The campaign had a good run. One big idea launched everywhere, studied, repeated. Now? Not so much.

During an ADWEEK House Cannes Lions panel that we co-hosted, industry leaders explored what replaces it: a connected creative infrastructure where engineers, creative talent, data, and AI production work together.

The infrastructure shift

When AI production tools reach everyone, the real competitive question comes into focus. What keeps one brand from sounding exactly like the next?

The answer is not necessarily more tech.

“I think the creative teams are the ones that now matter more than anything,” said Roland Butler, head of product, content solutions at Zalando.

“What we are now building is a whole creative system around those teams, maintaining their agency and their creative freedom, and allowing them to respond faster and better,” he added. Designers and engineers now work alongside one another on prompts, quality controls, editorial guidelines, and cultural trend signals.

Ben Hall, VP at Empathy Lab, sees this moment as a clarifying one. “The fundamentals are more important than ever,” he noted. “The idea, the insight, the cultural relevance has become massively important. Teams are now surrounding themselves around this again.”

None of that completely went away. What shifted is the strategic foundation. “You’ve got to have systems thinking, you’ve got to have people who really understand how this idea can translate to composable systems across and outside of the Internet,” Hall continued.

Read the full article on Adweek.