The ‘cockroaches’ of Cannes might be the smartest survivors in business
With the rosé-fuelled creative fest in Cannes wrapping up today, I’ve been reflecting on how often the ad industry has been declared dead.
I’ve spent much of my career in advertising. And I’ve lost count of the supposed extinction events we’ve survived.
The internet. Programmatic. Social media. Privacy regulations. In-house studios.
Each time, we adapted. And in many cases, my agencies have been on at the front of the charge, turning disruption into growth.
Now it’s AI’s turn to kill us off.
And yet… here the cockroaches were this week. Rosé in hand, poolside in Cannes, debating prompts and prompting debates.
Then The Economist landed in my inbox with a piece that mirrored what I’ve been thinking. It offered three sharp lessons from adland — lessons other industries would do well to pay attention to:
🔹 AI is eating the middle, not the top.
LLMs already do a solid job of the “good enough” marketing that keeps the industry running. That’s most of what brands rely on. And most of what agencies deliver. It’s being automated faster than we’d like to admit.
🔹 The big players are pulling away.
We love the story that AI levels the playing field. But in practice, scale wins. Compute, data, distribution. It’s all for sale. Intelligence isn’t being democratised. It’s being bought.
🔹 Everything old is new again.
Billboards and PR are back. not because they’re trendy, but because AI has changed how we track what works. Attribution is now data science, not guesswork.
But here’s the bit that matters for agency and marketing leaders:
AI isn’t just a tech trend. It’s exposing three deeper challenges. And we can’t automate our way out of them:
🔸 1. The business model is broken.
The headcount and timesheet model doesn’t hold when machines can do middle-tier work faster and cheaper.
Clients want strange, sharp, standout. And they want it fast.
We need new economics, not just new tools.
🔸 2. The centre is collapsing.
Mid-tier roles, work, and agencies are getting squeezed.
Value is shifting to the extremes: automated at one end, deeply human at the other.
Successful agencies will move to the edges.
🔸 3. Creativity needs redefining.
If AI handles the functional 95%, the weird and wonderful 5% just became priceless.
That demands a reframe: from service providers to cultural stewards and business partners.
We can’t out-machine the machines. But we can out-human them.
In my coaching and consulting work, I’m seeing who’s adapting — and who’s clinging to familiar ground.
The ones who survive?
They’re the ones who keep moving.
Like cockroaches.
(And I say that with love.)