Cannes Briefing: Creativity is moving beyond the agency model

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Cannes Briefing: Creativity is moving beyond the agency model

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What 1980s novelty Garfield phones tell us about our rampant consumerism

But, in this case, Zack found that, “the Brittany community was so refreshingly candid and generous that it gave me renewed hope for the power of true humanity in film,” he says. Brittany’s undeterred pursuit of environmental sustainability in the face of bigger foes was palpable. “I soon understood that for the Brittany community, protecting

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Google Loses Two Top AI Researchers To OpenAI & Anthropic

Google Loses Two Top AI Researchers To OpenAI & Anthropic

Two senior Google AI researchers are leaving for OpenAI and Anthropic within a week. Reports point to internal concern over Google’s developer-facing AI coding products. The departures raises questions of whether Google can hold onto senior researchers. Two senior Google AI researchers, Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer and AlphaFold’s John Jumper, are leaving for OpenAI and

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Amazon expands AI advertising with Alexa+ agentic ads

Amazon expands AI advertising with Alexa+ agentic ads

AI recommendations are becoming the new digital shelf as people search and shop within LLM chatbots. The change has left the ad industry scrambling to determine what an ad strategy looks like without clicks, landing pages or traditional search results. At the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity this year, Amazon announced what it’s calling

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VIDEO: I found three pre-Prime Day deals on Macs and a monitor so you won’t have to wait for Prime Day

VIDEO: I found three pre-Prime Day deals on Macs and a monitor so you won’t have to wait for Prime Day

If you’re a designer, editor or all‑round creative trying to upgrade your setup without setting your wallet on fire, three deals have landed today that are genuinely worth a look; one for the US crowd, one for the UK, and one very thrifty quality monitor pick for your desk setup. And all are recommended among

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Google Says SEO Tools Lack Access To Its Internal Metrics

Google Says SEO Tools Lack Access To Its Internal Metrics

Google’s CMO-facing blog post presents AI Search optimization as standard SEO. Google says third-party SEO tools and vendors don’t have access to its internal metrics. The guidance restates Google’s position that AEO and GEO are part of SEO. Google’s new messaging to CMOs reiterates that GEO is still SEO and states that third-party tools have

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A German Court Made Google Liable For What Its AI Says About You

A German Court Made Google Liable For What Its AI Says About You

The AI answer about your business is the platform’s own speech now. A German court has now said so, and it changes who is liable when the answer is wrong. The lawsuit itself is the smaller story. The bigger one is what an answer engine does once it can be held responsible for what it

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Automation doesn’t eliminate vague objectives

Automation doesn’t eliminate vague objectives

It’s never been easier to hand marketing work over to automation. Ad platforms will manage bidding, targeting, and creative. CRMs will score leads, trigger workflows, and suggest the next action. You can pipe performance data into an AI assistant and get optimization recommendations back before your coffee is done. None of that is hype. These

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Sicko is a book that celebrates the design of airline sick bags and the man who’s collected them since 1989

Sicko is a book that celebrates the design of airline sick bags and the man who’s collected them since 1989

The book is hand typed on a 1970s typewriter, including hand-written diary entries from Trevor himself – the nostalgia and memories that flood from the book are punctuated by the analogue elements, including genuine vintage paper plane templates, old photographs and Kodak slides of planes that Trevor had been on. But most of all, these

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Google Exposes The Fundamental Flaw Of LLMs.txt

Google Exposes The Fundamental Flaw Of LLMs.txt

Google’s John Mueller and Martin Splitt talked about LLMs.txt and markdown, with Mueller offering a surprising fact about the original purpose of LLMs.txt and also explaining why the proposed standards are have severe shortcomings. What Discovery Is And Why It Matters In the context of information retrieval (search), discovery is about a search engine discovering

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An investment bank walks into Cannes. A holdco walks out.

An investment bank walks into Cannes. A holdco walks out.

