At A Glance
Cannes Lions 2026 showed that marketers are moving from AI discussion to AI decisioning. This article explains four themes shaping marketing in the second half of 2026: agentic AI, interoperable identity, curated activation, and outcome-based measurement across a more connected ecosystem.If Cannes Lions 2026 had a bingo card, AI would have filled every square. But the week pointed to a bigger story: marketers are rethinking how identity, interoperability, activation quality, and measurement work together as the ecosystem becomes more connected and AI-driven.
As marketing changes, independence matters more. Brands, agencies, publishers, platforms, commerce media networks, and data providers need the flexibility to adapt without being forced into a single workflow, partner path, or technology stack. That requires trusted identity, interoperable data, strong governance, and infrastructure that supports choice across the ecosystem.
Here are the themes that defined Cannes Lions 2026.
1. Agentic AI shifted the conversation from content creation to how marketing decisions get made
Agentic AI shifted the Cannes conversation from content creation to the way marketing decisions get made. Marketers are now asking how AI systems recommend actions, build plans, optimize spend, and shape which brands appear in AI-influenced environments. That shift puts understanding and managing AI-driven decisions at the center of the AI conversation. Marketers need to know what data an AI system is using, which signals it may prioritize, how those signals are governed, and whether the decision path can be explained, tested, and measured.
Agentic AI will raise the stakes for the data collaboration layer because connected data can influence training, decisioning, optimization, activation, and measurement. That makes governance, transparency, and control more important across every environment where data is used.
- Brands need confidence that AI-informed decisions reflect accurate and unbiased customer understanding.
- Agencies need transparent inputs they can defend across clients.
- Platforms and media owners need high-quality signals that improve performance without creating more fragmentation.
- Publishers need clear ways to protect the value of their content and audiences as discovery becomes more automated.
“Everyone wants to talk about agentic AI, but the differentiator is the quality, governance, and connectivity of the data behind it. The organizations that will get the most value from agentic AI are the ones that have invested in trusted identity, strong governance, and interoperable data foundations that allow them to activate, measure, and maintain control at scale.”
ExperianBudi Tanzi, SVP, Product
Agentic AI needs trusted, permissioned, and well-connected data. It needs identity that can support a consistent view of people and households across environments, and governance that gives marketers confidence in how data is connected, activated, and measured.
2. Interoperability is the foundation for flexibility and trust
Interoperability gives marketers the flexibility to work across partners, platforms, and channels without being locked into one commercial environment. At Cannes, it became clear that trusted infrastructure is now central to how teams collaborate, activate audiences, and measure performance.
Cannes also made clear that flexibility has become a business requirement. Marketers are working across more partners, channels, and collaboration environments. Marketers also need to trust the infrastructure underneath it. That means clear governance, aligned incentives, transparent data use, and the ability to measure performance without being locked into one commercial environment.
As the market becomes more connected, teams need identity and data infrastructure that can move across the ecosystem without limiting choice. Interoperability isn’t enough on its own.
- For brands, this starts with making first-party data more usable and scalable across the marketing ecosystem. Customer data becomes more valuable when it can be resolved, enriched, expanded, activated, and measured in privacy-conscious ways. That flexibility helps brands turn owned signals into scalable audience strategies without losing control over how data is used.
- For agencies, it creates more efficient ways to plan, execute, and measure across clients. For commerce media networks, publishers, platforms, and media owners, it helps valuable signals move into market in more usable, governed, and scalable ways.
“The marketers making the most progress today are the ones building flexibility into their data and identity strategies. Interoperability gives them the freedom to work across partners, adapt to change, and trust how audiences are understood and activated.”
ExperianKevin Dunn, Chief Revenue Officer
An independent identity foundation can help connect these environments without forcing every partner into one workflow. Teams need the ability to work across agencies, platforms, publishers, commerce media networks, clean rooms, and media channels while maintaining a consistent view of their audiences, understanding how data is being used, and measuring performance across partners.
3. Curation is a path to better decisions
Curation gives buyers and sellers a more intentional way to bring data and media together. At Cannes, the strongest conversations focused on how better signals, supply, and decisioning can improve performance at the point of activation.
- For brands and agencies, that means media strategies that are easier to explain, optimize, and measure.
