Business of Marketing

What makes a burger look like your burger? Or a beer look like your beer?
For Olaf van Gerwen, Founder & Global Creative Director of Chuck Studios, that question gets to the heart of a problem facing some of the world’s biggest food and drink brands: too much advertising makes the category look good, while doing very little to make the brand distinctive.
Recorded at Cannes Lions, Olaf joins John Horsley to talk about the craft and science of building brands through food.
They explore why years of performance marketing have pulled attention away from long-term brand building, why consistency beats constantly reinventing the campaign, and how brands can develop a distinctive “culinary identity” in much the same way they build a visual or sonic identity.
Olaf also shares the thinking behind Chuck Studios’ work with brands including McDonald’s, KFC and Lipton, why subtle brand cues can become incredibly powerful over time, and why his decision to specialise completely in food and drink transformed his own career.
His advice for anyone coming into the industry is equally clear: find the thing you want to be known for, then go deep.
A conversation about creativity, distinctiveness, specialism and what it really takes to build a brand people remember.

AI is changing how consumers discover products, how brands reach them and, increasingly, how marketing itself gets done.
John Horsley is joined by Travis Clinger, Chief Connectivity & Ecosystem Officer and GM, International at LiveRamp, for a wide-ranging conversation about the infrastructure behind that transformation.
Travis explains why connecting identity across platforms has become so important as consumers move between CTV, social, publishers, retail media and emerging AI interfaces.
They discuss the evolution beyond cookies, the rise of interoperable identity, measurement and clean rooms, and why marketers increasingly need to understand a sequence of customer interactions rather than attribute a sale to a single advert.
Travis also takes John inside LiveRamp’s push into agentic marketing, including its LiveRamp Agent Builders programme and the growing role of AI agents in measurement, data collaboration and marketing workflows.
The conversation covers:
• Why the customer journey is becoming more fragmented• How unified identity connects brands across channels• What AI agents could change inside marketing teams• Why clean rooms and measurement are becoming easier to use• How innovation differs across the UK, Australia, Europe and the Middle East• What brands such as L’Oréal and United Airlines are doing differently• Why Travis believes simply “showing up” remains one of the most powerful career advantages
A fascinating look at how data, identity and AI are converging, and what marketers need to understand about what comes next.

For years, programmatic advertising has been optimised around clicks, viewability and other proxy metrics. But marketers increasingly want a much simpler answer: what did this investment actually do for the business?
Recorded live at Cannes Lions, John Horsley sits down with Luca Filardo, Chief Revenue Officer at Adlook, to explore how AI is changing the economics, speed and expectations of digital advertising.
Luca explains why marketers are moving beyond media metrics towards ROAS and real business outcomes, and how AI is making it possible to change targeting, creative and campaigns in real time as market conditions shift.
They also get into conversational campaign building using LLMs, AI-powered audience creation, connected TV, attention and creative optimisation, the growing problem with publisher ad overload, fraud, and why the role of a modern CRO now extends far beyond simply running a sales team.
Plus, Luca shares why relentless curiosity matters in an industry moving this quickly, and the Japanese principle of Kaizen: getting a little better every single day.
A conversation about what happens when programmatic stops simply buying media and starts responding intelligently to the world around it.

Most brands say they have a first-party data strategy. Far fewer are actually using that data to shape the media they buy.
Recorded live at Cannes Lions, John Horsley sits down with Rob McLaughlin, Founder and CEO of AUDIENCES, to explore why so much customer data still fails to make it into media activation and what needs to change.
Rob argues that less than 3% of media spend is currently informed by first-party data, creating what he calls the “activation gap”: businesses have the permission, technology and customer intelligence, but still fail to put it to work.
They discuss why brands may already have most of the data and technology they need, why chasing a 360-degree customer view can be both unrealistic and intrusive, and why CMOs and CTOs need to work far more closely together.
Rob also explains AUDIENCES’ new partnership with Snowflake, how bringing activation capability directly into a company’s existing data infrastructure can remove months of complexity, and why customer data should remain with the organisation it was originally entrusted to.
The conversation also goes behind the business, from bootstrapping AUDIENCES and building enterprise-grade software from day one to Rob’s experience founding and exiting Loop Horizon, hiring the right early team and why he remains unapologetically optimistic about entrepreneurship.
A conversation about making first-party data genuinely useful, building software businesses from scratch and closing the gap between having customer intelligence and actually doing something with it.

Recorded live at Cannes Lions 2026, Justin Cooke sits down with Luis Miguel Messianu, Founder, President and Chief Creative Officer of MEL, for a conversation about cultural intelligence, creativity, AI and where brands will find their next wave of growth.
Luis has spent decades challenging the way brands think about multicultural marketing, building award-winning agencies and leading creative work across some of the world’s biggest brands.
His argument is increasingly relevant far beyond multicultural marketing: the brands that win will be those that understand culture deeply enough to make people feel genuinely understood.
Luis explains why specificity creates authenticity, why multicultural thinking belongs at the centre of the brief rather than at the edge of a campaign, and why brands looking for growth need people inside their organisations who have actually lived the cultures they want to reach.
Justin and Luis also explore the impact of AI on creativity. Luis describes AI as “augmented imagination” and argues that, as technology makes execution faster and easier, human nuance, taste, cultural insight and the quality of the underlying idea will become even more valuable.
They discuss:
• Why multicultural marketing can no longer be treated as a niche• How cultural intelligence creates stronger brand connections• Why changing the brief is often the first step towards changing the work• What leading McDonald’s creative work across 46 markets taught Luis about human behaviour• Why AI could make cultural insight and creative originality more important, not less• How agencies can protect their creative soul while still building successful businesses
They also talk about agency reinvention, creative standards, mentoring the next generation of talent and why Luis believes advertising is ultimately “the business of optimism”.
A wide-ranging conversation about culture, creativity, growth and what will differentiate great brands in an increasingly AI-powered world.

