At Cannes, AI was everywhere in conversation, yet rarely grounded in reality.
Blis set out to change that. President Alex Boras moderated a panel featuring senior marketers who have been exploring practical applications of AI long before the advertising community descended on the Croisette. In the session, a different kind of dialogue took shape: one focused on practical, immediate use cases.
The panelists made up a diverse and valuable range of perspectives:
- Melissa Berger, Chief Solutions Officer, Digitas North America
- Katie Comerford, EVP Strategy and Operations, Horizon Media
- Kodi Foster, VP of Advanced Marketing & Data Products, Pfizer
- Amanda Grant, EVP, Global Head of Partnerships, WPP Media
Together, we explored how top brands and agencies are leveraging AI to drive measurable outcomes in a world where signal loss has become the new status quo.
What emerged was an incisive conversation that stripped away the hype and dug into the practical uses of AI. Kodi Foster put it well: “If everything in your stack has AI, then where does the AI decision live?”.
Here’s what stood out from our conversation.
1. AI is only as good as the signals behind it
From pharma to agencies, every panelist agreed: you can’t optimize toward real-world outcomes if your signal quality is broken. Whether it’s Pfizer’s use of synthetic data and topic modeling, or WPP’s shift from identity to intelligence, the message was clear: AI won’t come close to human-level strategy until it has consistently better inputs.
At Blis, we see this daily. AI models trained on weak, modeled identity data simply can’t compete with systems that ingest real-world signals such as movement patterns, geo-behavioral context, and environmental cues. This is where performance starts.
2. Identity as an ingredient (but not the main course)
Horizon’s Katie Comerford summed it up: Identity still plays a role, but it’s just one cohort in a much larger recipe. In today’s environment, planning and measurement strategies that rely entirely on IDs are increasingly unstable and incomplete. Forward-thinking marketers are augmenting them with contextual intelligence, geographic segmentation, and predictive modeling.
Blis has built for this shift from the start. We don’t require identity to deliver outcomes, which is why our platform continues to outperform in ID-light environments, such as DOOH, iOS, and CTV.
3. The new battleground is orchestration
Beyond powering targeting and measurement, AI is transforming how marketers approach workflows. Comerford noted that Horizon is helping clients navigate media planning and organizational planning, where strategy, activation, and operations all interconnect through the use of AI-based tools. The agencies and brands that win won’t be the ones with the most AI in the stack, but those who know where it is best put to use.
At Blis, we’ve applied this thinking across our planning, activation, and smart-holdout measurement tools. Our goal has never been more AI. It’s better AI, used in the right places, with the right signals.
4. The consumer still matters most
Digitas’ Berger reminded us that consumers (especially young or tech-savvy ones) can spot fake, automated interactions from a mile away, and they’ll opt out if it doesn’t feel real. Human context and creative judgment still matter. AI should support those instincts but never erase them.
Our big takeaway from Cannes? For some, AI is on the horizon. For us, it’s already here. The difference lies in who is using it to build systems that will perform now and in the future.