Sir Martin Sorrell took the Debussy Theatre stage at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 2025 with a clear message: AI will impact marketing so deeply, it’s too important to outsource.
In this panel, hosted by S4 Capital and joined by Linda Sheng (MiniMax) and Tanzeen Syed (General Atlantic), the discussion revolved around rethinking how brands approach creativity, production, and media in the age of AI.
The star of the session? Monks.Flow
Built over the last 18 months by .Monks this is more than a tool. It’s an end-to-end AI Marketing Orchestration Platform. A complete infrastructure to help brands control, execute, and scale their marketing, from insights and strategy to production and optimisation.
Here’s what it actually does:
- Pulls insights from brand data and market signals
- Automates content creation, versioning, and distribution
- Lets brands manage production and media workflows in one place
- Keeps ownership of customer interaction and outcomes fully inside the brand
It’s now being offered as SaaS, but with human support optional. Brands can plug in Monks’ teams where needed, or run it in-house. As Victor Knaap, Co-Founder at .monks, said: “We built it for the future, but it’s live today.”
This isn’t about replacing agencies. It’s about replacing fragmentation.
Sir Martin didn’t mince words. Traditional brand-agency models will collapse under the weight of complexity and inefficiency unless they adapt.
His key point:
- Attribution is inadequate
- Optimisation is complex
- Data is irrelevant
- Scale is daunting
AI, when integrated correctly, fixes all four.
But this isn’t just about cost cutting. As Linda Sheng noted, AI’s true advantage is speed and responsiveness. Campaigns can evolve in real time. Creative can be localised at scale. Feedback loops become instant.
So what’s the catch? Ownership.
If brands don’t own their data, tech stack, and creative flow, they’re handing power to middlemen. That’s the model Monks.Flow challenges directly.
The session closed with an open invitation: book a demo, try the platform, and see how your brand could run faster, cleaner, and smarter. In-house. At scale. Without losing the human touch.
The future isn’t AI vs creativity. It’s AI and creativity. But only if the brand owns the system.
