We\u2019ve got a special Decoder <\/em>today \u2014 I had the chance to talk with Amy Lanzi, the CEO of Digitas North America, in front of a live audience at the Uber Villa at the Cannes Lions advertising festival in the South of France. I know, it\u2019s a hard gig, but I do it for you.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Amy has been on Decoder<\/em><\/a> three times now<\/a>, and she\u2019s one of my favorite people to chat with \u2014 she is clear-eyed about what the advertising industry really is and does for brands and what all the money sloshing around the ad-supported internet really accomplishes. You\u2019ll hear her say that she thinks the traditional chief marketing officer role is done for and that her job is driving business results using data and analytics.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Verge<\/em> subscribers, don\u2019t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder<\/em> wherever you get your podcasts. Head here<\/a>. Not a subscriber? You can sign up here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n That might sound straightforward, but it was a shocking statement at Cannes, which is where the entire advertising industry gathers every year, drinks ros\u00e9, and convinces itself of outrageous nonsense. This year, the big trends were creators, and, of course, AI. And Amy, alongside her parent company Publicis, aren\u2019t holding back when it comes to calling out the AI nonsense for what it is.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Publicis actually put out an ad before Cannes<\/a> listing all the false promises being made about AI when it comes to advertising, so I asked Amy about that, and what AI might actually be good for, beyond just generating slop and slop headlines. After all, Meta and the rest of the big platforms were all at Cannes talking about generating more and more ads with AI \u2014 something that threatens almost every other company in the industry.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Of course, we also talked about the creator economy and how all the creators at Cannes were openly calling themselves marketers \u2014 essentially turning themselves into small ad agencies of their own. On top of that, the biggest creators in the world almost all launch their own products \u2014 something Amy and Digitas see as an opportunity, as those companies will need operational scale and excellence if they\u2019re going to be successful over time.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n There\u2019s a lot in this one \u2014 like I said, Amy is as sharp as they come, and I really enjoy talking to her about how the money really works.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Okay: Amy Lanzi, CEO of Digitas North America, live at Cannes. Here we go.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. <\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Hello everybody. I\u2019m Nilay Patel. I\u2019m the editor in chief of <\/strong>The Verge<\/em><\/strong> and the host of <\/strong>Decoder<\/em><\/strong>.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Hi. Amy Lanzi, CEO of Digitas, part of Publicis Groupe.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I\u2019m very excited to be here with Amy. Amy, we have to stop meeting like this. We only talk during <\/strong>Decoder<\/em><\/strong> podcasts.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I know. We do. We have to do this more. We both live in New York. We should get together more IRL.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Yeah. We only travel long ways to talk to each other in front of live audiences, which is wonderful. Thank you all for being here. Thanks to Uber for having us. I have a lot to talk to you about. It seems like every year we hang out and the entire advertising industry is in a new form of chaos. And that chaos doesn\u2019t really get resolved. We just move on to the next form of chaos. This year, it\u2019s AI.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I don\u2019t think that\u2019s a surprise to anyone in this room. Everywhere here at Cannes, the conversation is about AI. Let\u2019s just get started.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Publicis put out what you would call a fake ad, a documentary ad. It\u2019s called <\/strong>\u201cThe Wrong Promises\u201d<\/strong><\/a> and it is basically just a series of vignettes of promises people are making in pitches, including \u201cyou don\u2019t have to pay us until you win a Lion,\u201d which is incredible. And it says \u201cthis is real\u201d at the bottom.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Tell me about what you are hearing in these rooms that are leading to these crazy AI promises getting made.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Thank you for bringing up our fun video. It was really designed to stimulate conversations like this. In the business right now, it\u2019s crazy. I\u2019ve been in this business for a long time and we are seeing all kinds of partners offer wild things in the pitch process.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s different than it\u2019s been before, whether it\u2019s all the things that were, of course, hyped in that video, but also just insane commercial deals that are just generally bad for people and the business. And they\u2019re coming in all different types \u2014 whether it\u2019s about free AI, free platform, free whatever \u2014 that are creating a dynamic that is not good for all of us in this industry. Because we all need to work together. It is a people business and all of those things really, long-term, create a people problem.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Not to get all <\/strong>Toy Story 5<\/em><\/strong> here, but the conversation that you and I are constantly having is about the pressure of the tech platforms on the media ecosystem, whether that\u2019s publishers, whether that\u2019s agencies, whether that\u2019s creators at some point. We\u2019ll come to that.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n But the idea that the platforms have enough scale to promise you business results and then deliver them \u2014 whether or not that happens, but they certainly can make those promises \u2014 is leading to some of these outcomes. And some of these promises about AI and what it might be able to do, is there any reality to that? Or is that just a reaction to the pressure the platforms are putting on the ecosystem?