CMOs Navigate AI Anxiety as Marketing Budgets Flatten and Roles Expand at Cannes Lions

How marketers are balancing broader remits and tighter budgets | Fortune

A recurring theme on and off stage at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity this year was just how drastically the marketing job has changed. It's no longer all about making great ads. Today's marketing leaders are expected to understand AI, build communities, and shape organizational culture. As marketing leaders have taken on broader responsibilities, budgets have remained flat. Across the U.S. and Europe, businesses allocated an average of 7.7% of company revenue to marketing in 2025 -- the same as in 2024 and down from 9.5% in 2022, according to Gartner's 2025 Global CMO Spend Survey. The representation of marketing heads in the C-suite is also declining. Less than half (49%) of Fortune 500 marketers held the "CMO" title in 2025, down from 55% a year earlier, according to research by Forrester. Separate research by leadership consulting firm Spencer Stuart found that a third of Fortune 500 marketing leaders did not have the word "chief" in their title, 16% carried dual-function titles such as chief marketing and communications officer, and 11% had no reference to marketing. UPS, for example, has grouped the leadership responsibilities for sales, marketing, and communications under the single role of chief commercial and strategy officer. Last year, Reckitt, the multinational consumer-goods company, folded marketing and commercial strategy into a single function and gave regional teams more power to build the brands in their own markets. "This was an explicit attempt to break down silos and push brand-building power out to local markets," Ryan Dullea, Reckitt's chief growth officer, tells Fortune. "We need to stop running brand and commercial strategy as separate disciplines if marketing is to be viewed as a continuous business function." However, Tim Ellis, executive vice president and CMO at the National Football League (NFL), believes marketing chiefs still need their own voice within the C-suite. "CMOs need to be at the table, listening and contributing to every decision the business makes," he tells Fortune. "Yes, we have to be experts in the marketing world. But we also need to be experts in business. That requires completely new ways of thinking." The most effective way to communicate marketing's value internally is through profitability and revenue growth, according to 46% of the marketing and finance decision-makers surveyed by Fortune, in partnership with Morning Consult. "The traditional CMO was a steward of creativity and communications, occasionally fluent in data, and perpetually at war with the CFO over budget," says Mélanie Brinbaum, Nestlé's European head of marketing and consumer communications. "Today, the ones who can speak finance, supply chain and risk fluently are the ones who can prove where growth and value actually come from." Communication with data and technology teams has also taken on added importance for CMOs. "I used to need one language. Now I need several," says Lynsey Woods, senior global brand director at Carlsberg. "I talk to finance, data, and tech daily. That's not a soft skill anymore. The whole business is reorganizing itself around new technology and data, and marketing can't sit in a corner and lob campaigns over the wall." Keeping marketing's creative edge This added focus on financials can sometimes be at odds with the more creative aspects of marketing. Ellis admits that the creative instinct that defined his early career is no longer where the value sits. "Creativity still matters, but it's not the center of the job anymore," he says. "I'm expected to understand how brands move through culture and actually shape society, not just how to nail a clever campaign." However, Marcela Melero, chief growth officer for Dove in North America, remains adamant that marketing should not lose its creative edge. "The internal corporate environment can be a bit like a meat-grinding machine, where high-quality creative ideas get turned into a generic product by stakeholders with too many opinions," she says. Finding allies within the C-suite can be helpful when trying to get a creative idea approved. "Before I take a risky idea forward, I look for at least one other person in the C-suite who believes in it," Melero says. "There was a project my Argentine team was convinced would kill the brand, but it worked. Once you have one of those on the board, the next risk is easier to sell." "Our job is also to make sure we don't manage the business purely through a scorecard or a P&L," Brinbaum says. "Marketing leaders today have to create conditions where people feel safe enough to give direct feedback, take risks and think slowly when everything around them is moving fast." Adapting to AI AI is also placing some of marketing's creative roles at risk. A third (34%) expect AI to replace some creative functions, and 19% think it could significantly reduce the need for human creativity altogether, the Fortune and Morning Consult survey found. "The spirit of marketing hasn't moved -- you find an audience and persuade them -- but the how has been utterly rebuilt around generative and agentic AI," says Dullea. At Reckitt, internal AI tools now surface insights and ideas in roughly a third of the time once required. Sephora US CMO Zena Srivatsa Arnold warns against "surrendering" to the technology. "Marketers can use AI to inform them but must maintain their own conviction," she says. For Andrew Warden, vice president of marketing at Adobe, agentic AI represents the "single biggest shift in marketing in 25 years". "It's changing not just how marketing works but who, or what, brands are talking to. We didn't expect bot traffic to overtake human traffic so quickly," he adds. "CMOs need to stay focused on marketing to humans, but also to AI agents." For Warden, this represents a "huge challenge". The most successful CMOs will have to adapt to these challenges and their expanded brief, while continuing to communicate marketing's value to the business.