- For publishers, platforms, and media owners, it creates new ways to package differentiated inventory with high-quality data.
- For commerce media networks and data providers, it can extend valuable audiences into more scalable activation environments.
“The future of marketing belongs to organizations that prioritize data and audience activation at the centerpiece of every conversation.”
ExperianChris Meredith, Head of Audience Activation
This is where curation becomes more than a media tactic. It becomes a way to improve decision quality at the point of activation. When trusted data, identity, and supply come together, marketers can reduce waste, improve relevance, and bring more confidence to each activation decision.
4. Measurement has to account for an AI-shaped customer journey
Measurement remained a consistent theme throughout the week, but the conversation was broader than campaign reporting. Measurement now has to account for more decision points, partners, and AI-shaped interactions. Marketers need to understand how investments influence growth, sales, visits, and other meaningful actions across a journey that may not begin with a search, site visit or traditional ad exposure.
- Brands need to understand which investments are driving customer growth, sales, visits, or other meaningful actions.
- Agencies need proof they can defend across clients and channels.
- Publishers, platforms, commerce media networks, media owners, and data providers need clearer ways to show the value they create as attention, discovery, and activation become more fragmented.
“Marketers are under pressure to prove outcomes, not just report performance. As measurement becomes more fragmented, organizations need a stronger foundation built on identity, interoperable data, and outcome-based measurement.”
ExperianAli Mack, VP, AdTech Sales
The measurement challenge now is about building a trusted view of performance across more decision points, partners, and AI-shaped interactions. It also requires confidence that measurement is grounded in consistent identity, governed data, and infrastructure that supports transparency across the ecosystem. That level of proof depends on stronger connection across planning, activation, and measurement. When teams use a consistent identity foundation and responsible data practices across the journey, they can move beyond delivery metrics and start understanding what worked, where it worked, and how to apply those insights to the next decision.
Continue the conversation beyond Cannes Lions 2026
Cannes Lions 2026 may be over, but the conversations that mattered most are just getting started. The week reinforced a clear market need: marketers want flexibility, transparency, and the ability to collaborate across platforms, partners and channels without sacrificing control. That requires an interoperable approach to identity and data that supports choice, enables collaboration, and helps teams activate and measure.
At Experian, we’re continuing those conversations with brands, agencies, publishers, platforms, commerce media networks, and data providers looking to build stronger connections across the marketing ecosystem. Whether your goal is improving audience activation, expanding addressability, strengthening measurement, or creating more seamless collaboration across partners, we’re focused on helping marketers put these Cannes themes into action.
If we connected in Cannes, (or if you’d like to explore how these trends may impact your business), we’d love to continue the conversation. Reach out to learn how we can help you build a more connected, interoperable, and measurable marketing strategy for what’s next.
FAQs
The main marketing themes from Cannes Lions 2026 were agentic AI, interoperability, curation, and outcome-based measurement. Together, these themes point to a marketing ecosystem where identity, governed data, and partner flexibility are becoming central to how teams plan, activate, and measure.
Marketers are talking about agentic AI now because AI is starting to influence more than creative and workflow efficiency. It’s beginning to shape recommendations, planning, spend decisions, consumer actions, and brand visibility in AI-shaped environments.
Identity matters more as AI becomes part of marketing decisioning because AI systems need accurate, permissioned and connected data to guide useful decisions. A consistent identity foundation helps marketers understand people and households across environments, test decision paths, and measure outcomes with more confidence.
Experian helps marketers act on these Cannes Lions 2026 themes through our identity foundation, data capabilities, and measurement approach that help marketers connect planning, activation and measurement across partners. Experian helps brands, agencies, publishers, platforms, commerce media networks and data providers build interoperable strategies that support flexibility, transparency, and control.
After Cannes Lions 2026, marketers should assess how their identity, data, activation, and measurement strategies work together across the partners they use today. The next step is to identify where fragmentation limits decision quality, audience activation, or proof of performance, then build a more connected approach across the ecosystem.
