We'll be back on Monday looking at Americans travel plans for this summer. Happiest of weekends.