Recorded live at Cannes Lions 2026, Justin Cooke sits down with Lisa Morgan, Managing Director of Generation Media, one of the UK’s leading independent media agencies specialising in children, young people and family audiences.
Children and young people are often the earliest adopters of new platforms, technologies and behaviours, but understanding what captures their attention, earns their trust and builds lasting affinity is becoming increasingly complex.
Lisa explains why Generation Media built its business around deep audience specialism, how children now influence major household purchasing decisions, and why marketers need to move beyond simply measuring reach and attention towards understanding fandom, affinity and long-term engagement.
They discuss the changing role of linear TV, the growth of experiential marketing, social media regulation, brand safety, the importance of insight in spotting emerging trends, and why global strategies still need local understanding.
Lisa also shares how Generation Media’s employee ownership model has shaped its culture, how coaching changed her own leadership style, and why AI and automation will make human qualities such as curiosity, judgement, passion and strategic thinking increasingly important.
In this episode:
• Why children and young people cannot be treated as one audience• How brands can spot emerging trends before they become mainstream• Why marketing is shifting from attention to affinity and fandom• How AI is changing the skills agencies need• What employee ownership can teach businesses about culture and leadership• Why the future of media still includes lessons from the past
This is a conversation about understanding the next generation of consumers while building the next generation of agencies.

AI might be dominating the conversation in marketing, but Miguel Machado believes most businesses are focusing on the wrong thing.
Recorded live at Cannes Lions 2026, Justin Cooke sits down with Miguel Machado, CEO of Keenfolks, to discuss why competitive advantage will come from data, not AI alone, and why marketing needs to move beyond one-off campaigns towards intelligent systems that continuously learn and improve.
They discuss:
Why marketing needs to focus on business outcomes, not outputs
Why proprietary data will determine who wins with AI
The shift from campaigns to repeatable intelligent marketing systems
Why 90% of AI pilots can fail while investment continues to grow
How CMOs and CTOs are becoming increasingly interconnected
Why technology adoption ultimately depends on people
Why efficiency should be a consequence of growth, not the objective
How Keenfolks is building a new model around technology, data and human capability
A conversation about what AI-native marketing actually looks like when you move beyond the hype and connect technology directly to business growth.
Recorded live at the DEPT Garden during Cannes Lions 2026.

Recorded live at Cannes Lions, Katie Mitchell, Managing Director of Seen Studios, joins Justin Cooke on the Business of Marketing to explore why the future of brand experience is neither physical nor digital, but the connection between the two.
Katie explains why physical spaces still matter in an increasingly digital world, how brands can turn stores, pop-ups and events into content engines, and why the best experiences start with a genuine understanding of the audience rather than the creative idea.
The conversation covers how brands can build connected online and offline experiences, localise global campaigns without losing consistency, make experiential marketing work harder commercially, and measure the return on expensive physical activations.
Katie also gets into the business of running and growing an agency, from building a strong leadership culture and protecting margins to why she believes human relationships will remain critical to new business, even as sales and marketing become increasingly automated.
A conversation about experiential marketing, retail, brand experience, consumer behaviour, agency growth and the increasingly connected physical and digital customer experience.

Recorded live at Cannes Lions 2026, Justin Cooke sits down with Marcus Startzel, CEO of GumGum, to explore what the next era of advertising looks like when brands stop thinking only about audiences and start thinking about mindset.
Marcus explains why context, attention and receptivity are becoming critical to advertising effectiveness, and how AI is making the old promise of reaching the right person, with the right message, at the right moment far more achievable.
They discuss:
Why consumers are different people at 7am and 7pm, even if the audience data says otherwise
How GumGum is using its Mindset Graph to understand when people are most receptive to advertising
Why attention alone is not enough without relevance
How AI could reshape targeting, optimisation and brand outcomes
Why customer obsession still matters more than the technology
What Marcus learned about leadership from Amazon and serving as a nuclear submarine officer
Why “ship, shipmate, self” still shapes the way he leads
How fast decision-making, trust and constant innovation separate the companies that grow from those that get left behind
A conversation about AI, adtech, customer obsession and leadership, and why understanding the moment someone is in could become one of advertising’s biggest competitive advantages.

Recorded live at Cannes Lions, John Horsley sits down with Alistair Hill, Co-Founder of On Device, to explore why marketing measurement still gets so much wrong.
They discuss why click-through rates can be a terrible measure of brand effectiveness, the growing problem of survey fraud, how brands can connect brand lift to commercial outcomes, and why AI is shifting measurement from reports consumed by people to data consumed directly by machines.
Alistair so explains why the smartest marketers are moving towards outcomes-based planning, why confidence matters when balancing brand and performance, and why being able to find and tell stories through data remains one of the most valuable skills in marketing.