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Tapad, a part of Experian, experiences record growth following increased investment in identity resolution
Featured storiesSixty-Nine Percent Organic Sales Growth Spurred by Expanded Business and Continued Investment in The Tapad Graph™ NEW YORK, May 7, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Tapad, a part of Experian, a global leader in digital identity resolution, today announced a record start to the year, following its highest earning year in the company’s history. Since January, Tapad has experienced a 69 percent organic increase in global revenue; with strategic investments in talent, continued high retention rates, and an expanded range of clients across global markets. Globally, Tapad increased its client base across multiple categories and verticals, catering to agencies, brands, telecoms, and data providers. The Tapad Graph™’s varied use cases and differentiated global scale have been instrumental to the company’s overall success to-date. With an ongoing investment in product, and expected feature releases slated for 2019, the company anticipates these accomplishments to continue. “Since the inception of our business, Tapad has heavily focused on enabling marketers to boost the performance of their campaigns with the help of our advanced digital identity resolution technologies,” said Sigvart Voss Eriksen, CEO at Tapad. “While we continue to grow, creating privacy-safe solutions that solve marketers evolving needs remains integral to our evolution. As pioneers in cross-device, we’re constantly innovating and pushing ourselves to be at the forefront of industry change. Our leadership in the space is recognized across the industry, as is evident by our current success.” In addition to partner expansions, Tapad also invested in new talent. In February, Tapad announced Ajit Thupil as the company’s first Senior Vice President of Identity, deepening the company’s commitment to creating ground-breaking digital identity resolution products for brands, agencies and platforms. Tapad’s investment in talent has been recognized by One World Identity’s 2019 Top 100 Influencers in Identity Award and by ClickZ’s 2019 Marketing Technology Awards. To learn more about Tapad and our digital identity resolution products, visit Experian.com Open job opportunities across the globe can be found on Tapad’s career page here: https://www.experian.com/careers/ About Tapad Tapad, Inc. is a global leader in digital identity resolution. The Tapad Graph™, and related solutions, provide a privacy-safe approach to connecting device identifiers to brand and marketer data, thereby allowing marketers around the world to maximize campaign effectiveness. Tapad is recognized across the industry for its innovation, growth and workplace culture, and has earned numerous awards, including the TMCnet Tech Culture Award. Based in New York, Tapad also has offices in Chicago, London, Oslo, Singapore and Tokyo, and is a wholly owned subsidiary of Telenor Group. Contact us today
The UK digital advertising market is worth £13.44bn, an increase year-on-year of 15%, reveals the 2018 IAB UK & PwC Digital Adspend Study. Report highlights The majority of all growth is coming from smartphone advertising, which has increased by £1.65bn (35%) from 2017. Smartphone advertising now represents 51% of all UK digital ad spend, up from 45% in 2017. Video is now the largest display format (£2307m), overtaking standard display banners (£1486m). Outstream/social in-feed has increased its majority in total video spend, now occupying a share of 57%, up from 52% in 2017. Social revenue now represents 23% of all digital ad spend. Growth is predicted to slow during 2019, with 5% estimated growth (+9% digital, +11% display, +9% search) compared to 15% in 2018. 2018 marks the tipping point towards a mobile-first ecosystem “For the past few years, industry commentators have been hailing the year of mobile. Each January the predictions come and the waiting commences for evidence to mark a tipping point, a shift to a mobile-first digital ad ecosystem. Well, drumroll… it was 2018! The latest Adspend report from IAB UK and PwC reveals that spend on smartphones outstripped spend on desktop for the first time last year. Brands spent 51% of total spend (which stands at £13.44 billion) on smartphones in 2018, up from 45% in 2017 – a significant milestone in the evolution of digital advertising. “This evidence shows that advertisers are increasingly thinking mobile-first. Growth in investment has historically lagged behind the amount of time spent on the device and we expect to see growth continue at a rapid pace to keep up with audience behaviour – two thirds of time spent online is now on mobile, according to UKOM. Other areas of growth highlighted by the report include video, which accounts for 44% of the total display market, while mobile video now makes up 51% of smartphone display. This is no doubt down to bigger mobile screens, better 4G and more readily available WiFi making video ads an increasingly attractive option. “Across the board, advertisers are investing in digital for longer-term brand building as well as short-term activation, with the direct-to-consumer market helping to drive this trend. What’s more, digital continues to be an accessible and popular route to market for businesses