Walk the Croisette on the first morning of Cannes Lions and the whole apparatus has reassembled itself, as it always has — more or less. Meta at the Plage Barrière Le Majestic. Amazon at its port. Pinterest and its Manifestival, a word that should not exist and yet somehow does, and somehow fits. Spotify, Salesforce,

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How one creator is using AI to build an entire transmedia sci-fi universe

How one creator is using AI to build an entire transmedia sci-fi universe

The debate about AI is slowly moving away from the question of whether AI should be used and towards a more nuanced one: how, when, and why generative AI could be used. While much of that conversation focuses on image generation and productivity, some creators are using AI to tackle something far bigger: building entire

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Google Is Becoming A Personalizing Mirror Before You Even Type A Query

Google Is Becoming A Personalizing Mirror Before You Even Type A Query

Search has always used basic personalization like location, language, and recent history. But now, Google does not just react to the words you type; the system builds a profile of your habits to change what you see before you search. This is a fundamental change in how search works. Google is building a system to

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Lotus for Cullinan Harbour

Last year 2025 I was approached by art agency, Pistachio Kernel company limited https://www.pistachio-k.com/ to create 6 artworks for Cullinan Harbour (Kai Tak) property in Hong Kong, build by Sun Hung Kai Real Estate Development Company Limited. For this particular project, I was invited to create a series of artworks centered around the theme of

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Make Something Agents Want

Make Something Agents Want

Y Combinator’s motto, “Make something people want,” was never about the product. It was about distribution. Build the thing that finds product-market fit, and the people come. For 20 years, that distribution ran through search engines, social algorithms, paid ads, and word of mouth. All human-mediated channels. That changed. In the past six months, Cloudflare,

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BlueConic acquires Blueshift as CDPs move from data to action

BlueConic acquires Blueshift as CDPs move from data to action

Customer data platform BlueConic announced today it was acquiring Blueshift, an AI-powered cross-channel marketing platform. The next wave of CDPs is looking more agentic than previous generations, which were focused on collecting and unifying customer data. Agentic CDPs, as they’re starting to be called, will add AI agents to make decisions based on that data, creating

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a short history of modern brand design

a short history of modern brand design

In addition to the profound economic, societal and technological changes brought on by the advent of the industrial age in the second half of the 19th century, the time period also saw the introduction of symbols and brand names for distinguishing and identifying products. Logos began as representational symbols, according to various regional traditions, and

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AI Mode Sends A Different Visitor. Your Website Wasn’t Built For Them

AI Mode Sends A Different Visitor. Your Website Wasn’t Built For Them

AI Mode visitors arrive at your website having already done the research. They compared options inside the AI, refined their query three times, and planned. By the time they click through to you, they are not browsing. They are ready to complete a task. Your website is still built to persuade someone who has not

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WPP is testing a buyer agent, but it’s bigger bet is on governance

WPP is testing a buyer agent, but it’s bigger bet is on governance

Marketers are nervous about agentic media buying. WPP is betting governance is the answer. Which is why alongside the launch of its Buyer Agent for Video yesterday (June 18), it unveiled a coalition of premium media owners including Disney, Netflix, NBCUniversal, Paramount and Fox as well as standards bodies IAB Tech Lab and Prebid.org. It

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4 things you won’t learn in design school (but you really need to know)

4 things you won’t learn in design school (but you really need to know)

Most design courses are good at teaching you how to make the technical stuff, like software, principles, and processes. What they’re often less good at is teaching you how to work, or manage a client relationship, or grapple with feedback that doesn’t make much sense because it’s come from someone with no creative background. These

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Deindexing Reports Keep Coming, Google Sees Nothing Unusual

Deindexing Reports Keep Coming, Google Sees Nothing Unusual

For about two months, business owners and SEO professionals have reported that pages have been removed from Google’s index without a clear explanation. The reports started in late April and have continued into June. In many of those reports, the affected pages had neither a manual action nor a crawl error. They moved into “excluded”

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