CANNES – At a Beet.TV panel moderated by Tameka Kee, executives from VML, The Trade Desk, WPP Media and PayPal Ads argued that the future of commerce-driven advertising will depend on blending cultural insight with frictionless shopping experiences.
Tyler Murray, chief enterprise solutions officer at VML, said his agency defines creative commerce as work that “is driving conversion, but we hope it also is brand building at the same time.” He emphasized that consumer budgets extend beyond money to include time and frustration. “If they go over on either of those others, they actually stop shopping,” he said, adding that frictionless, culturally relevant experiences can boost both sales and loyalty.
For Jill Smith, vice president of retail business development at The Trade Desk, creative commerce is about elevating campaigns from “transactional to transformational.”
She said transformation happens when “you bring everyone together in a holistic way and rally around what is the goal we want to accomplish.” Smith added that data-driven personalization, when applied responsibly, can help marketers turn insights into “creative intelligence” that powers cultural moments rather than just targeting.
Aisha Khan, head of client engagement for global commerce at WPP Media, broke the concept into three elements: “cultural insight, contextual creativity and shoppable design.”
She said federated learning and privacy-first approaches are key to building consumer trust. “Instead of actually looking at the ID level, what we’re doing is…understand patterns in behavior and activate audiences against that model,” she said.
Mark Grether, senior vice president and general manager of PayPal Ads, spotlighted the company’s new “storefront ad,” which embeds a merchant’s shopping experience directly into an ad unit.
“Creatives become storefronts as opposed to just plain creatives,” he said. “That’s a huge benefit for both the publishers and the merchants… At the same time, it’s much more convenient for the consumer if they don’t need to go multiple hops” to make a purchase.
Grether also warned that as AI-powered platforms steer more commerce into walled gardens, merchants risk losing direct ties to customers. “It’s so important that with things like storefront ads, we enable the merchants…to continuously own the relationships to the consumers,” he said.
The panelists agreed that as measurement shifts beyond sales to include market share and cultural resonance, creative will play a bigger role in performance marketing. “The number one component…usually is the creative itself,” Murray said. “If creative matters, really the way you get creative resonance is through culture and relevance.”
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