Cannes, France — June 2026. At Cannes Lions, R/GA delivered one of the clearest arguments yet for how agencies, brands and marketers should rethink creativity in the age of artificial intelligence: the industry must move from simply making outputs to making systems that can generate value continuously.
In the session “Making Things That Make Things: A Playbook for the Intelligence Age,” Tiffany Rolfe, Chair and Global Chief Creative Officer at R/GA, and Nick Pringle, Global Head of Story at R/GA, presented a practical and optimistic framework for creative businesses navigating the rapid acceleration of AI. Their central message was direct: the value of creativity has never been in the asset itself, but in the intelligence, taste, judgment and strategic choices that shape what gets made.
Rolfe opened the talk by addressing the anxiety surrounding AI in the creative industry. As campaigns, assets and content become cheaper, faster and easier to produce, agencies risk being judged by the wrong measure: volume. For R/GA, that is the trap. The future of creative value will not be defined by how many things a brand can produce, but by the quality of the systems, inputs and brand intelligence behind them.
The session challenged the industry’s long-standing economic model around hours, headcount and deliverables. Rolfe argued that marketing has too often priced itself around outputs, even though creativity has never operated in a linear relationship between effort and impact. AI only makes that tension more visible. If execution becomes more abundant, then strategy, originality and differentiation become more valuable, not less.
A key point from the talk was the distinction between efficiency and effectiveness. R/GA acknowledged that AI can deliver efficiency at an unprecedented scale, but warned that efficiency is not the highest form of creativity. As Rolfe framed it, outputs are only the expression of where real value lives: insight, strategy, taste, point of view, design intelligence and differentiated brand behavior.
This is where R/GA introduced the core idea of the session: “making things that make things.” In the intelligence age, creativity will no longer be judged only by a finished campaign, platform or piece of content. It will also be judged by what it enables next: the systems it creates, the decisions it encodes and the value it compounds over time.
R/GA defines this new model as Intelligent Brand Systems: AI-powered systems that codify brand DNA and unify communications, product, marketing and customer experience. In this vision, brand is no longer a static guideline, abstract positioning statement or PDF rulebook. Brand becomes a living system capable of learning, adapting and expressing itself across contexts.
Pringle then translated the philosophy into a three-part playbook: define, encode and deploy. The first step, define, is about making brands both machine-readable and machine-writable. That means going beyond traditional brand strategy, design systems and tone of voice, and giving AI systems the deeper context they need to behave in ways that are distinctive, useful and on brand.
R/GA described this as building Brand DNA: the source code for intelligent brand systems. That DNA includes character, behavioral guardrails, knowledge, memory, intelligence and context. In simple terms, it answers a critical question for the AI era: how should this brand behave when it has to respond, create, adapt or converse in real time?
The second step, encode, shifts brand governance from rules to tools. Instead of static brand guidelines that teams may ignore or struggle to apply, R/GA proposes custom agents and tools trained on brand DNA. These can include visual agents, design agents, story agents and verbal agents that help brands operate with consistency while still allowing flexibility.
Pringle emphasized that this does not remove humans from the process. On the contrary, human judgment becomes even more important. People are still responsible for directing, training, framing and deciding how these tools should behave. The creative role evolves from manufacturer of assets to architect of intelligent systems.
To show what this looks like in practice, R/GA shared several examples. One was AI Bob, an interactive expression of R/GA’s own brand, created with permission from Bob Greenberg. Rather than asking employees or new starters to only read a brand book, R/GA imagined a more human interface: a conversational brand experience that can explain the company’s principles, history and work.
Another example was Abandoned Nights for Toda Delivery, a drinks delivery brand owned by AB InBev in South America. Built from the brand’s refreshed identity and expanded brand DNA, the project turned the classic e-commerce challenge of abandoned carts into a personalized story engine. Instead of sending generic reminders, the system imagined the epic, ridiculous night a customer could have had if they had completed checkout.
This example captured one of the talk’s strongest marketing insights: AI should not be used merely to generate more assets. It should create more relevant brand experiences. By combining personalization, modular storytelling and brand behavior, R/GA turned a conversion problem into a scalable, culturally expressive CRM idea.
The third step, deploy, focused on how intelligent systems can create experiences that were not possible even a year ago. R/GA highlighted G42.ai, developed with G42, as an example of a generative interface that challenges the conventional idea of a website. Instead of forcing users through fixed navigation, search bars and dropdown menus, the experience adapts through conversation and generates a personalized journey in real time.
For Pringle, the important point was that the website itself is not the product. The intelligence behind it is the product. The system learns from interaction, improves over time and changes the way users experience digital brand environments. In this model, digital experience is no longer fixed; it is generative, adaptive and increasingly individualized.
R/GA also presented The Second Team Machine, a project with Fox One and Google designed around World Cup fandom. The idea responds to a simple but powerful sports-marketing problem: when a fan’s team gets knocked out, how can a broadcaster keep them emotionally engaged for the rest of the tournament?
The answer was an AI-powered fandom engine that helps users find a “second team” and become knowledgeable fans quickly. The system uses agents for news, lore, memes, statistics and cultural context, helping fans understand a team’s history, rivalries, players and live match dynamics. It acts as part analyst, part cultural translator and part companion.
This example showed how intelligent brand systems can move beyond campaign thinking. A traditional campaign may expire once culture moves on. But a living system can continue to learn, respond and evolve alongside audiences. That is the shift R/GA wants the industry to embrace: from temporary campaigns to adaptive brand infrastructure.
Rolfe closed the session by reframing the economic value of creativity. The most valuable work, she argued, is no longer just the thing a brand launches. It is the thing that continues to work after the team leaves the room. Intelligent systems can become brand IP, generating value over time and transforming creative work from a marketing expense into a long-term investment.
The session ultimately offered a strong counterpoint to the fear that AI will commoditize the creative industry. For R/GA, the opportunity is the opposite: AI can help the industry revalue creativity by making human inputs more visible, more important and more commercially powerful.
In the intelligence age, the brands that win will not simply produce more content faster. They will build systems with sharper strategy, stronger taste, clearer values and smarter behavior. As R/GA’s Cannes Lions session made clear, the next frontier of marketing is not just making things. It is making things that make things.