of all sizes, from leading advertisers to SMEs.” Tim Elkington, Chief Digital Officer, IAB UK Content & context crucial for attracting audiences “As people spend more and more of their time on mobile, it’s comes as no surprise that advertisers will follow where audiences are with their marketing spend. “Video has been the driving force in this growth, indicating that engaging visual content is still key in helping brands to achieve great results and to capture consumer attention in a vast sea of digital noise. “Video still has a way to go if it is to reach the level of effectiveness of traditional formats like cinema, but it will be interesting to see how the format develops over the next year or so. Ultimately, brilliant content and properly considered context are crucial for advertisers hoping to attract relevant audiences and build strong brands long term.” Kathryn Jacob OBE, CEO, Pearl & Dean Mobile-first approach driving investment in user experience “As a mobile-first approach has become the norm for many businesses, we’ve seen significant innovation and investment in the user experience that has fuelled the rise in mobile commerce. “Yet, for some years, limitations in the technology and formats available have meant that mobile advertising couldn’t always keep pace with changing consumer behaviours – delivering weaker performance when compared to desktop. “Fortunately, mobile has made huge strides in recent years. Mobile advertising affords great targeting opportunities for brands and a more interactive and immersive experience for consumers. “There is no reason to doubt this trend will continue as advertisers design their media, creative, and targeting strategy with mobile at the heart – optimising performance, enhancing the customer experience, and delivering the best results.” James Cragg, UK Managing Director, Tug New technologies to improve investment efficiency “The UK digital ad market has continued to grow despite the various challenges that the market has faced, including the current socioeconomic climate and general changes in the industry. As spend increases, it’s important to look at how media buying can be made as efficient as possible, minimising waste and maximising the return on investment. “Marketers will start to look to new technologies, like AI, to offer an impartial and more efficient approach to media buying, allowing marketers to measure effectiveness of campaigns and allocate spend accordingly.” Carl Erik Kjaersgaard, Chief Executive, Blackwood Seven Industry going from strength to strength “This significant growth in ad spend is great to see and shows that our industry is going from strength to strength. It’s especially good to see that as advertisers invest more and more in digital advertising, they’re becoming more considered in where they’re spending their money – with a large portion of the growth coming from companies that are part of IAB’s Gold Standard. “At The Trade Desk, we’ve long been ambassadors for the importance of transparency. These findings show that it isn’t just the right thing to do, but makes good business sense as advertisers increasingly choose partners who are demonstrating a commitment to best practice.” Anna Forbes, UK General Manager, The Trade Desk Advertisers embracing mobile “As consumers spend more of their time online, it’s no surprise that digital ad spend has continued its rise, up 15% to £13.4bn. With digital, in every sense, becoming further embedded in our daily lives, it is inevitable that this number is set to rise further next year. “Given the vast majority of people using their smartphone as their primary digital device, evident from site traffic stats we see across the board, the IAB report shows that advertisers have started to fully embrace this shift by following with ad spend. Over the last few years, a combination of faster wireless connectivity along with more capable devices has made it the go-to device for consumers to get online. This is set to continue over the next few years with 5G and even faster, more capable smartphones arriving (i.e. foldables) that will further cement ‘mobile’ as the main digital device to reach consumers.” Wajid Ali, Head of Paid Search, ForwardPMX Budgets must go to professionally produced content “In the IAB’s latest ‘Digital Adspend Study’ it is positive to see that outstream continues to dominate video spend, showing close to a 10% year-on-year increase. “Unsurprisingly, the study highlights that mobile is the most important distribution device (76% of all video spend is on the smartphone), and it’s great to see the format we invented dominating that space. “However, it’s now more pertinent than ever that clients and agencies invest their outstream budgets into professionally produced content and not social infeeds. Budgets must go where content is being produced, rather than aggregators and distributors, where the content is read rather than where a click happened. “We must remember how important local, national, and vertical press are to the global digital ecosystem. By unifying the best publishers at scale, delivering mobile-optimised creativity and outcome-orientated distribution, we are fighting to ensure publishers are getting their fair share of revenue in comparison to the social platforms.” Justin Taylor, UK MD, Teads UK market in robust health “The latest IAB digital