McKinsey's Kelsey Robinson on the current marketing AI paradox

At Cannes Lions, management consultant Kelsey Robinson breaks down McKinsey's new research showing a paradox in AI adoption: marketers are widely using AI and excited by it, but many also fear its impact on their roles. At Cannes Lions, where the global marketing industry gathers each year to explore what's next, one topic unsurprisingly dominated the conversation: artificial intelligence. AI is already widely used across marketing teams - but according to strategy and management consulting firm McKinsey's latest research, that doesn't mean organisations are truly ready for it. Behind the excitement sits a more complicated reality: anxiety about jobs, uncertainty about how to adapt, and a gap between using AI and actually seeing value from it. McKinsey's report published during Cannes Lions, titled From anxiety to advantage: A marketing organisation that thrives with AI, draws on a survey of more than 500 marketers alongside interviews with senior leaders. It shows a clear disconnect - most marketers are using AI regularly and are excited about its potential, but many are also worried about what it means for their roles. In this interview with Euronews Culture at Cannes Lions, McKinsey Senior Partner Kelsey Robinson discusses these findings and what they mean for CMOs navigating the shift to AI-driven marketing. Euronews Culture: Tell us about what McKinsey have put out for Cannes Lions. Kelsey Robinson: So we did two different articles that launched on Monday, actually, for Cannes really. One was overall research where we talked about the new five capabilities for marketing - like what should those be, what do those look like. And one piece of research where, with Kellogg and Google, we actually went to talk to, I think, a thousand different marketers across the world, from CMOs all the way down, to understand what is actually happening with AI, how do you feel about it, and what are the barriers to progress. Generally, after doing that straw poll, what was the sentiment you picked up? Was it mostly positive, or more fear and anxiety? Or do people see AI as an opportunity? I think it has a decent amount of anxiety in it, and that is a lot of what we were trying to unpack and understand. So I'd say maybe two main insights. One: lots of companies are using AI. 88% of companies are using AI. When we ask marketers, over 60% of them are saying that they're using it multiple times a week. But then less than 10% of those companies say they've actually really seen value capture from it. And so there's this disconnect between usage and the aspiration, and real business impact. The second main insight was there's a lot of anxiety, and we need to move from anxiety to advantage - that's how I like to say it. So if you go and talk to the marketing teams, they are really excited about AI, right? So 86% of them are like, this is great, I'm excited about using AI within my job in marketing. That could be anyone from a copywriter to the CMO to a media optimisation analyst. So 86% are excited, but 57% are super anxious. Okay, well what does it mean then? If you talk to the CMO, 96% of them are excited, 71% are anxious. And what was most shocking to me is 80% of them were actually worried about their job. And what surprised you about that? I would have assumed that with this level of anxiety, people would tend to think about themselves first. Yeah, I think we might have expected maybe certain roles to feel more anxiety. And what we saw was that was widespread. So there was some variance, but largely every role within the marketing function had some meaningful level of anxiety. Some people might say, "Is copywriting something that feels like it will be replaced sooner?" They were just as anxious as folks who were thinking on the creative breakthrough ideation. So I think I was surprised by the lack of variation by role. And then also, to have the head leader, a CMO, I didn't expect their personal anxiety and fear to actually be higher than some of the folks on their teams. What's your key advice to CMOs who are feeling that