The story of this year’s Internationalists is the evolution of marketing leadership itself. The most influential marketers today are not simply building brands. They are helping people navigate complexity, creating confidence in uncertain times, building communities around shared passions, humanizing technology, and finding new ways for organizations to create meaningful value. The 2026 Internationalists of […]
Why the industry’s challenge may not be creativity itself—but the systems required to scale it. Most marketers believe creativity drives growth. Far fewer believe their organizations consistently deliver it. That is one of the most striking findings from new research by the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) and Cannes LIONS, released as the industry gathers […]
Organizations today have more information than ever before. Research is richer. Data is more accessible. Measurement is more sophisticated. Artificial intelligence can summarize, predict, analyze, and optimize at a scale that would have seemed unimaginable just a few years ago. Yet despite all this intelligence, many leaders find themselves confronting a surprisingly human challenge. How […]
Costas Papaikonomou on disruption, decision-making, and the overlooked power of the obvious. Innovation has become a kind of corporate reflex. When growth slows or markets shift, the instinct is often the same: disrupt, reinvent, transform. But according to Costas Papaikonomou, an innovation expert, entrepreneur, co-founder of Una Terra, and author of The Disruption Fallacy and […]
IN PRACTICE | The Cases Shaping Marketing Now What five award-winning campaigns reveal about the future of marketing. At first glance, these examples seem unrelated. Different countries. Different categories. Different audiences. Different objectives. Yet together they reveal something important: Marketing is moving beyond the message. Across this year’s highest-scoring Internationalist Award winners, the most innovative […]
The Big Idea Is Only as Strong as the System That Delivers It. Global brands have never invested more in creating big ideas. Brand platforms are centralized. Creative systems are increasingly sophisticated. Campaigns are built to travel across markets, formats, platforms, and channels. Strategy is aligned. Guidelines are documented. Master assets are approved. And yet, […]
TRENDSETTERS | Martyn Etherington, CMO of BMC Software. There was something refreshingly grounded about speaking with Martyn Etherington recently. At a moment when much of the marketing conversation around AI feels dominated by acceleration, automation, and speculation, Martyn’s perspective was strikingly simple: the future may belong less to louder brands — and more to trusted […]
Some brands are still focused on visibility. Others are beginning to recognize that visibility alone is no longer enough. In an environment shaped by skepticism, overload, and constant exposure, marketing increasingly faces a different challenge: not simply getting attention, but demonstrating credibility, usefulness, transparency—or even self-awareness. This week’s examples from Shein, a Finnish bakery brand, […]
If transformation is now the default, the question is simple: now what? It’s easy to assume that marketing’s current challenges stem from complexity. More channels.More data.More expectations. But that may not be the real shift. The deeper change is structural. The conditions marketing operates within keep shifting. From Phase to Condition For years, transformation was […]
Most organizations don’t struggle with a lack of ideas.They struggle with the discipline to turn those ideas into decisions. AI has amplified that gap. What begins as exploration too often becomes a permanent state—an ongoing series of pilots, tests, and initiatives that never quite reach production. Investment continues. Progress is reported. But meaningful outcomes remain […]
