Playing It Safe May be a Brand’s Riskiest Move: Amazon’s Lauren Anderson
CANNES, France — Advertisers searching for the next great use of artificial intelligence might want to put down the efficiency spreadsheet for a moment.
For Lauren Anderson, U.S. head of Amazon Ads Brand Innovation Lab, AI is not merely a tool for making ads faster or cheaper. It can help creative teams build customer experiences that previously were not possible, provided humans remain in charge of the creative decisions.
“We really think of it in terms of how do we use it to create things inside of our advertising experiences that haven’t been done before,” Anderson said in an interview with Beet.TV Editorial Director Lisa Granatstein at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
Amazon’s Brand Innovation Lab develops custom campaigns across properties including Prime Video, Amazon Music, Twitch and Fire TV. That gives the team a sizable creative canvas, along with enough consumer touchpoints to make the traditional marketing funnel look less like a funnel and more like the plumbing diagram for a luxury yacht.
AI is the paintbrush, not the painter
While much of the advertising industry pitches AI as a way to produce more assets before lunch, Anderson sees a broader opportunity. Her team is exploring how the technology can expand creative possibilities, improve brand experiences and deliver personalization that goes beyond inserting someone’s name into a message.
The goal is to complement the work of creative strategists, executive creative directors and producers, not send them to a quiet corner while the algorithm wins a Cannes Lion.
“It’s a paintbrush. It is not the painter,” Anderson said. Creative teams, she added, are “still in the driver’s seat of creativity.”
That distinction matters as marketers face pressure to automate production without draining campaigns of the judgment and imagination that make them memorable. AI can provide another instrument in the creative toolbox. It does not necessarily know what house should be painted or why anyone would want to live there.
Funnel should feel like one experience
The Brand Innovation Lab also approaches brand building and performance marketing as connected parts of a customer experience.
“This isn’t about separating upper funnel from lower funnel,” Anderson said. “It’s about how is the handoff seamless and smooth?”
Campaigns should make sense as customers move from discovery to consideration and potentially to a purchase. Treating each interaction as a separate assignment can produce a collection of ads that technically belong to the same campaign but behave like distant relatives seated together at a wedding.
“That experience has to cut across the funnel,” Anderson said. “It has to make sense from one point to the next.”
Amazon’s collection of entertainment, streaming and commerce properties gives the lab opportunities to connect those points. The creative challenge is to make the journey feel coherent rather than assembling a series of one-off placements and hoping consumers admire the media plan.
Creators come with communities
Anderson also urged brands to think beyond hiring creators as delivery systems for corporate talking points.
Working with creators “really is about going beyond a line in the media plan,” she said. The old formula of finding an influencer, handing over a message and saying “go forth” misses much of what makes creator marketing valuable.
Creators have built communities with their own tastes, expectations and conversational habits. Brands should identify which creator and audience would naturally engage with the campaign, then develop something tailored to that group.
“For us it’s really about creating community,” Anderson said.
That approach can involve co-creating a campaign with the creator and, in some cases, the community itself. A conventional sponsored message may still have a role. Anderson said Amazon does that work too. The larger opportunity comes from creating a genuine conversation instead of renting someone’s follower count for the afternoon.
Safety can disappear into the noise
Asked what advice she would give CMOs and creative leaders who want to push boundaries but feel pressure to play it safe, Anderson did not offer much comfort to the cautious.
“I think that’s too bad,” she said with a laugh. “If the pressure is to play it safe, I think the reality is that’s maybe the riskiest thing you can do right now.”
Media fragmentation has produced more noise, more clutter and more competition for attention. A campaign engineered to offend nobody may also interest nobody, which is an expensive way to achieve perfect brand safety.
“If you’re playing it safe, you are not gonna be heard in the middle of the noise, of the chaos, of the busyness,” Anderson said.
Innovation has therefore become less of a decorative ambition and more of a requirement for visibility. Brands have to take creative chances to stand out across a crowded media landscape.
“You have to be innovative to cut through,” Anderson said.
For marketers, that means AI, creators and Amazon’s many consumer platforms are not shortcuts around creative thinking. They are tools for making bigger ideas possible. The paintbrush may be getting smarter, but someone still has to decide what belongs on the canvas.