fear? So a few things. First, you really have to have a narrative that isn't just about efficiency. And I think we see this in all the companies we talk to, is that AI came in, not even just to marketing, but to technology, to engineering, and other functions, and there was a very big focus on productivity and efficiency, which reads as "we are saving money, we are cutting," which I think is a reality and actually a benefit of AI. I think leading companies realise they can't just focus the narrative on an AI transformation that leads to cost cutting. You have to have a growth aspiration, and it should unlock growth. If we think about personalisation - we've talked about this for 15 years - we are at a point where we can really realise that in a new way. That should drive growth, real growth, revenue uplift. But a lot of companies are still very focused on this as an efficiency play. And then I don't think it's surprising why the org isn't fully behind it, because they want to be a part of growth, they want to be a part of rewriting that next chapter of marketing, not just "how can I cut costs?" So I think that's one thing - leaders focusing on growth, not just efficiency, but both. I'd say the second thing we see leading organisations doing is they are not waiting for perfect data. A big conversation since last year - I remember last year in Cannes - was "our data is not good enough, we really need to shore up the foundation before we can make progress with AI." Sure, but there is actually value to be captured now. So leading organisations are kind of taking two speeds. They are figuring out where they can actually show value - maybe in customer support, maybe in some version of personalisation - and then continuing to make progress on their data foundation and rewire workflows, which is another key thing that leaders are doing. How do you actually implement those ideas now, given the current climate of fear and anxiety? In the research, we profile the fintech player Chime, and I think their story is one of the best ones out there. Their CMO is really focused on this as a staged organisational transformation, versus just rolling out some technology. So phase one is giving teams enterprise tools they need to make their day-to-day lives more effective. "Kelsey, you as a marketer, here are a bunch of tools. This hopefully makes your day better, lets you save time, lets you be more impactful." So stage one is what I'd call normalisation - normalising what it means to use AI. Stage two is actually transforming some of the core jobs. So where can you see value - taking something like media optimisation or customer support and really working those specific jobs and driving value through those. In the case of that company, they actually saw real value. A ten-week campaign cycle down to four, return on ad spend up by almost 20%. And that is both efficiency and growth. They were able to talk about it as a growth driver and no longer needed to think these things are all trade-offs. And then the third phase, which I think most companies are not quite there yet, is how do you reimagine whole workflows from front to end. In Chime's case, they call it "go-to-market AI factories" - how do you take agents, humans and workflows and reimagine how all that work gets done. But that last part is an intimidating place to start. So we're seeing this phased transformation approach being really successful. Looking ahead - if companies don't adopt these changes and tools - what does the future hold? Yeah, I don't really think that's an option - to not do it. I think there will be a cohort of leading companies, and you're seeing a few break away. But again, we think it's maybe somewhere between 5 and 10% that are really figuring out how to drive value and re-architect the function. So I think if you don't do it, someone else will. There's this quote I've heard many people use: "It might not be AI that takes your job, but it might be someone who's just better at using AI." So I think that is the spirit - if everyone shifts from anxiety to advantage and embraces these capabilities, then they'll be great.