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Whenever this conversation comes about, the promise of AI, I always go back to the promise of programmatic. How many of you remember when programmatic was a thing? No more people, it was all going to magically\u2014<\/p>\n<\/div>\n No one in this room admitted that they remembered that programmatic advertising was a thing.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Yes, right, exactly. And that was a time when it was all just going to magically happen and it magically still needs people, still has the nuance of brands and the marketplace and all of the things that we do to define our partnerships and what are going to be game changers. I go back to that because I feel like the AI story is the new programmatic story, with the promise of everything just being absolutely automated, and that absolutely did not happen.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When programmatic was rising, there were all those promises at that time as well and now we are living that. But what is different here is it\u2019s coming from either agency partners or tech and platform partners. It creates a different chaos to where you started.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Publicis and Digitas also have huge investments here. You were early, right? You bought Influential in 2024 to do analysis of how the creator ecosystem was doing. You have Digitas AI, and it\u2019s been two years that you\u2019ve been into that. How do you think about those products and those platforms in an ecosystem that is full of these promises?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n For me \u2014 and I\u2019ll talk about Digitas AI in particular \u2014 we started to make our people better unicorns, as we talked about the last time we met. It was really to say, \u201cOkay, everyone look at what\u2019s on your desk, what\u2019s in your day, and think about what you absolutely could build an agent to do and that way we free up our time to do this.\u201d That\u2019s where we started. And then what was fascinating is the magical things that were able to be built by the young talent in the industry that is solving a working problem but eventually a business problem.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That still holds because every day, as a Gen Xer, I always say, \u201cHackers wanted.\u201d If you have a hacking mentality and you\u2019re curious, you can actually do better things than I did when I was a hacker in that age. It enables us to use our agents, use our data to get to better ideas, better workflows that are more of a surprise and delight to clients than what you might have brought in the first round. Because you can do many rounds before you actually get to the final product and that\u2019s how you get to the unique outcome.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n You can tell that Amy is a <\/strong>Decoder<\/em><\/strong> pro because she has led directly to the <\/strong>Decoder<\/em><\/strong> questions. I\u2019m very curious if AI, at least in the enterprise context, is a top-down or bottom-up change agent. You just restructured Digitas, right? You put in a bunch of new roles. You have a new chief intelligence officer, a new chief systems officer, and my favorite, a chief transformation officer. He turns into a robot. What are these roles?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n [Laughs] I hope he hears this because that\u2019s going to make him laugh. Anyway.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s very exciting. The toy line is going to be great. What are these roles for? How are you changing the structure of Digitas?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n You\u2019ve always inspired me by asking \u201chow do you structure yourself\u201d and \u201chow do you make decisions?\u201d The first time we talked about it, I had been in this role for just a little bit of time and we had set our culture, which is, \u201cWe\u2019re fearless, inventive and generous.\u201d That still holds on how we make decisions.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Org structure-wise, we needed to figure out exactly what you just said: how do we do things in the underpinning of the agency that will enable all of our different practices to be able to scale faster? To leverage intelligence \u2014 and, of course, intelligence is code for AI in this story. We are moving \u2014 so that\u2019s why we have our chief intelligence officer, which was a pickup from data and analytics \u2014 into liberating that into an intelligent platform that all of our agents are built on and then also all of our employees use.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The second is systems thinking. We took the traditional COO role, turned that into a chief systems officer role and really redefined both of those roles because all of our client conversations are really about marketing systems. You need to have someone who can come in and understand that and meet them where they are. Then we think about the marketing flows that we\u2019ll marry to the system that works within some of their tech choices, et cetera, as two examples. The third, the chief transformation officer is \u2014 and this is a big conversation here \u2014 around clients wanting to transform, particularly CMOs transforming into CGOs.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I\u2019m a journalist. My job is not to innovate. It\u2019s unfortunate.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I just ask the questions. <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n That\u2019s why we\u2019re good friends. I make up a lot of things.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I was just coming from the Forbes CMO Council thing and there was a whole conversation on the rise of the CGO. What that means is CMOs, formerly, were really responsible for making marketing magic. Campaigns and media investment. Now they\u2019re responsible for building capabilities and they need a partner to help transform their solutions, so it\u2019s a people problem as well as a tech problem. That\u2019s why we have that discreet chief transformation officer role.