AI won’t save advertising, says Digitas’ Amy Lanzi

We’ve got a special Decoder today — I had the chance to talk with Amy Lanzi, the CEO of Digitas North America, in front of a live audience at the Uber Villa at the Cannes Lions advertising festival in the South of France. I know, it’s a hard gig, but I do it for you. Amy has been on Decoder three times now, and she’s one of my favorite people to chat with — she is clear-eyed about what the advertising industry really is and does for brands and what all the money sloshing around the ad-supported internet really accomplishes. You’ll hear her say that she thinks the traditional chief marketing officer role is done for and that her job is driving business results using data and analytics. Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Head here. Not a subscriber? You can sign up here. That might sound straightforward, but it was a shocking statement at Cannes, which is where the entire advertising industry gathers every year, drinks rosé, and convinces itself of outrageous nonsense. This year, the big trends were creators, and, of course, AI. And Amy, alongside her parent company Publicis, aren’t holding back when it comes to calling out the AI nonsense for what it is. Publicis actually put out an ad before Cannes listing all the false promises being made about AI when it comes to advertising, so I asked Amy about that, and what AI might actually be good for, beyond just generating slop and slop headlines. After all, Meta and the rest of the big platforms were all at Cannes talking about generating more and more ads with AI — something that threatens almost every other company in the industry. Of course, we also talked about the creator economy and how all the creators at Cannes were openly calling themselves marketers — essentially turning themselves into small ad agencies of their own. On top of that, the biggest creators in the world almost all launch their own products — something Amy and Digitas see as an opportunity, as those companies will need operational scale and excellence if they’re going to be successful over time. There’s a lot in this one — like I said, Amy is as sharp as they come, and I really enjoy talking to her about how the money really works. Okay: Amy Lanzi, CEO of Digitas North America, live at Cannes. Here we go. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Hello everybody. I’m Nilay Patel. I’m the editor in chief of The Verge and the host of Decoder. Hi. Amy Lanzi, CEO of Digitas, part of Publicis Groupe. I’m very excited to be here with Amy. Amy, we have to stop meeting like this. We only talk during Decoder podcasts. I know. We do. We have to do this more. We both live in New York. We should get together more IRL. Yeah. We only travel long ways to talk to each other in front of live audiences, which is wonderful. Thank you all for being here. Thanks to Uber for having us. I have a lot to talk to you about. It seems like every year we hang out and the entire advertising industry is in a new form of chaos. And that chaos doesn’t really get resolved. We just move on to the next form of chaos. This year, it’s AI. Yes. I don’t think that’s a surprise to anyone in this room. Everywhere here at Cannes, the conversation is about AI. Let’s just get started. Publicis put out what you would call a fake ad, a documentary ad. It’s called “The Wrong Promises” and it is basically just a series of vignettes of promises people are making in pitches, including “you don’t have to pay us until you win a Lion,” which is incredible. And it says “this is real” at the bottom. Yes. Tell me about what you are hearing in these rooms that are leading to these crazy AI promises getting made. Thank you for bringing up our fun video. It was really designed to stimulate conversations like this. In the business right now, it’s crazy. I’ve been in this business for a long time and we are seeing all kinds of partners offer wild things in the pitch process. It’s different than it’s been before, whether it’s all the things that were, of course, hyped in that video, but also just insane commercial deals that are just generally bad for people and the business. And they’re coming in all different types — whether it’s about free AI, free platform, free whatever — that are creating a dynamic that is not good for all of us in this industry. Because we all need to work together. It is a people business and all of those things really, long-term, create a people problem. Not to get all Toy Story 5 here, but the conversation that you and I are constantly having is about the pressure of the tech platforms on the media ecosystem, whether that’s publishers, whether that’s agencies, whether that’s creators at some point. We’ll come to that. But the idea that the platforms have enough scale to promise you business results and then deliver them — whether or not that happens, but they certainly can make those promises — is leading to some of these outcomes. And some of these promises about AI and what it might be able to do, is there any reality to that? Or is that just a reaction to the pressure the platforms are putting on the ecosystem? Whenever this conversation comes about, the promise of AI, I always go back to the promise of programmatic. How many of you remember when programmatic was a thing? No more people, it was all going to magically— No one in this room admitted that they remembered that programmatic advertising was a thing. Yes, right, exactly. And that was a time when it was all just going to magically happen and it magically still needs people, still has the nuance of brands and the marketplace and all of the things that we do to define our partnerships and what are going to be game changers. I go back to that because I feel like the AI story is the new programmatic story, with the promise of everything just being absolutely automated, and that absolutely did not happen. When programmatic was rising, there were all those promises at that time as well and now we are living that. But what is different here is it’s coming from either agency partners or tech and platform partners. It creates a different chaos to where you started. Publicis and Digitas also have huge investments here. You were early, right? You bought Influential in 2024 to do analysis of how the creator ecosystem was doing. You have Digitas AI, and it’s been two years that you’ve been into that. How do you think about those products and those platforms in an ecosystem that is full of these promises? For me — and I’ll talk about Digitas AI in particular — we started to make our people better unicorns, as we talked about the last time we met. It was really to say, “Okay, everyone look at what’s on your desk, what’s in your day, and think about what you absolutely could build an agent to do and that way we free up our time to do this.” That’s where we started. And then what was fascinating is the magical things that were able to be built by the young talent in the industry that is solving a working problem but eventually a business problem. That still holds because every day, as a Gen Xer, I always say, “Hackers wanted.” If you have a hacking mentality and you’re curious, you can actually do better things than I did when I was a hacker in that age. It enables us to use our agents, use our data to get to better ideas, better workflows that are more of a surprise and delight to clients than what you might have brought in the first round. Because