As AI re-writes the rule books, legacy brands need to re-think marketing - time to be a pain in the proverbial, suggests Kraft Heinz's CMO

As AI makes its way into the enterprise mainstream, how do so-called legacy brands come to terms with the future direction that this implies? Can they keep up-to-date or will many of them give way to a new generation of replacements? Todd Kaplan is CMO of Kraft Heinz North America. He's inevitably a strong defender of the legacy brand: People think about legacy brands as this is forgotten thing of yesteryear, kind of trapped in time, but the interesting thing about legacy brands is they've created a legacy. That's a pretty frickin' cool thing. At Kraft Heinz, we have in North America alone 70 brands across 50 categories, many are 150 years old. But what's amazing is when you think of legacy brands, the misconception is that they're old and tired, but they're actually very well established. You just need to feed them. Kraft Heinz's CEO has a philosophy that a brand is a promise, but a great brand is a promise kept, he says: The key to building a good brand is not about chasing trends. It's about really understanding who you are and having a healthy self-awareness as a brand. I like to think of brand building overall as this idea, like pointilism, painting little dots, like Van Gogh, where every interaction a consumer has with a brand, you're putting a dot in their brain, and the collection of dots over time form a perception of the brand. Your job as Marketer is to build those dots. But if your brand doesn't know what it stands for, and each of those dots look different and have a different color, a different point of view, it's not going to tell a cohesive picture...a consistent brand narrative is really the drum breed of a brand building. This idea of clarity should be easier for older brands, he suggests: When you're starting a new brand, it's hard to really understand what does that brand stand for, beyond the product. I like to think with a brand, it's the tattoo test - people tattoo brands on their bodies if they actually stand for something, if it has a deeper emotional connection. They don't do that for iconic products versus iconic brands,. It's not just about the taste or the functional attributes or the value that your product has. As you go up that emotional pyramid to, 'What does it really mean to me as a human?', and 'how do I have that deeper emotional connection?', that is really what you got to get to. It's the hardest thing as a brand builder, to unpack as you're working through brand architecture and word choice - you get the thesaurus out and all that stuff - but it's important, and it's not something you can just build overnight. You have to really understand and unpack as you get to learn your consumers. So it's that clarity, then multiplied to this exponential degree of consistency, because showing up and making sure that once you've unpacked it, you got to hit that at every single turn through the process, even if the creative canvas is different, from a TV spot to a social tweet to some other thing in between. Collaborativity There are three truths in play, he suggests - a consumer truth, a cultural truth, and a brand or product truth. Getting that message across requires a CMO to begin by being "a real pain in the ass", Kaplan argues: You've got to be clear on what you're trying to do internally with all the stakeholders. A key is bringing everybody along early on the journey as well. There's two approaches here, he adds - you can try to push something through, and you'll not actually get that far, or you can bring everybody along very early. At Kraft Heinz, this is known as 'collaborativity', he explains: Here we bring our, our agencies, our cross-functional partners, our legal team, everyone around very early on to start with these baby ideas and kick things around and really just get in on the floor early. The real secret sauce, as you look across the organization, is everyone wants to be a part of marketing and the fun things and the wins and the stuff you're doing. But if you can get along and understand the risks, the barriers, the costs, it's really [worth] having that fluid, frequent, and open, honest conversation early and often with the stakeholders and bringing everyone along the way, so it's a shared win at the end of the day. It gets back to that point of consistency of understanding the foundations of who you are and everything we do across all of our brands. And just because you're a legacy brand that doesn't mean you aren't open to modern ideas and innovations, he adds, which in 2026, of course, means AI. It may also require placing some bets: I think what we're going to be betting on a lot more is beyond the world of paid media, so organic, earned, owned. That requires creativity to get things to travel, obviously, and make them more interesting and connect, but when you think of your own life in the world of paid media, and how, when it came up through the 'Mad Men' era, where you'd buy all the stuff to reach the consumers. Now when I'm watching a commercial, I pick up my phone, when a pre-roll comes on, I hit skip on YouTube. Just because your message was delivered doesn't mean it was received with the consumer. Attention is going to be the new game, especially with LLMs (Large Language Models). If you're invisible, if someone goes on ChatGPT and looks up, 'Hey, I want to feed a family of four for dinner with a high protein meal. What are options under $10 for my family?'