How Web Summit Put Marketing Under The Microscope
Attendance Insight: Over 20,000 attendees from 100 countries attended Web Summit in Vancouver, highlighting its global reach.
AI Focus: Nearly all sessions covered AI in marketing, emphasizing its growing influence in the industry.
Storytelling Shift: Brands must adapt to platform changes, starting stories with action rather than traditional narratives.
Creative Data: Combining creativity and data crafting impactful marketing, increasing engagement beyond traditional methods.
Agentic AI: Agentic AI is revolutionizing the discovery market by enabling complex queries and genuine recommendations.
Over 20,000 attendees from 100 countries came to Vancouver's Convention Centre for Web Summit's second year in the city.
The Marketing Summit had back-to-back sessions, forcing your hand on which ones to pick. Not surprisingly, nearly all touched on AI, mainly at a surface level. Opening Night spoke at length on the impact of AI, and various leaders spoke on the plan for data sovereignty.
My goal was to look for where AI and marketing intersect, and to discover how people leveraged their lived experience and unique expertise to convey value. I was also privy to discovering why most brand marketing falls short, and then showed the receipts.
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Four sessions stood out to me. Each one advanced a specific argument.
Together, they form a coherent picture of where marketing is headed and what's getting in the way.
The Story Arc Has Flipped And Most Brands Haven't Noticed
Before Ahmed Iqbal became CMO of Cadillac F1, he spent nearly four years at Twitter and three at TikTok. He focused on helping automotive brands understand why their carefully produced commercials were dying on phone screens.
The problem was structural. Traditional advertising ran on a classic narrative architecture — scene-setting, a build, action sequences, a climax, then resolution.
Car commercials had been built on this logic for decades. It worked on television, where changing the channel required effort.
On algorithmic, short-form platforms, this architecture no longer holds up.
The traditional story arc starts with table setting, a narrative build, action sequences, a climax, then resolution. Algorithmic media changed everything. You start with the climax. The hook has to be immediate. Then you linger in the action.
— Ahmed Iqbal, CMO, Cadillac F1
What TikTok gave automotive brands beyond distribution became more valuable in time. Frame-by-frame data on the exact moment an audience stopped caring.
This feedback loop now shapes everything Cadillac F1 produces. The team shipped over 300 pieces of content for a single race weekend, each one functioning as a test as much as a communication.
But the content machine rests on something that predates any of that. When Iqbal arrived, people had already been working on the team for two years without FIA approval, investing time and money into something that might never be sanctioned. His first job wasn't a brief or a brand identity. It was a question: why does this team need to exist?
"You need to understand why you're here. Once you have the North Star — this is how the sport will be different because we came, this is what we'll leave fans feeling — the marketing gets a little easier." — Ahmed Iqbal, CMO, Cadillac F1
Format and conviction aren't separate problems. You can't hook someone in the first second and a half if you don't know what you stand for.
The Best Brand Stories Are the Ones You Stop Trying to Manage
Brooke Stites opened her session with a distinction that most marketing rooms would rather not sit with.
Storytelling has been around since the beginning of time. We've told stories around the fire to connect. It's how we share, how we incite emotion, how we shape our worldview. The problem is most brands think ads are stories, and they're just not.
— Brooke Stites, CEO, ModernArts
Stites co-founded ModernArts in 2024, an agency that pairs strategists with showrunners, screenwriters, and Hollywood-level production talent. Fast Company named it one of the most innovative companies of the year.
The thesis is simple. Except the brand is never a product placement. It's the reason the story exists.
Jill Kirkman, creative lead for Mattel's masterbrand and Mattel Creations, illustrated what that looks like at scale. Mattel is built on products that carry memory. Barbie, Hot Wheels, Uno, American Girl — close your eyes and picture any of them and you feel something before you think anything.
Kirkman alludes to how emotional residue is the real asset. The Barbie movie didn't manufacture it.
Taking a risk and letting go of control of your IP is new for an 81-year-old company. But you don't know what's going to come out of storytelling, and you don't want to. You want the story to take on a life of its own.
— Jill Kirkman, Mattel Masterbrand & Mattel Creations
For the first time in over eight decades, Mattel is letting its characters exist together — Barbie and He-Man in the Dreamhouse, a Hot Wheels car in the driveway. They're shooting it lo-fi, behind the scenes, no production value.
Audiences want to see makers being makers. Kirkman described a father who had never watched Drive to Survive in his life. His son shared a film about Kimi Antonelli. Now they watch every race together. The story traveled because nobody tried to steer it.
Stites pushed the same logic toward brands more broadly. Finding your audience means tapping into what people are already passionate about, then putting something true in the work.
"When you tap into people's personal passions, there's an element of authenticity in the output you can't manufacture. Strategy comes from human truth. As long as there's a nugget of that somewhere in your execution, you'll find your people — including the freakiest ones. You want all of those people."
— Brooke Stites, CEO, ModernArts
The session closed on a line that connected directly to what Iqbal had argued earlier in the day. Brands shouldn't try to create culture. They should find the stories that already exist, amplify them, and let people do the rest.
The Case for Creative Data
Jason Carmel runs Creative Data at WPP. His team's job, as he described it on stage, is to play with new technology that grown-ups aren't supposed to use yet. As he says “pick it up, bang it on the table, see if it's ready for a client.”
His session was a brisk, funny argument for why most organisations are still misusing the most powerful asset they have.
Fifteen years ago, big data was everywhere. Every company wanted it, and the slide decks all had blue backgrounds and swirling numbers.
