Interconnected Threads: Looking Beyond the Headlines from Cannes
Signals Every year, Cannes Lions produces a long list of trends. AI. Creators. Retail media. Commerce. Cultural relevance. Trust. Measurement. Brand experience. Purpose. This year was no different. But looking across the conversations, jury discussions and industry announcements, something more interesting began to emerge. The biggest story wasn’t any one trend. It was the growing […]
The Future of Marketing Depends on Better Questions, Not Just Faster Answers
AI & Humanity | Before becoming a technology entrepreneur by founding quantilope, Dr. Peter Aschmoneit spent more than a decade making the same kinds of decisions that today’s CMOs face. His experience as a brand marketer at Unilever, Danone and Fuchs—and his doctorate in marketing—led him to a simple conclusion: the future of AI depends […]
Jared Belsky: Trust, Collaboration—and Why Marketing’s Best Days May Still Be Ahead
When Jared Belsky decided to return media rebates to Acadia’s clients, he knew people would notice. The decision challenged one of the marketing industry’s least-discussed practices. Instead of keeping rebates earned through media buying as agency profit, Acadia redistributed them to nearly 50 clients based on their share of spending. “It wasn’t my money in […]
When America’s 250th Birthday Party Goes Global
How the FIFA World Cup is helping America—and the world—rediscover one another. More than 13 million visitors are expected to travel across North America during the 2026 FIFA World Cup, with international supporters accounting for roughly 40% of stadium attendance. Many will stay for two weeks or longer, visit multiple cities, and spend more than […]
The Missing Layer in Modern Marketing
Why Creative Infrastructure May Become Creative’s Next Competitive Advantage An Internationalist Conversation with Alexander Augustesen CEO & Co-Founder, Zuuvi Over the past several weeks, The Internationalist has explored an increasingly important question facing global brands. How do great ideas survive scale? We examined why global campaigns often lose coherence as they move across markets, agencies, […]
What the AI for Better Marketing Winners Reveal About Marketing’s Future…
… From Audience Segmentation to Human Understanding… For decades, marketers have relied on demographics to understand consumers. Age. Income. Geography. Household composition. These categories helped brands identify audiences, but they rarely explained what people were actually experiencing. The winners of The Internationalist’s 2026 AI for Better Marketing Awards suggest that a new model is beginning […]
The 2026 Internationalists of the Year
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 […]
Most Marketers Value Creative Excellence. Few Deliver It Consistently.
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 […]
TRENDSETTERS | Michael Fanuele on the Crisis of Inspiration
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 […]
The Grumpy Innovator: Why Good Ideas Don’t Always Win
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 […]