. If your brand, one of our brands, doesn't come up organically, we're invisible. What those things are scraping is organic content. Paid content is really not being seen by a lot of the LLMs right now, and to really understand how you show up organically to create this opt-in attention with consumers, where they can participate more organically, is really going to be, I think, where the puck is going. Concerns All of this is going to require some mindset adjustment, suggests Kaplan, beginning with the role of creatives in the mix: In a world where we have more data, more touch points, more financial pressure than ever to deliver, it's very easy to play the quick 'media math' game and do all the spots and dots and connect everything and have a nice spreadsheet ready to go. But I think with the role of creativity, a lot of companies, a lot of CMOs, almost view it as an outsourced thing - 'Oh, I just need some great creative agencies, and that'll do the job' Actually creativity is a very iterative, collaborative process, and internal, just as much as external, need to take the weight on their shoulders of driving, what are the creative ideas building together? The kind of old school way of, you brief, you go behind the curtain for four weeks, you come back, you're sold three ideas, you pick one, that's a very old school formal kind of method. Most of our best ideas are unbriefed, they come out of discussions, they come out of text chats, they come out of real conversations with our full team, together with our agency partners on an equal playing field, having diverse perspectives and thoughts coming together to build. So I think that creativity isn't something that you just outsource. Of course, you need great partners around you and great people internally to do that, but I think it's much more of a collaborative process. To that end, Kaplan encourages what he calls "an enterprising mindset" in Kraft Heinz's marketing division: You make the role, the role doesn't make you,. It's this idea that a lot of people come into a job and they're like, 'Here's the sandbox I have to play in', and all that. Even if you're on a small brand, a big brand, no budget, big budget, whatever level you are in the organization, the only thing between you and making an impact is yourself. You are the most consistent part of every role you will ever have, so how do you approach that role, how do you bring that enterprising mindset? I want people who will come in and push and think a little bit differently, and say, 'Hey, what if this is an unbrief thing? Should we look at this thing over here?' Trying to encourage that mindset and mentality, I think, is really important across the whole enterprise. And that means being willing to add new skills and take risks, he concludes: At the end of the day, there's a lot of fundamental skills, and as we think about the future of AI and all that stuff, of course, it's going to continue to evolve. But the two evergreen skills that will always be in vogue with with marketing are going to be empathy - understanding consumers having and the curiosity to learn and say, 'Why is somebody thinking that way?' - and then this idea of agility. Marketing is not linear, it's not an if-then Excel formula. So, [you need to be] trying to learn as you go, figure out, being curious with the new technologies. Go down the rabbit hole on TikTok for three hours and learn how that works. Just figuring out where and how people are going to engage, and being curious, I think, is half the battle.

Cannes Lions - three major brands testify to the real impact of AI on the Marketing model

A simple stroll along the seafront at Cannes Lions this week would be enough, from the adverts and the branded hospitality 'beaches' alone, to convince you that the headline topic at the annual jamboree this year is AI. But how much is the hype cycle actually impacting on the Marketing function? Marta García Alonso is VP Marketing, Heineken Mexico. She says: I'm very passionate about what AI can do at the beginning of the thinking process. I find amazing the level of how you can elevate your work by really finding insights. We, our human brains, would never be able to input so much data. I've already seen some cases that are amazing in which they are using AI to really get to new insights in different audiences, and then they will multiply the effect of the campaign that they do. So for me it's more at the beginning of the process than at the end. There will be a lot of opportunities to do different things with AI, but I'm more passionate about the insight and audience part. Zena Arnold, CMO at retailer Sephora US, tells an exemplary anecdote about changes to food carts in a number of US cities. The signage on these carts follows a standard set ot requirements and is supplied by a set number of providers. But that's changing: What's happened over the past six months is all of these food cart vendors, also small businesses, are going to ChatGPT or Gemini, and printing and creating these signs, so now all of a sudden, instead of just Joe's Hot Dogs, you see a tiger eating a hot dog. It's very AI surrealist. But what is really fascinating is there's this explosion of these kind of AI images on all of these carts. She cites the case of one cart owner who's seen an increase in business due to his use of his own personality to act the basis of AI-generated signage: He put himself onto his sign. This is not something he would have been able to pay to do with the regular vendor that normally makes the signs. But he said that everybody loves him, and when he put himself on the sign, and people started coming more often to his cart because they saw him. To me it just illustrates that there's going to be a profusion of AI-generated images, copy ads out in the world, but what really is going to lead to results is, how do you find an insight, a consumer insight? How do you connect with your customer, your consumer in a really authentic way that tells them who you are and why they should work with you or buy something from you. That's a human truth. So, the tool is changing, there's going to be more people using AI, but the ones who are going to be successful will find the insight to develop that. For her part, Tamika Young, Chief Marketing & Communications Officer at dating site Hinge, argues: AI cannot automate creativity or human storytelling. I think there are definitely benefits to AI. We cannot escape it. We're all talking about it ad nauseam. But I do think that there's something about the human component, the