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n You are a data person, you\u2019ve always been a data person. I\u2019m really curious about that. The idea that the marketing function is now so directly tied to business results, I see it on the tech platforms all the time. You and I have talked about this before.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Mark Zuckerberg will just look every single one of you in the eyes and say, \u201cI\u2019m going to kill you.\u201d He does it without remorse. His vision is that <\/strong>you will just pay Meta and it will make creative for you<\/strong><\/a>, it will find the audience for you and they will deliver you business results and almost everything in the middle, from money in to money out, gets automated away by Meta\u2019s intelligence stack.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n The idea of the chief growth officer feels of a piece with that. That the marketing function is now a business function and it needs a data layer, it needs all these things. Where do you see the creative fitting into it? Where do you see the classic form of brand building?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s a fundamental part of that capability that needs to live, like the marketing capability now, as a system. Brand building and the fundamentals matter more than anything. What you stand for and how you show up, what you\u2019re the answer for, especially with LLMs, is really important and it has to be authentic for the brands to grow.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That\u2019s still the case. You just can\u2019t stop there. It needs to be attached to a system and ideally, you have some data intelligence layer so I\u2019m learning more and more about you and I can then redefine my marketing stories to reshape how I\u2019m showing up if it\u2019s not working, if it\u2019s not selling more candy, if it\u2019s not selling more cars.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n How we change faster versus the CMO being responsible for building these campaigns and then moving on \u2014 that role is a dying role and it should be. It should be that marketing drives commercial value, marketing drives shareholder value.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n You heard it here first, CMO is a dying role.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n The previous version of the CMO. Sure. Just like the whole, we are in a chaotic world. We\u2019re in an area of convergence. If you are a CMO and you\u2019re not thinking about your data layer, you\u2019re not thinking about your full stacks, [you\u2019re not thinking about how] you can get closer to the consumer and get to better creative, better use of creators, you are not going to be doing well in the future. Whether it\u2019s CMO 2.0 or you\u2019re moving into that CGO role, that\u2019s really the future of that type of function in an organization.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The audience here at Cannes knows this, but for the <\/strong>Decoder<\/em><\/strong> audience in their cars listening to this, the conventional wisdom was that CMOs only ever had two years on the job, maybe less. You were dead the moment you showed up, you got to execute one big campaign, you found the bathroom and then you were out.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I hope you heard everyone in this room laugh.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n That was the most knowing laugh in the world. This seems like a much longer-term role. If you show up as the new CMO and your job is to transform the entire business from the bottom up over and over again, it\u2019s a lot of instability. Do you think these are longer term roles?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n If you do this right and you create a marketing system, you will be able to live beyond the two years path, because you\u2019re creating a growth engine. If you only want to do two tent pole marketing campaigns, that\u2019s probably not going to go well after two years.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I basically have two themes that I want to talk about. One is data in scale and one is creators. This sits right in the middle of them. And I just keep thinking about this phrase that I\u2019ve heard Meta use the most, but the other platforms use it a lot too, and it\u2019s <\/strong>\u201ccreative is the new targeting.\u201d<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I hear that and I don\u2019t make ads. We make two podcasts a week. We don\u2019t do scale at that level, but I hear \u201ccreative is the new targeting\u201d and I think that is a demand for output like no one has ever heard before \u2014 \u201cWe\u2019re going to find your customer for you; you just feed the machine with as much as you can.\u201d <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n It seems obvious to me that you have two choices in that world of \u201ccreative is new targeting.\u201d Meta\u2019s Andromeda system is the biggest example of this, and it\u2019s that you\u2019re going to feed it with AI creative and you\u2019re going to let them do it, or you\u2019re going to have your own AI creative system or you\u2019re going to let a million creators and influencers do it for you. How do you plug a growth engine into a world where that\u2019s what the platforms are all saying?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n The closer you are to your consumers and all the places they\u2019re spending time from a data identity, however you\u2019re systematically doing that, is the most important thing so you can see how they are reacting to\u2026 what did you say?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Creative is new targeting.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I\u2019ve never heard this phrase. I don\u2019t like it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Yeah. I figured you wouldn\u2019t.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s terrible, right? It\u2019s terrible for our business \u2014 \u201ccreative is targeting.\u201d Only because it sounds horrible. Creative is emotional and lovely and magical. How can it be emotional and magical if it\u2019s targeting you? Those are two words that don\u2019t go together.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The brands that are doing really well are deciding not to do that or to do it in a way that feels so contextually relevant because they know so much about Gen Z on [Meta\u2019s products], that they\u2019ve decided that they need to do this to be able to drive velocity for a certain type of brand that feels fit for that brand.