you can do many rounds before you actually get to the final product and that’s how you get to the unique outcome. You can tell that Amy is a Decoder pro because she has led directly to the Decoder questions. I’m very curious if AI, at least in the enterprise context, is a top-down or bottom-up change agent. You just restructured Digitas, right? You put in a bunch of new roles. You have a new chief intelligence officer, a new chief systems officer, and my favorite, a chief transformation officer. He turns into a robot. What are these roles? [Laughs] I hope he hears this because that’s going to make him laugh. Anyway. It’s very exciting. The toy line is going to be great. What are these roles for? How are you changing the structure of Digitas? You’ve always inspired me by asking “how do you structure yourself” and “how do you make decisions?” The first time we talked about it, I had been in this role for just a little bit of time and we had set our culture, which is, “We’re fearless, inventive and generous.” That still holds on how we make decisions. Org structure-wise, we needed to figure out exactly what you just said: how do we do things in the underpinning of the agency that will enable all of our different practices to be able to scale faster? To leverage intelligence — and, of course, intelligence is code for AI in this story. We are moving — so that’s why we have our chief intelligence officer, which was a pickup from data and analytics — into liberating that into an intelligent platform that all of our agents are built on and then also all of our employees use. The second is systems thinking. We took the traditional COO role, turned that into a chief systems officer role and really redefined both of those roles because all of our client conversations are really about marketing systems. You need to have someone who can come in and understand that and meet them where they are. Then we think about the marketing flows that we’ll marry to the system that works within some of their tech choices, et cetera, as two examples. The third, the chief transformation officer is — and this is a big conversation here — around clients wanting to transform, particularly CMOs transforming into CGOs. What is a CGO? Chief growth officer. Okay. Did you not know that? I’m a journalist. My job is not to innovate. It’s unfortunate. [Laughs] Okay. I just ask the questions. That’s why we’re good friends. I make up a lot of things. Yeah. I was just coming from the Forbes CMO Council thing and there was a whole conversation on the rise of the CGO. What that means is CMOs, formerly, were really responsible for making marketing magic. Campaigns and media investment. Now they’re responsible for building capabilities and they need a partner to help transform their solutions, so it’s a people problem as well as a tech problem. That’s why we have that discreet chief transformation officer role. You are a data person, you’ve always been a data person. I’m really curious about that. The idea that the marketing function is now so directly tied to business results, I see it on the tech platforms all the time. You and I have talked about this before. Mark Zuckerberg will just look every single one of you in the eyes and say, “I’m going to kill you.” He does it without remorse. His vision is that you will just pay Meta and it will make creative for you, it will find the audience for you and they will deliver you business results and almost everything in the middle, from money in to money out, gets automated away by Meta’s intelligence stack. The idea of the chief growth officer feels of a piece with that. That the marketing function is now a business function and it needs a data layer, it needs all these things. Where do you see the creative fitting into it? Where do you see the classic form of brand building? It’s a fundamental part of that capability that needs to live, like the marketing capability now, as a system. Brand building and the fundamentals matter more than anything. What you stand for and how you show up, what you’re the answer for, especially with LLMs, is really important and it has to be authentic for the brands to grow. That’s still the case. You just can’t stop there. It needs to be attached to a system and ideally, you have some data intelligence layer so I’m learning more and more about you and I can then redefine my marketing stories to reshape how I’m showing up if it’s not working, if it’s not selling more candy, if it’s not selling more cars. How we change faster versus the CMO being responsible for building these campaigns and then moving on — that role is a dying role and it should be. It should be that marketing drives commercial value, marketing drives shareholder value. You heard it here first, CMO is a dying role. The previous version of the CMO. Sure. Just like the whole, we are in a chaotic world. We’re in an area of convergence. If you are a CMO and you’re not thinking about your data layer, you’re not thinking about your full stacks, [you’re not thinking about how] you can get closer to the consumer and get to better creative, better use of creators, you are not going to be doing well in the future. Whether it’s CMO 2.0 or you’re moving into that CGO role, that’s really the future of that type of function in an organization. The audience here at Cannes knows this, but for the Decoder audience in their cars listening to this, the conventional wisdom was that CMOs only ever had two years on the job, maybe less. You were dead the moment you showed up, you got to execute one big campaign, you found the bathroom and then you were out. [Laughs] Yes. I hope you heard everyone in this room laugh. I did. That was the most knowing laugh in the world. This seems like a much longer-term role. If you show up as the new CMO and your job is to transform the entire business from the bottom up over and over again, it’s a lot of instability. Do you think these are longer term roles? If you do this right and you create a marketing system, you will be able to live beyond the two years path, because you’re creating a growth engine. If you only want to do two tent pole marketing campaigns, that’s probably not going to go well after two years. I basically have two themes that I want to talk about. One is data in scale and one is creators. This sits right in the middle of them. And I just keep thinking about this phrase that I’ve heard Meta use the most, but the other platforms use it a lot too, and it’s “creative is the new targeting.” I hear that and I don’t make ads. We make two podcasts a week. We don’t do scale at that level, but I hear “creative is the new targeting” and I think that is a demand for output like no one has ever heard before — “We’re going to find your customer for you; you just feed the machine with as much as you can.” It seems obvious to me that you have two choices in that world of “creative is new targeting.” Meta’s Andromeda system is the biggest example of this, and it’s that you’re going to feed it with AI creative and you’re going to let them do it, or you’re going to have your own AI creative system or you’re going to let a million creators and influencers do it for you. How do you plug a growth engine into a world where that’s what the platforms are all saying? The closer you are to your consumers and all the places they’re spending time from a data identity, however you’re systematically doing that, is the most important thing so you ca