Here's a story I heard last week that I cannot get out of my head.

A brand paid 480,000 euros to two creators. The deal was simple. Show up to our activation, go through it, post about it. Two people. Almost half a million euros.

One of them never showed up. Something better came along that day.

The other one showed up, sort of. She posted a single Instagram story. Not a post. A story, the kind that vanishes in twenty-four hours. And in that one disappearing story, she tagged eight different brands she had run into on her travels that day. She never actually walked through the activation she was paid to experience. Didn't feel like it. Ran out of time.

Almost half a million euros. One story that no longer exists. Eight competitors tagged inside it. Zero data the brand will ever own.

I am not telling you this to dunk on two creators. They did exactly what the incentive structure rewarded them to do. I'm telling you this because it is the entire industry in miniature, and almost nobody is willing to say it out loud.

This is happening at the exact moment you would least want it to.

Marketing is always the first line a CFO reaches for when the numbers get tight, and right now every dollar is being interrogated. Procurement is in every conversation. Boards want to know what the spend actually returned, not what it reached.

And the reflexive move across most of the industry is to throw money at creators as if a couple of sponsored posts are going to save the business.

Let me be precise about what I am criticizing, because some brands do this brilliantly. The ones who treat creators as a measurable, owned, long-term channel, with real attribution and real relationships, are building something. Good for them. They are the minority.

The majority are renting an audience for a week. You get a spike you can't attribute. You tell yourself you are being culturally relevant and supporting artists. You are not supporting artists. You are buying product placement and calling it patronage. When the post disappears, the impact disappears with it, and you own none of the data it generated.

It is the modern way to burn money and feel productive doing it.

A year ago at Cannes I said the festival had become a retirement party for old-school agencies, and that the executive exits were just getting started. I caught a lot of rosé-soaked side-eye for it. Then the year actually happened.

Mark Read left WPP. Omnicom and IPG stopped existing as two separate companies. DDB, FCB, and MullenLowe, the agencies that built modern advertising, got erased from the org chart. Thousands of people lost their jobs, with thousands more queued up through 2028.

Here is the math nobody on the Croisette wants to do out loud.

Omnicom ran the single biggest merger in the history of advertising to swallow IPG. The combined company is worth around $21B. Publicis, which merged with nobody, is worth roughly the same. The biggest deal in the industry produced a company worth about what the rival that didn't do a deal anywhere near that much was already worth.

WPP, the company that defined the entire holding-company era, fell from twenty-four billion pounds to under three, and got thrown out of the FTSE 100. S4 Capital, the firm Martin Sorrell built specifically to reinvent all of this, is now a penny stock.

And the number that explains everything: global ad spend grew almost 9% last year. Holding company revenue shrank. Sit with that for a second. The market these companies serve grew nearly nine percent, and the companies serving it got smaller. That is not a bad year. That is a broken model.

The creator gold rush and the holdco collapse look like different stories. They are the same one.

It is all renting relevance you will never own.

The holding companies are trying to bolt AI and data onto a profit-and-loss statement that still runs on billable hours, and it does not work, because that model makes its money from inefficiency and AI exists to destroy inefficiency. The brands chasing creators are renting reach they cannot measure and do not keep. Everybody is reaching for the same real thing, and almost everybody is missing it.

The real thing is this: owned relationships, owned data, and provable outcomes. Not reach. Not vibes. Not a Lion on a shelf. Proof.

Here is where I land, and it is the opposite of bearish.

I am not down on this industry. I am down on the old shape of it. I think the next five years belong to a business model that does not exist yet.

Picture one company that fuses five things into a single organism. AI as the engine. Technology as the platform that runs everything at scale. Consumer data the brand actually owns. Services, the human strategy and relationship layer. And creative, now accelerated by AI rather than priced by the hour.

The old model pulled those five apart on purpose. A creative agency here. A media agency there. A data vendor somewhere else. A SaaS tool for measurement. A consultancy for strategy. Five invoices, five logins, five relationships, and the brand left holding none of the connective tissue. That fragmentation was the business model. It was how you billed five times for one outcome.

AI collapses the cost of execution toward zero. The second that happens, value stops living in who makes the asset and moves entirely to who owns the relationship, owns the data, and can prove the result.

So imagine the loop instead of the org chart. Real experiences and real services generate first-party data. That data makes the AI smarter and the creative sharper. The technology runs the whole thing at scale. The creative drives participation, which generates more data, which feeds the loop again. Each piece makes every other piece better. One company. Native. Not an agency with a data partner taped to the side. Not a software tool with a creative team bolted on.

Nobody has built this yet, and the reasons why are revealing. The holding companies structurally cannot, because they unbundled on purpose and their entire P&L depends on the hours. The software platforms do not have the creative and services DNA. The consultancies are the closest, and they are still too light on data and creative. There is a wide-open space in the middle of all of it.

This is what I think about every single day. At AnyRoad, we’re already sitting on the experiences and the first-party data for hundreds of the biggest consumer brands in the world. We have a strong point of view on the rest of it.

I am not going to lay out the whole roadmap here. Not yet. But the shape is there, and we are building toward it.

Keep your eyes on this space over the next year. The retirement party is over. The interesting part, building the thing that replaces it, is just getting started.

Love from Cannes,

Jonathan