The long-term, all-encompassing agency retainer is being replaced. Brands like PepsiCo now favor project-based work, leveraging their own in-house capabilities and seeking more flexible, specialized agency partnerships for specific needs.
Beyond creating great content, brands must focus on making it findable by both human audiences and AI agents. This involves technical, unglamorous work like meta-tagging, but it's foundational to getting a message heard in a crowded landscape.
Innovation isn't limited to new products. PepsiCo created a joint venture-style content studio with VaynerMedia, merging internal and agency teams to co-create organic content. This structural innovation has led to a five-fold increase in content throughput.
When entering a new leadership role, especially in an unfamiliar culture, bypassing small talk for direct questions builds trust quickly. Asking "What's working? What's not?" opens up dialogue and gets to the core issues, creating a foundation for healthy tension and transparency.
To foster connection and transparency across a large marketing organization, PepsiCo's CMO writes a personal weekly email. It covers business performance, celebrates individual promotions, and includes a personal perspectives piece, making leadership feel more human and accessible.
PepsiCo launched its prebiotic cola exclusively online. This allowed them to test messaging and gather consumer data quickly. The insights, like 50% of buyers being new to the brand, directly informed the successful full retail launch months later.
A key observation from the Cannes Lions festival is the resurgence of humor in advertising. The industry is moving away from an over-emphasis on serious, purpose-driven work, signaling a return to lighthearted, fun-loving creative as a way to connect with consumers.
Rather than replacing human creativity, AI's most powerful application is in the early stages of the process. It excels at mining insights from data and serving as a tool for creatives to "bounce ideas off of," much like a musician riffing with a collaborator, speeding up ideation.
A major cultural barrier in multinational corporations is the resistance to adopting ideas from other markets. Overcoming this "not invented here" bias is crucial for leveraging global scale and ensuring the best ideas, regardless of origin, can be implemented system-wide.
While the tactics ('the how') of marketing are rapidly changing due to technology, the fundamental principles ('the what') remain constant. PepsiCo's CMO argues that a deep understanding of these basics is essential before marketers can effectively navigate the complexities of modern channels.