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But we are not in a world where we need more content. Does anyone want more content? We are not in a world where we need more content. That idea, creative targeting, assumes that we have endless amounts of content and impressions as a concept. Those are two worlds that still need to be decoupled, but when they\u2019re put together, it needs to be in a way that you are constantly learning. \u201cHow did that do? Did I gain more attention from a certain type of growth audience I\u2019m trying to get to?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Can I push you on this? Not to support Meta\u2019s ideas here. <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Let me just make the argument because you and I have talked about it before. The way, in particular, Mark Zuckerberg talks about it is at some point they know more about the viewer of Instagram than anybody, or they want to know more about the viewer of Instagram than anybody, and they will just deliver the right creative to that person at the right moment.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n This is the same argument as programmatic. Only now they have acres of GPUs with which to do it. The argument there is yes, the army of unpaid teenagers will make the fun stuff that you watch and the advertising will just show up magically in the platform and find the right person at the right time.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Again, I read that as, \u201cYou should just let Meta make the creative for you.\u201d You just give them a picture of the shampoo bottle and they will put it in the right place, on the right background. For me, it will be pictures of trucks jumping over things and exploding and then shampoo will appear at the end. They\u2019re like, \u201cThat\u2019s shampoo for me.\u201d It would work. If any of you need an idea to target me specifically, that would work.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n No agency is ever going to make something that niche, but for example, <\/strong>Publicis just bought LiveRamp<\/strong><\/a> to take all that data out\u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s still in the situation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Yeah. I mean, it\u2019s out there, but the deal is not done.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Presumably the goal of buying LiveRamp, which is a giant data platform, is to lever up against Meta and say, \u201cActually, we know as much about these customers as you do. We can distill information across all the platforms and we will actually do a better job for our clients of placing the creative in the right place at the right time.\u201d This implies that Meta will participate. Why would they do that?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Because people are complicated. And today, look at how often on this beach there are different players on the beach. Everyone doesn\u2019t stay in this position forever and people are complicated. I would offer that if I started seeing your wonderful ad 50 times, I would say, \u201cI don\u2019t want to see this anymore and I actually don\u2019t like that shampoo.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That\u2019s what happens when it\u2019s just left to go on its own without someone thinking about suppressing messaging, without understanding consumers better because you actually win hearts and minds when you\u2019re doing something that\u2019s not as expected. Because people are complicated.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s like we say to our clients, \u201cYou need to work with all of them because all of us spend time in all these different places for different reasons. Why does someone choose to spend time on Pinterest versus [a Meta product] versus Amazon versus Walmart Connect? All of them are different roles, in terms of how the platforms work for you and your life. So why would you put all of your dollars in one place?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n For me, those players are shifting in and out depending on what we think that growth audience is doing and how they\u2019re thinking about intersecting with that category.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Are they good at participating in an ecosystem in that way? This is something that strikes me every time.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Some of them are and some of them are not. The more they start to see headwinds, they lean more into participating. Ideally we want to do data collaboration with these partners because it\u2019s better for our clients that we can say, \u201cWe knew more about this growth audience on the platform \u2014 I\u2019m not going to say X because I\u2019m not saying X \u2014- on platform Y. We know more about them and this is\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n No one knows anything about X.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Right. \u201cAnd this is how we\u2019re going to grow your brand.\u201d That\u2019s a good joint story for a platform and an agency partner to come in to talk about because we\u2019ve been able to actually share data and look at that in a way that\u2019s beneficial for the consumer in the end.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n There are only two business models, right? Bundling and unbundling. In the agency world, there\u2019s a lot of bundling going on right now, right?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n There\u2019s a lot of bundling going on.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Obviously Publicis is huge. Omnicom just <\/strong>bought IPG<\/strong><\/a>. CAA is out here saying they\u2019ve invented creators this year. I don\u2019t know if anyone heard. They\u2019re very proud of themselves, but they have a <\/strong>$250 million fund to take stakes indirectly in creator businesses<\/strong><\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/platform.theverge.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/chorus\/uploads\/chorus_asset\/file\/24792604\/The_Verge_Decoder_Tileart.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=2400\"\/)
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