You’re watching Beet.TV coverage from Cannes Lions 2026. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
CANNES, France — Advertisers searching for the next great use of artificial intelligence might want to put down the efficiency spreadsheet for a moment.
For Lauren Anderson, U.S. head of Amazon Ads Brand Innovation Lab, AI is not merely a tool for making ads faster or cheaper. It can help creative teams build customer experiences that previously were not possible, provided humans remain in charge of the creative decisions.
“We really think of it in terms of how do we use it to create things inside of our advertising experiences that haven’t been done before,” Anderson said in an interview with Beet.TV Editorial Director Lisa Granatstein at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
Amazon’s Brand Innovation Lab develops custom campaigns across properties including Prime Video, Amazon Music, Twitch and Fire TV. That gives the team a sizable creative canvas, along with enough consumer touchpoints to make the traditional marketing funnel look less like a funnel and more like the plumbing diagram for a luxury yacht.
AI is the paintbrush, not the painter
While much of the advertising industry pitches AI as a way to produce more assets before lunch, Anderson sees a broader opportunity. Her team is exploring how the technology can expand creative possibilities, improve brand experiences and deliver personalization that goes beyond inserting someone’s name into a message.
The goal is to complement the work of creative strategists, executive creative directors and producers, not send them to a quiet corner while the algorithm wins a Cannes Lion.
“It’s a paintbrush. It is not the painter,” Anderson said. Creative teams, she added, are “still in the driver’s seat of creativity.”
That distinction matters as marketers face pressure to automate production without draining campaigns of the judgment and imagination that make them memorable. AI can provide another instrument in the creative toolbox. It does not necessarily know what house should be painted or why anyone would want to live there.
Funnel should feel like one experience
The Brand Innovation Lab also approaches brand building and performance marketing as connected parts of a customer experience.
“This isn’t about separating upper funnel from lower funnel,” Anderson said. “It’s about how is the handoff seamless and smooth?”
Campaigns should make sense as customers move from discovery to consideration and potentially to a purchase. Treating each interaction as a separate assignment can produce a collection of ads that technically belong to the same campaign but behave like distant relatives seated together at a wedding.
“That experience has to cut across the funnel,” Anderson said. “It has to make sense from one point to the next.”
Amazon’s collection of entertainment, streaming and commerce properties gives the lab opportunities to connect those points. The creative challenge is to make the journey feel coherent rather than assembling a series of one-off placements and hoping consumers admire the media plan.
Creators come with communities
Anderson also urged brands to think beyond hiring creators as delivery systems for corporate talking points.
Working with creators “really is about going beyond a line in the media plan,” she said. The old formula of finding an influencer, handing over a message and saying “go forth” misses much of what makes creator marketing valuable.
Creators have built communities with their own tastes, expectations and conversational habits. Brands should identify which creator and audience would naturally engage with the campaign, then develop something tailored to that group.
“For us it’s really about creating community,” Anderson said.
That approach can involve co-creating a campaign with the creator and, in some cases, the community itself. A conventional sponsored message may still have a role. Anderson said Amazon does that work too. The larger opportunity comes from creating a genuine conversation instead of renting someone’s follower count for the afternoon.
Safety can disappear into the noise
Asked what advice she would give CMOs and creative leaders who want to push boundaries but feel pressure to play it safe, Anderson did not offer much comfort to the cautious.
“I think that’s too bad,” she said with a laugh. “If the pressure is to play it safe, I think the reality is that’s maybe the riskiest thing you can do right now.”
Media fragmentation has produced more noise, more clutter and more competition for attention. A campaign engineered to offend nobody may also interest nobody, which is an expensive way to achieve perfect brand safety.
“If you’re playing it safe, you are not gonna be heard in the middle of the noise, of the chaos, of the busyness,” Anderson said.
Innovation has therefore become less of a decorative ambition and more of a requirement for visibility. Brands have to take creative chances to stand out across a crowded media landscape.
“You have to be innovative to cut through,” Anderson said.
For marketers, that means AI, creators and Amazon’s many consumer platforms are not shortcuts around creative thinking. They are tools for making bigger ideas possible. The paintbrush may be getting smarter, but someone still has to decide what belongs on the canvas.
You’re watching Beet.TV coverage from Cannes Lions 2026. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
Series Videos