creativity that comes from storytelling, that really can't be replicated. For us, because we do sit in this space where we are bringing two people together, we are really centered around human connection. That is the thing that's utmostly important to us. So we do think about AI in terms of, how we can create efficiencies in our work, but not to replace human creativity Human intelligence The beer business is one that is about creating human enjoyment, she goes on. AI doesn't change that but does provide new tools and complexities: What we are doing, and what I can see this over the last 24 months especially, is that we are really re-doing all our ecosystems. We have to really work on how the funnel works, I think. The coming of the new LLMs, the way you have to show up, and also the power that you're giving to telegram to all these areas is creating your brands in a way where there is a bit of attention on how do you build a long-term brand building. At the same time, al the power is in the hands of the conversation. I don't have the solution yet, but I think we all should be looking at this way of building brands in which you have to protect the long term, but at the same time you have to accept how these LLMs, how your brands, are going to be in conversation, and how you're building it. You really need this new ecosystem of creators,. You need to really build that trust and to really bring new angles and innovative ways of really showing up in these these brand experiences. What I see with mixing brand experiences with the use of creators is that first the creators are becoming a media channel, per se. They are really the media channel. Secondly, they really help you to build audiences in a more sophisticated way, because each creator would bring an angle that you never thought. Sometimes, as brands, we try to go just from A-to-B. With these creators, you would be able to multiply the effect of that experience. And the third thing that I think really helped in terms of trust is you're having other people talking in different ways to different audiences about the experience that you're trying to create, and how this is impacting our consumers. Hinge's Young concurs on the criticality of creatives: For us, creators are foundational for our marketing approach, and the reason for that is Hinge doesn't have its own social channel, so if you go onto an Instagram, you'll see a singular tile that says, like, The dating app that's designed to be deleted, which is our tagline. The reason why we don't engage in our own social channels is because we're in the relationship space. Having a creator that has had their own experience with our platform, who is on their own dating journey, is far more valuable because they're built in to that audience and they've built in that trust from their community, so, being able to lean into those voices and be able to amplify the work that they're doing is incredibly important. But we also think about creators not in the traditional sense of like Instagram or TikTok. We're also leaning into authors, like for our latest campaign called No Ordinary Love, where we told the story of how people have met and found their partner on Hinge. It was through writers that we've commissioned to tell this story. We're also looking at Substack. That's a really big platform for us as well, so we're trying to think about how do we look ahead at where the creator economy is going, and really leaning into those moments to connect with our data. New skills All of this implies big changes to accommodate in terms of the Marketing function. Is this understood organizationally outside of the functional domain? Sephora's Martin suggests that it's hard for CEOs these days to understand the specialization involved: We do so much, and now across so many channels. Marketing used to be about making ads and buying media to place those ads. Now it's about social, it's about influencers, it's about figuring out LLMs and how we market there. So just the breadth of resources and talent required, I think is still something that a lot of people are getting their heads around, because if you grew up with marketing in the old world, it was just simpler, and you had agencies do a lot of work. We still do, but we have a lot of the things that we do in-house because we want to have that talent within our business, so I think that's the challenge - how do you make sure they know and understand what's required to be done. She has a number of recommendations to make: One of the most important mindset skills that anyone can have right now is operating with agility, is experimentation, getting comfortable with the pace of change, because it's only going to accelerate. It's already here and already accelerate and it's going to get even faster. I tell everyone, don't get comfortable [because] your role, your team might change dramatically year-to-year, month-to-month, moment-to-moment in how you work. That's just the speed at which the environment is changing, that your customer is changing. You also have to just be open to building different skill sets, she suggests: I do think that as we're all developing these mindsets of agility, of experimentation, and all of these new tools that are going to come our way with AI, I feel like the role of the CMO, of all Marketers, is going to become more about orchestration. How do you make a great idea come to life, not just in one place, in one channel, but truly throughout the ecosystem, whether it's your controlled assets, or [across] the community of the creators that you work with. It's just getting all the more complex, but I really feel that the ones who are going to win in this are the ones who are able to get a cohesive message across and out through the ecosystem. Years ago, if you understood ads and media, you do 90% of marketing. Now, there's so much more to learn and know, so be open to that...Be comfortable with change and pick up a lot of new marketing skill sets. We're all going to need them. My take Marketing some new ideas for the future.