Bold Ideas from Cannes Lions 2025: The De-Shittification of Advertising

By Sonia Carreno, President, IAB Canada

De-Shittification: Rebuilding Brands in an Age of Fragmentation and Forgotten Experience

One of my favourite themes emerging from today’s discussions on day one of Cannes Lions 2025 was the deep dive into a relatively new industry buzzword – and, arguably, a necessary rallying cry: de-shittification.

It drew laughs when said on stage, but the sentiment behind it couldn’t be more serious. Our industry is facing a reckoning. We’ve optimized for everything – reach, efficiency, performance – but somehow made the customer experience worse. Satisfaction is down. Loyalty is crumbling. And it only takes one bad moment for 1 in 3 people to abandon a brand they once loved. An era where AI can execute flawlessly but feel nothing, the differentiator is no longer efficiency – it’s humanity. And the future will belong to those bold enough to design with, not around, neurodivergent minds.

But as the day’s talks unfolded, it became clear: poor CX isn’t the root problem. It’s a symptom of a larger collapse – one that spans strategy, structure, and execution. The real issue? We’ve disconnected the brand from the experience. And we’ve done it at scale.

The most explicit articulation of this came from Yael Cesarkas (SVP, Executive Strategy Director, R/GA) and Brent Mitchell (VP, Marketing, Social and Influencer, Sephora), who warned that most marketers still control less than 25% of the customer journey. The result? A fragmented experience that feels nothing like the brand we think we’re building.

Mitchell spoke to how Sephora has resisted this by embedding its brand into every touchpoint – from loyalty programs that drive 95% of purchases to social content that reflects real, in-store energy. It’s not just “better CX.” It’s coherent brand-building. And while the industry’s scores drop, Sephora’s are climbing – because they treat experience as a creative asset, not a cost centre.

That message was perfectly reinforced in a separate – but spiritually aligned – session from Contagious and WARC, where Sunil Bajaj and Paul Stringer framed the issue from the top down. Brands today aren’t just poorly executed – they’re structurally fragmented. Campaigns are stretched thin across formats and platforms without a consistent, elevated idea to anchor them. Worse still, content production is accelerating, while meaning is evaporating.

Their antidote? Stop building campaigns. Start building communications platforms. These are not taglines or moments – they’re structured systems that can be atomized intelligently across the ecosystem. They travel. They adapt. They stay intact.

Together, these talks made something click: we don’t just need to de-shittify CX. We need to de-shittify the entire marketing operating system.

We need to:

Treat every touchpoint as brand-building – not just the big, shiny ones.
Elevate ideas to platform-level thinking – so they can stretch without snapping.
Reconnect teams, tools, and touchpoints so that the brand experience actually lives where customers experience it.

It’s not about adding more tech, more formats, or more assets. It’s about restoring coherence – to the work, to the systems behind it, and to the reason we do it in the first place.

De-shittification, then, is more than a punchline. It’s a mandate. To move from fragmentation to integration. From reactive marketing to intentional experience. And from brand dissonance to brand truth.

Because in a world of infinite impressions, what people feel – and remember – will be the only thing that matters.