Technology & Humanity
Global Marketing Fails Operationally Before It Fails Publicly
Kevin Freedman on AI, brand drift—and the growing risk of “international marketing debt.” Great global marketing tends to be celebrated for the things we can see: the idea, the creative, the media, the results. Kevin Freedman thinks we should pay considerably more attention to what happens underneath. “Creative often gets the credit for campaigns and […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The Hidden Cost of Global Marketing
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, […]
Trusted Enough to Become the Answer
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 […]
When AI Becomes a Cost, Not a Capability
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 […]
When Great Ideas Don’t Survive Scale
The most dangerous moment for a great marketing idea is not when it is created. It is when it is scaled. A global idea is approved. The strategy is clear. The creative platform is strong. The brand team is aligned. Then the idea enters execution. It is adapted, resized, translated, rebuilt, localized, versioned, reviewed, approved, […]