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The Brave New Business Journal
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Issue 09 · Cannes special · Tuesday, 30 June 2026 · Reading time: 5 minutes
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Brave New was at the Super Bowl of Ads, on the Riviera. Bonjour from
Cannes.
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And you’re probably already asking the only question that matters: how does
a creativity festival on a French beach impact me, the person who runs a
real company that moves real things?
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Our answer: more than you’d think, once someone translates it out of
agency-speak and into your world. That’s the job. Brave New brings you the
news from the Croisette and shows you what to do with it. Creativity and
AI, minus the fog.
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Five things worth your time.
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01 · SCALE
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Go big and broad. Scale is back.
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Les Binet, the effectiveness researcher everyone quotes, used his stage
time to say the industry got obsessed with efficiency and quietly starved
creativity. The fix isn’t a clever hack. It’s scale: enough budget, enough
reach, enough media, enough creative to actually move the dial. His line:
‘If you are a big brand and think like a small one, you will become a small
brand.’
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For you:
in serious industries the reflex is to treat marketing as a cost to
trim and ‘do more with less.’ That is how you shrink without noticing. Pick
fewer things, fund them properly, and show up broadly and consistently.
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02 · AUDIENCE
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Find your buyer through passion, not demographics.
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The audience lesson, repeated all week and backed by Kantar: you don’t find
your customer with a demographic. You find them through what they care
about. Start at the passion point and the community. LEGO is the textbook
case. In a world drowning in content, community is the scarce asset.
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For you:
there is no ‘the procurement director.’ There are specific
communities, cold-chain operators, plant engineers, logistics and
facilities teams, each with its own language and trust network. Serve one
of them better than anyone else does.
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03 · DISTRIBUTION
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You need pipes and content. Both.
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Binet again: great content with no distribution is a cathedral in the
desert, beautiful and empty. Great distribution with weak content is just
noise at scale. You need the pipe and something worth carrying through it.
And the most under-researched lever right now is context: not just who your
buyer is, but where they are in their work and life when they see it.
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For you:
a brilliant case study nobody reads does nothing. A boring blast to
a bought list does worse. Build something worth saying, then put real
distribution behind it, aimed at the moment your buyer actually cares.
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04 · CREATIVITY
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Effectiveness beats efficiency, and creativity drives both.
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The loudest tension at Cannes: marketers trapped between efficiency demands
and the desire to actually grow. New research from WARC, System1, and
TikTok across 1,200+ creator ads landed the punchline: engagement rate has
no relationship to brand memory, and creative quality matters more.
System1’s own data says creative work is roughly three times more effective
than non-creative work. AXA won the Grand Prix by using creative thinking
to change the product, not just the ad: three extra words in a contract
that gave domestic abuse victims a way out.
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For you:
stop optimizing for the cheap, measurable thing. Memory and
distinctiveness are what move a buyer into the consideration set. Efficient
is not the same as effective.
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05 · DISTINCTIVENESS
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Distinctiveness is the moat, and AI just raised the stakes.
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The word of the week was ‘blanding,’ everything starting to look the same
because it’s generated, not created. Sir John Hegarty opened a keynote
asking ‘are we all f***ed?’ and argued brands have perfected stalking, not
inspiring. Here is the part that should get your attention: in an
AI-mediated world, coherent and distinctive brands get surfaced by AI, and
the bland, scattered ones do not. Coinbase built a category, not just a
brand, by picking an enemy bigger than its competitors and staying
relentlessly itself.
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For you:
when AI is the new front door and everyone sounds identical, a
recognizable voice is what gets you found and remembered. Sameness is now a
commercial risk. That, more than anything, is what we brought home.
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One small thing, before summer eats your calendar.
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All of this collapses into a single first move: say something, in your own
voice. Not a campaign. One post. One useful thing your ops lead actually
knows.
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We made you a free guide for exactly that first step.
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Yes, it’s too hot outside. Yes, a colleague might raise an eyebrow. Yes,
you’ll feel self-conscious. Do it anyway. The companies that win the next
few years are the ones that started before they felt ready.
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À bientôt,
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Anne BecheruFounder,
Brave New Media
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