Cannes 2026: We are in the third era of brand

Let’s be honest about Cannes. 

For all the brilliance of the setting and the brands and agencies it gathers, it can be a lot of hot air. This year was hot at the very least. 

So I’ll admit I landed in Nice with a healthy dose of skepticism, but after a week of panels, networking and discussions with marketing leaders from a range of sectors and geographies, I came away feeling different. 

And that’s because marketing has changed. After two years of marketing leaders asking whether AI would change anything, this year the question was different. Across the stages, the sunset drinks, and the dinners, the mood was one of reckoning. AI has changed the game - how do we react? 

For me, the more conversations I had, one thing became clear: we are in the third era of brand. 

In the first era, your brand was what you said it was. You controlled the message and the advert or the campaign was the first thing a customer met. Even journalists were more susceptible to a long lunch and a favourable article in return.

In the second era, which started gathering pace around two decades ago, control was handed over to your community. Your brand became what other people said about you, on social media, in product reviews, or forums. 

Today, we’re in the third era, and it’s the most consequential shift yet. Your brand is now what the AI says it is. For an increasing number of customers, their first impression of a brand or a business isn’t from its website or via a campaign, it’s from an AI-generated answer. 

For marketing leaders, that means the locus of control has moved one step further away. Again. 

Maintaining that control in this AI-mediated world was the backdrop to many of the conversations I had during the week. Here are three of my key takeaways: 

1. You can’t take a LLM to lunch, but…‍

…you can shape what it reads.

For marketing leaders optimizing the content of the primary sources they can control is still crucial. 

In the first era of brand this might have been a well-respected journalist, in the second an influencer with millions of followers.

In this new era, although you can’t take an LLM to lunch, you can ensure the primary sources within your control are optimised for LLM discoverability, whether that’s the ‘About’ page on your website or company blog posts. ‍

2. Consistency is the chief currency ‍

AI now composes your brand from everything it has ingested: reviews, support transcripts, third-party coverage, customer forums, the actual product experience, as well as your owned content. If the AI is describing your brand from such scattered signals, the brands that win will be those that make those signals as coherent as possible, wherever it looks. Consistency in your voice, facts and positioning, governed into every output is how you teach the models to represent and cite you correctly.

It’s also why we built the GEO Agent and GEO Hub. The Hub shows you what the AI says about you: your citations, sentiment, share of voice, and where a competitor is winning the answer instead of you. The Agent does something about it. It finds the gaps and closes them, and optimizes and creates content so the models represent and cite you correctly over time. ‍

3. Taste is the multiplier 

If consistency is the chief currency for brands in this AI search era, human taste is the multiplier. 

In many ways nothing has changed here. Human taste will still always set a brand apart. 

A lazy argument I often hear is that foundation models are killing creativity. I understand this to a degree. Every team has access to the same models, and when these models have access to such huge datasets, the output naturally trends toward the median.

What can never be lost though is the human instinct for what to cut and what to amplify, that’s the one thing a model can't hand you.

The model gives you the median. Style, discernment, and restraint - in other words, taste - are what carry you past it.

The value isn't the model's first draft, it's the human correction on top of it. Capture the difference between what the AI produced and what your team actually chose to ship, track it over time, and you've built something proprietary: your brand's taste signature. That's an asset no competitor and no model can copy.

The pace of change in marketing right now is unlike anything I’ve seen before which is exactly what makes this the most exciting moment the industry has had in years. 

The teams that win in this third era of brand will be those that are world class are two things: optmizing relentlessly for AI discoverability, while protecting the human judgment and taste a model can never give you. 

See how the GEO Agent and GEO Hub helps your team own how AI represents your brand.

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