Cannes, France — June 2026. At Cannes Lions, senior marketing leaders from Mastercard, KFC India, Westpac Banking Corporation and The Coca-Cola Company came together for a sharp conversation on the evolving role of the CMO in an era defined by pressure for growth, sharper accountability, AI disruption and the constant need to keep brands culturally relevant.
Moderated by Jamie Heller, Editor-in-Chief of Business Insider, the session “CMOs in the Spotlight: KFC, Mastercard, The Coca-Cola Company, Westpac Banking Corporation” featured Jill Kramer, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Mastercard; Suhayl Limbada, CMO of KFC India; Michelle Klein, Chief Growth, Brand and Marketing Officer at Westpac Banking Corporation; and Manuel “Manolo” Arroyo, Chief Marketing & Customer Commercial Officer at The Coca-Cola Company.
Across different categories and markets, the panel converged on one central idea: modern marketing must defend creativity not as decoration, but as a commercial engine for growth. The CMO’s role is no longer limited to campaigns, awareness or brand storytelling. It now requires fluency in P&L, cultural intelligence, consumer behavior, data, partnerships, product truth and organizational leadership.
Kramer opened the conversation by reflecting on her arrival at Mastercard after a decade at Accenture and the challenge of stepping into one of the most iconic platforms in modern advertising: Priceless. Rather than treating the platform as untouchable, Kramer said her first instinct was to interrogate it. With the platform approaching its 30th anniversary, her mission has been to understand what Priceless was originally built to do, how it has evolved across different chapters and what it now needs to become.
For Mastercard, the lesson is that heritage is not a reason to stand still. A strong platform must be respected, but it must also be questioned. Kramer described the importance of balancing the history of a much-loved brand asset with the discipline to ask whether it can still stretch into the future. That balance between preservation and evolution became one of the defining themes of the session.
Limbada brought a different kind of energy to the panel, arguing that marketers should think less about return on investment and more about return on bravery. Reflecting on his previous work at KFC Thailand, including the Cannes-winning “Let There Be Cake” campaign, he explained that great creative work often requires marketers to protect the idea before the organization fully understands it.
The campaign came from a social trend where everything was being turned into cake. KFC Thailand was celebrating its 40th birthday, but instead of asking consumers to care about a brand anniversary, the team found a more lateral way in. The idea became a “cake apocalypse” where everything turns into cake except KFC’s chicken, which remains the hero.
The campaign’s success, Limbada argued, came from giving the idea the time and craft it needed. He changed the marketing calendar to create three additional months for production and refinement. His point to the industry was direct: do not brief work four weeks before launch and expect world-class creativity. If the idea matters, create the space for it.
Klein then spoke about leading brand transformation at Westpac, Australia’s first company and oldest bank. In a highly commoditized banking market, her challenge was to make a 200-year-old institution relevant for future generations. The solution came from an asset hiding in plain sight: Westpac’s logo, a double “W.”
That became the foundation for a new brand expression around the idea that it takes a “little double U” — a little “you” — to help people move from doing to done and reach their financial goals. The campaign used real twins from across Australia and New Zealand, supported by a song that has extended the idea beyond traditional financial services advertising.
For Klein, the work showed that banking does not need to rely on literal product scenes or category clichés to be effective. Financial services brands can use metaphor, music and emotional storytelling to drive consideration and business performance, as long as the work is anchored in clear commercial objectives.
Klein also offered one of the session’s strongest operational lessons: every brief should begin with the question, “How will we know we have been successful?” Rather than treating measurement as a post-campaign exercise, she argued that effectiveness should be built into the brief from the start. That discipline, informed by her time at Meta, has helped her marketing organization become more commercially credible.
Arroyo brought the Coca-Cola perspective, framing the company’s marketing challenge with absolute clarity: growth is the only challenge that matters. For a brand with nearly 140 years of history, the task is not simply to preserve nostalgia or awareness, but to keep the brand promise relevant in a changing world.
He defined a brand as a promise delivered through experiences that create long-lasting memory structures, trigger behavior change and generate economic value. For Coca-Cola, the role of marketing is to stay true to that promise while showing up differently as generations, cultures and consumer behaviors evolve.
Arroyo challenged the industry’s separation between performance marketing and equity-building marketing, arguing that the distinction does not make sense. In his view, perception follows behavior, and behavior leads to growth. A person may like Coca-Cola enough to wear a T-shirt but never drink the product. The more meaningful metric is whether marketing changes behavior and drives consumption.
