• by Maarten Albarda , Featured Contributor, June 19, 2026

Hello Cannes -- and hello, avalanche of announcements and press releases prior to the big week. Consumer platforms are tumbling over each other to announce their latest (AI-driven) innovations. Meta announced its latest, fully automated approach to “give us your ad budget and we do the rest.”  Both Horizon Media and WPP Media announced their latest media buying team members, both of course agentic solutions. And Publicis released a pre-Cannes video mocking the pitch process, focusing on flashy, empty AI vocabulary instead of actual structural value.

The core narrative of the Publicis video relies heavily on the current hot buzzword: agentic AI. The storyline pitches a world of autonomous software systems that seamlessly connect multistep marketing workflows -- from planning to execution -- with "absolute certainty".

Publicis rightly identified the massive corporate craving for control and bottom-line impact in an uncertain world. Autonomous agents are indeed surging as a top technology priority for enterprise decision-makers, not because the decision makers know why, but because their LinkedIn feed relentlessly tells them that agentic is where it’s at.

In the entertaining video, a parade of agency execs spew a sea of identical, high-concept jargon (“end-to-end, open ecosystem, transparent, decisioning”) without providing a single standardized definition. When every agency relies on the exact same empty-promise vocabulary, the words lose all utility. The video accuses agencies (not Publicis, of course, but “the others”) of promising "AI-driven decisioning intelligence" that can replace human nuance, but operationally, is often just sophisticated workflow automation wrapped in a generative AI bow.

If the jargon-heavy pitch narrative is broken, how do we fix it?

Let’s start by no longer selling a science-fiction marketing narrative and start providing operational accountability. Recent industry data shows that creative quality, or lack thereof, is the number-one reason North American marketers pass on a new agency during a review, ranking nearly seven points ahead of category experience. Marketers are tired of empty tech promises; they want to know how you protect and build their business.

A winning pitch today requires specific, documentable answers to the questions the Publicis video completely ignores:

Don't aggregate results. Disclose exactly where AI is automating a task versus where human talent is driving the strategy. Marketers want a "hybrid intelligence" superbike, not a pilotless car.

Guarantee data governance: With data leakage top of mind, a pitch must explicitly contract that client data will never be used to train external models. You win by demonstrating guardrails and data residency, not just algorithmic horsepower.

Price outcomes, not infrastructure: Paying for token counts or vague platform access fees is meaningless. Anchor your commercial pitch in measurable business outcomes with clear performance milestones built right into the contract.

If you are a marketer evaluating an agency pitch, ignore the AI hype. Look at the contract. Push your procurement teams to demand written, verifiable proof of concepts under real conditions before committing your budget.

And if you are an agency? Stop trying to look like a tech company by recycling the same commoditized buzzwords. The agencies winning reviews aren't the ones promising an autonomous future; they are the ones combining data-disciplined execution with exceptional, human-driven creative.

One last thought: What if the focus of the pitch was on an actual idea that can serve as an anchor for the brand and the business? AI the hell out of that idea -- but have the idea first.