ad spend report shows encouraging signs that the UK digital advertising market is in robust health, with mobile advertising continuing its upward trend. “The rise of up-and-coming ad formats like Shopping Ads, Google’s Responsive Search Ads, and Facebook Messenger Ads show that advertisers are looking for ways to capture consumer attention in the evolving digital landscape. As a result, the lines across search, social, and e-commerce are more blurred than ever with the introduction of features like Checkout for Instagram and Shopping ads on Google Images. Furthermore, with the rapid growth of Amazon’s ads business, e-commerce has quickly emerged as a third pillar of digital advertising, making it vital for marketers to have a complete view of the customer journey across channels and devices, if they hope to more accurately understand campaign performance and attribution.” Wesley MacLaggan, SVP of Marketing, Marin Software Digital identity resolution essential in understanding customer journey “Last year’s figures show that UK ad spend is starting to mirror the behaviour of consumers who, according to UKOM data, spend two-thirds of their time online on a smartphone. The fact that mobile ad spend now surpasses that of ad spend on desktop highlights marketers’ understanding that digital identity resolution is essential, not a nice-to-have. “Appreciating the cross-device behaviours of consumers allows brands to gain a better understanding of the customer journey and build stronger relationships with their audiences long term.” Tom Rolph, VP EMEA, Tapad, a part of Experian. Contact us today
OpenAudience promises the targeting capabilities of a walled garden but without the restrictionsOpenX has lifted the lid on a targeting solution it claims will offer people-based advertising opportunities outside of the industry’s walled gardens such as Facebook and Google. Dubbed OpenAudience, the supply-side programmatic player claims the new offering is powered by proprietary data assets and is supplemented by data partnerships with partners such as LiveRamp and Tapad, a part of Experian. Initially available in the U.S., OpenAudience has a user graph of 240 million monthly users and is currently being tested with multiple marketers with a general rollout planned for the third quarter of 2019. Speaking with Adweek, OpenX CEO Tim Cadogan said the rollout would help differentiate it among its peers as for the most part ad exchanges have marketed themselves based on their impression count, not necessarily addressable audiences. Compare this with Google and Facebook, both of whom account for almost 60% of U.S. ad spend, although this is disproportionate to the amount of time spent with their properties, according to Cadogan. “The thing that has given Facebook and Google so much power is that they have people-based systems [for ad targeting] that are simple to use and operate with a massive scale that are effective, and programmatic hasn’t kept pace with that,” he said. Cadogan cited the findings of a further study by eMarketer, which indicated that marketers are increasingly reliant on such walled garden players for their online inventory supply with the latest launch geared towards capitalizing on that. The latest launch is the culmination of the California-based company’s recent strategic overhaul, namely its attempts to get to grips with an identity-based solution that provides options outside of the walled gardens. Also speaking with Adweek was Todd Parsons, OpenX’s chief product officer, who offered further insight into how OpenAudience operates including how it uses its recently sealed relationship with Google Cloud Platform and machine learning to ape the efficacy of walled garden advertising solutions. “We had to build a matching technology, which made it possible for us to talk about monthly active users instead of talking about cookies or devices,” he explained. “And it took several quarters of staffing up with the right people from the consumer data and identity space.” OpenAudience’s matching technology works by using the identity and cookie matching capabilities of cross-device specialist Tapad and data onboarder LiveRamp to formulate a persistent, deterministic ID which can then be used to match advertisers with audiences on its ad exchange. “So, the idea isn’t for us as a company to put our future into one provider,” added Parsons. “It is to provide a matching technology that uses the best of several.” OpenAudience will also include involve additional tie-ups to offering further demographic information on the 240 million monthly U.S. users such as location, etc., which is currently in testing. “We felt like we needed to be very different about enabling marketers and publishers to activate against that data,” added Parsons. He further added that OpenX wants to rival Facebook’s levels of service when it comes to helping publishers monetize audiences on the social network, except this time on the open web. “No one has actually pushed identity and consumer data into the hands of publishers in a way that you might unify the view of audiences across many websites.” OpenX’s Cadogan summed up the OpenAudience offering and how it may look to advertisers when he said, “Imagine the open web is one publisher, and this lets buyers look at it as a single entity and market to them accordingly.” Contact us today