This belief has shaped Coca-Cola’s marketing transformation over the past five years, including a major shift in metrics and media investment. Arroyo noted that the company has moved from being heavily traditional-TV-driven to a model where more than 70% of its mix is now digital and social. The change reflects a broader transformation in how the company engages with consumers and how marketing earns its seat at the leadership table.
The panel also explored the global-local tension that every major brand faces. Kramer noted that many of the smartest ideas emerge from local proximity to real consumer problems. Her challenge at Mastercard is to help those ideas thrive without being diluted as they scale. Local teams often protect ideas because they fear that once shared globally, they will be broken down or generalized.
Limbada supported that argument through KFC’s local-market thinking. In Thailand, the team listened to mothers complaining on social media that KFC did not provide enough sauce sachets, which led to a playful two-liter sauce sachet for Mother’s Day. Only 5,000 units were made, but the idea helped deliver Thailand’s biggest sales day in the history of KFC Thailand.
The insight was not about targeting Gen Z as if it were a different species. Limbada argued that marketers should begin with universal human truths and then express them locally. His guidance was memorable: do not localize the work; localize the meaning of the work.
At KFC India, that philosophy now translates into deep listening. Limbada said some of the best briefs come from the social media feed, because consumer complaints, jokes and everyday behaviors often reveal the most relevant problems a brand can solve. For KFC, the mission is relevance: everyone knows the brand, but marketing must make people think of KFC when they are hungry.
The conversation then turned to the CMO’s role inside the boardroom. Limbada described the CMO as the voice of the consumer, while Klein pushed marketers to become more fluent in the language of business. Her advice to marketing teams was straightforward: learn to read the P&L, understand how the business works and explain marketing in terms the CFO and board can respect.
That commercial fluency is critical in moments of budget pressure. Klein noted that advertising and promotion are often among the easiest lines to cut because they are perceived as flexible. If CMOs cannot defend the link between investment and business outcomes, they will lose the argument.
The panel also addressed experiential marketing and partnerships. Kramer explained that Mastercard’s investment in sponsorships and experiences became a major chapter of the Priceless platform because it allowed the brand to create meaningful benefits for cardholders, partners and communities around the world. The goal is not sponsorship for its own sake, but access to audiences, passions and experiences that make the brand’s promise tangible.
Arroyo made a similar argument about the growing importance of influencing and experience. He pointed to live events, concerts, football stadiums and food festivals as environments where consumers choose to participate rather than experience a brand as an interruption. These moments can create stronger engagement because they are rooted in voluntary human behavior.
AI and the agentic future emerged as a major theme toward the end of the session. Klein said one of her biggest takeaways from Cannes was the idea that every consumer may effectively become their own procurement department. If AI agents can understand products more deeply than ever before, then brands must ensure that everything promised in communications is delivered in the product itself.
That reframes AI readiness for marketers. It is not only about writing content for generative search or preparing for new discovery systems. It is about being much closer to product truth, because AI systems will increasingly evaluate whether the brand promise and product reality align.
Arroyo addressed the fear that brands could lose relevance in an agentic shopping world, where AI agents prioritize price, utility and value over emotional memory. He argued that the fundamentals of marketing and branding will not disappear. Instead, marketers will need to connect both with consumers and with agents, while continuing to build relevance inside and outside the digital world.
His position was that the agentic future is one component of brand building, not the whole picture. Humans still live across digital, physical, retail, experiential and cultural environments. The brands that win will build relevance across all of them.
The panel closed with a reflection on creative excellence. Arroyo shared that Coca-Cola analyzed 140,000 creative assets to study the top and bottom performers. The result challenged simplistic global-versus-local thinking: both the top 10% and the bottom 10% contained global and local ideas. The real differentiator was not origin, but creative excellence, effectiveness and relevance.
That became the strongest final takeaway from the session. Whether a brand is nearly 30 years into Priceless, 200 years into banking, 140 years into Coca-Cola or reintroducing the Colonel to new generations, the challenge is the same: protect the core, listen closely, take creative risks and prove that marketing drives growth.
At Cannes Lions, the CMOs from Mastercard, KFC, Westpac and Coca-Cola made a compelling case for a more commercially fluent and creatively courageous marketing function. The future of the CMO belongs to leaders who can speak the language of culture and the language of the boardroom with equal confidence — and who understand that the best ideas are not only memorable, but measurable.