Then, because everyone had it, it stopped meaning anything. Data became commoditised. Carmel's team had a choice about what to do next.
Every abundance creates a new scarcity. When data became abundant, I thought the new scarcity was creativity. Not creativity as an adjective — creative data. Creativity as a noun. Two types of people making something together.
— Jason Carmel, Global Lead of Creative Data, WPP
I particularly appreciated Carmel’s talk as he led with humor. Plus, he showcased everyday companies that have successfully made data so beautiful, people feel compelled to share it.
Most organizations treat data as operational. Where it saves time, cuts costs, and the finance team approves it.
Except creative data is something different. It supercharges storytelling and makes people share something 450 million times. Spotify Wrapped is technically a CRM message that came about as the brainchild of a data engineer.
Nobody forwards a CRM message, he says. Except, of course, when the data is yours, reflecting something specific and true about how you've spent your time, you want the whole world to see it.
Beyond this, he explains that creative and data teams need to work together. It is the secret sauce that makes marketing work.
The Kleenex case study made the same argument in a different register. Carmel's team pulled movie data and scored films by crying likelihood.
The higher the crying score, the cheaper the tissues. A data person found the dataset, however a creative person made the connection. Neither could have done it without the other.
He urges, that you a strong team cannot have creative data without creative people, because you just end up with data. It's in the name, and he illustrates how, "You have to find a way to make friends, and you have to do that purposefully, because your organisations are too rigid right now to allow it to happen naturally."
One wild example was food delivery app in the Middle East called HungerStation. The problem for their team was decision fatigue. Thirty thousand restaurant options and users giving up before ordering. So, the team built a model that tracked where eyes lingered on food images, counted how long they stared, and predicted what someone actually wanted to eat. Creepy? Sure. But conversion went up. New customer acquisition followed, unexpectedly. The data told the story. Of course, it was the creative team who asked the right question first.
The organizing principle Carmel left the room with was framed as a grammar correction. Most people use 'creative' as an adjective. Carmel longs for,
creative data to be treated as a noun, with two equal disciplines in the same room, building off each other, because that combination generates more ideas than either group produces alone.
Agentic AI Is Rewiring the Discovery Layer
There was a lot of talk about agents at a surface level. And then, Michael Komasinski, CEO of Criteo, opened his talk by grading his own homework. At Web Summit Lisbon in November, he'd made a set of predictions about how agentic commerce would unfold. He ran through them publicly before adding new ones. It was a useful framing because it made the pace of change concrete.
The core argument: agentic AI is growing the total addressable market for discovery, not simply redistributing existing search traffic. Traditional search required a user to know what they were looking for and type it in cleanly. Agents handle complex, multi-variable queries, hold a dialogue, and deliver genuine recommendations. The funnel widens at the top and people arrive at the bottom faster.
In our early data serving ads on OpenAI, AI-referred traffic converts at 1.5 times the rate of traditional search. The funnel is wider, and people arrive with higher intent.
— Michael Komasinski, CEO, Criteo
He walked through three phases of the discovery market over 20 years, starting with traditional search, then the rise of retail media and social search, and now general AI assistants entering the channel alongside purpose-built retail shopping assistants. Walmart, Albertsons, and Lowe's are running these now. Lowe's reported 2x conversion improvement. Morgan Stanley forecasts agentic commerce contributing $50 to $115 billion to US e-commerce.
Not all categories are moving at the same pace. Consumer electronics, CPG, and lifestyle and wellbeing brands are already net beneficiaries, performing better in AI platforms than they did in traditional search. Travel and fashion are still finding their footing, largely because those categories require subjective judgement and SKU breadth that current models haven't fully resolved. But the more pointed argument Komasinski made wasn't about categories.
Paid advertising will matter more in a world of infinite AI content. Human attention is fixed. As the unit cost of content production drops to zero, volume goes infinite. The attention gap gets thicker. The platforms that own the discovery layer will be the gatekeepers of growth.
— Michael Komasinski, CEO, Criteo
Digitally native businesses already spend four times more on paid advertising than their legacy predecessors. That gap is widening. Conviction and story, the arguments from the first two sessions, need a discovery infrastructure to reach anyone. That infrastructure is being rebuilt in real time, and the brands paying attention now will be the ones with structural advantage later.
The Value From Being In The Room
In a time when more information than we can ever consume is widely available on the internet, why bother attending a conference? Many of the feature sessions are all available on YouTube, save for the niche talk tracks.
While you’ll always have mixed reviews from a conference of this size, one thing rings true. In-person events are effectively, and for good reason, AI-proof.
Nothing can replace the spark that happens when two people from completely different industries have a shared experience.
That's the product of a conference at this level. Context is everything, and it’s not essential to do it all. But a conference like Web Summit exists to serve many.
You might find yourself sitting next to someone who runs marketing at a company two years ahead of yours. Or you have an off-chance to connect with a food influencer who demonstrates the value of kindness with technical acumen. Then, there’s the host who happens to know the exact time of people you’re trying to connect with just by nature of his community-centric mindset.
Showing up, in person, and online has the capacity to change your life. Deciding to listen to that pull you feel when a topic piques your interest can only serve the multitudes you operate within as a person.
The moment where two ideas from different sessions collide in a hallway conversation and become a third thing you couldn't have generated alone.
None of this will show up in a transcript or video on Youtube. In fact, most of it won't show up here either. But it's what makes a conference worth attending are the people in the room that leave you with a slightly different perspective that can serve you well in the long run.
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