CMOs at Cannes Lions talk about how AI is reshaping marketing and the connection to customers

Business Insider

4 hours ago

This article is part of " CMO Insider," a series on marketing leadership and innovation.
The convergence of tech and marketing is impacting the way that companies form and nurture connections with consumers. The CMO Insider breakfast event at Cannes, with BCG as a founding sponsor, offered an invite-only group of CMOs the opportunity to hear from different voices on AI and other ways marketers are connecting with consumers through tech.
Speakers included will.i.am, a musician, producer, and entrepreneur; Jessica Apotheker, chief marketing officer at BCG; and a panel of senior marketing leaders from ELF Beauty, Mercedes-Benz USA, Citi, and Salesforce.
Founder of the platform FYI.Ai, will.i.am led off the event in discussion with Jamie Heller, editor in chief of Business Insider, and explored where AI is now and how it can be used in the future. He likened the state of AI to video games from the 1980s and early 1990s, and said that AI is actually in its "infancy." "It's Pac-Man," he said. "It ain't even Halo yet."
His point was that early video games required a level of imagination from the player in the absence of sophisticated graphics and a real story. He said this same level of imagination is needed from "the people that love AI, the folks whose imagination is doing the work as you're training it or it's learning from your imagination." He added that AI will not stifle creativity, but provide room to enhance it.
Will.i.am also spoke about the role and need for AI in higher education. Through a partnership with Arizona State University, FYI.ai will provide technology to help enhance the learning experience and prepare students for the reality that awaits them upon graduation at the end of the decade.
"When you go out into the world, you're not just competing with humans," Will.i.am said, referring to today's students. Rather, he said, there's an "onslaught of agents" that are replacing the jobs students are going to school for — and no one is trying to help them compete.
Will.i.am said FYI.Ai is going to provide a path so that students can build an AI agent of their own; when they graduate, so will their agent. "Humans have to be able to compete with the marketplace," he said. "That marketplace is going to be like ghost bots that are going to be doing amazing work."
BCG data shows the optimism and pressures facing marketing leaders
Jessica Apotheker, the CMO of BCG, took the stage next for a conversation with Orlando Reece, the global head of sales for Business Insider. Apotheker shared insights from a recent BCG survey of more than 200 CMOs, which found 71% of those polled plan to invest more than $10 million annually in AI, up from 57% last year.
"AI is the buzzword of the moment," Apotheker said.
Though CMOs are optimistic about the technology, Apotheker said that leaders are also dealing with cost pressure and want to understand how the technology will help them growth their businesses.
"It's not like CEOs are writing huge checks for marketers," Apotheker said. "Most people are not seeing ROI from that investment yet at scale."
She said the data shows marketers are using AI for optimizing content workflows, hyper-personalization, and digging deeper into consumer insights.
Apotheker said that marketing leaders have the potential to drive AI-fueled transformation within their own function, and across companies.
"As CMOs, what is so exciting is we can be at the center of really reshaping marketing, because it's one of the functions that is the most disrupted," she said. "And also inventing the future services and offerings of our companies."
In order to take advantage of this moment, marketers need to cultivate skills of creativity, business management, and science, she said.
"We'll need much more teams in the science space than we used to — we'll need more left-brain marketers to make it work," Apotheker said. "We'll also need people who are more creative than they used to be so that they can really add value to AI. What is the balance of skill sets of my teams of tomorrow? That should be top of mind for everyone."
Taking the lead from customers
A panel of marketing leaders, moderated by Joi-Marie McKenzie, Business Insider's editor in chief, Life, spoke about how the convergence of technology and marketing, including AI, could affect the customer experience.
For Melody Lee, CMO of Mercedes-Benz USA, part of that is through the Mercedes app, which connects the car to the consumer. It's intended for the consumer to experience the brand and car in a seamless way— being able to start the car with the app alone and not a key, for example.
"There's just an expectation from the world of consumer electronics that the car should also follow that same seamlessness and integration into our customers' lives," she said. "And so anything that we can do to enhance that digital experience is really important to us. It always comes back to what we're trying to do for the customer."
For customers of ELF Beauty, the digital experience includes giving feedback through email or social chats. Laurie Lam, the company's chief brand officer, said she or Kory Marchisotto, the chief marketing officer, reads and responds to that feedback and takes it into account during product development.
ELF Beauty has also recently integrated with Roblox and Twitch, places where younger consumers requested the brand to be. This has allowed the company to connect with hundreds of millions of consumers in a unique way that ultimately builds the brand.
Lam's advice for exploring new digital platforms is to not overthink and "just plunge into it."
"You'll find that you'll learn your way through it. And your community actually doesn't care if you don't come in guns blazing," she added. "They just care that you're there with them and authentically connecting with them."
Alex Craddock, chief marketing and content officer at Citi, said authenticity and trust are important for any brand, but perhaps particularly so in the financial industry. "I think we as consumers expect to be able to trust a brand, and a brand has to keep reinforcing that trust," Craddock said. "Not just through the excellence of its product and customer service, but I think through how it actually brings its products and its services to market."
He said the company has gone "from 0 to 250 miles an hour" in terms of AI in the past six months, but it was initially hesitant because it feared breaking the trust bond with clients.
Now, the company is pushing ahead and using AI in several different ways across its marketing function — from something as simple as summarizing reports and drafting emails to using Adobe Firefly in its in-house agency to create imagery and build content.
Ariel Kelman, president and CMO of Salesforce, said that although the company is using AI tools on the creative side, it has also been experimenting on the operational side to become more efficient. For example, producing leads for the sales organization is always important, but those lead follow-ups are a challenge.
Kelman said the company now uses AI agents to handle interactive follow-ups with leads, managing the first 80% of the conversation. As a result, the leads passed on to salespeople are of higher quality. Kelman said Salesforce has also improved lead response time by about 40%.
"There are lots of operational areas like that where I think we're going to see big improvements in productivity over the next couple of years," Kelman said.
Despite its increasing use, Citi's Craddock said he believes AI is still in its early days, which leaves room for taking risks.
"I think we're at the stage where we've got to be curious. We've got to be courageous and really lean in and be brave enough to make some mistakes," Craddock said. "That's the only way you're going to innovate."