CMOs at Cannes 2025: Balancing creativity, data, and consumer connection

What does it take to be a
Chief Marketing Officer
in 2025? The 'CMOs in the Spotlight' series at
Cannes Lions 2025
provided some compelling answers. The popular session brought together top brand leaders, Claudine Cheever, VP, Global Brand and Marketing, Amazon, Gülen Bengi, lead chief marketing officer, Mars; and Gail Horwood, chief marketing and customer experience Officer, Novartis, moderated by Jim Stengel, host of The CMO Podcast with Jim Stengel, The Jim Stengel Company.
They dissected today's most challenging marketing issues and shared their vision for the future, highlighting the critical interplay of creativity, technology, and genuine connection.
Bengi, highlighted the company's transformation journey, focusing on a new approach to brand building. 'We are moving from messaging to two-way engagement,' said Bengi, emphasising co-creation with communities and building ongoing, personalised experiences. Mars has restructured its brand teams by integrating data analytics, digital capabilities, and human insight placing the consumer truly at the heart.
Horwood, shared her pride in the company's intentional focus on creativity despite regulatory hurdles. 'We focused on what we can do, not what we can't,' she explained, referencing their award-shortlisted campaign Your Attention, Please, which tackles breast cancer awareness. This initiative includes a unique partnership with the NFL—demonstrating how creativity can thrive even in highly regulated sectors.
Cheever, reflected on the company's global-local balance. 'We're making Prime a global brand while staying locally relevant,' she said. She cited a notable holiday campaign that harnessed AI to mine millions of customer reviews for comedic gems, brought to life by actor Adam Driver. Cheever credited the blend of creativity and technology as critical to the campaign's success.
Stengel encouraged the panel to consider Cannes not only as a celebration but as a space for reflection. The CMOs agreed on the value of flexibility, collaboration, and intentional pauses. As Bengi advised, 'See something unexpected. Be flexible.'
Cheever, with nine years at Amazon, highlighted the company's deeply ingrained corporate culture rooted in creativity, risk-taking, and experimentation. "If you know it's going to succeed, it's not an experiment," she stated, underscoring the importance of providing a "safe space" for teams to make mistakes. Cheever explained Amazon's concept of "two-way doors" versus "one-way doors," encouraging quick decisions for reversible actions. For her, fostering creativity within the culture means delegating decision-making, enabling speed, and getting out of the way. She proudly noted that she no longer reviews content for Amazon's vast out-of-home network , considering her involvement a "defect." Her ideal scenario is when a team confidently takes ownership, reducing the need for her oversight and building courage throughout the organisation.
Bengi expressed Mars' fortune in having curiosity as a core cultural tenet, where creativity is deeply cherished. While leveraging the legacy of iconic brands built by past generations, Bengi acknowledged that the world has changed, transforming "creative" from a title for a select few into a "verb for everyone" within their culture. She believes good ideas can emerge from anywhere and must be approached with a mindset of learning, iteration, and scaling. Mars achieves this through what they call "learning journeys," such as immersing teams in new technologies.
They've expanded their partner ecosystem beyond traditional collaborators to include tech giants like AWS and visionary entrepreneurs. Bengi champions an "iteration to scale" mindset, where there are no failures or successes, only continuous iterations aimed at solving the right consumer problems, a fundamental part of their brand-building culture.
Horwood emphatically stated that at Novartis, their company culture begins with purpose, drawing people to healthcare with the shared mission of "reimagining medicine together" to help others live better lives. She stressed, "the culture is us," highlighting that their culture isn't defined by one person but is a collective strength.
Novartis actively enables this by encouraging every associate to contribute to their shared vision for creativity, which is not optional but multifaceted. Participation can range from workshops and trips to agency shadowing. Horwood underlined the significance of allowing associates to reflect on what's important to them within this shared mission, reinforcing that while frameworks exist, the principle of "the culture is us" remains the most important aspect of their organisational ethos.

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