At Cannes this year, every room, beach, and hotel I walked into was circling the same idea (my Whoop counted a record number of steps). Not the ad tech du jour. Not the next shiny tool. Trust.

Scenes from Cannes Lions 2026: publisher and platform activations along the Croisette.

As AI reshapes how content gets made and consumed, trust is becoming the currency of media. That’s been our thesis at HyperContent™ from day one, and I heard it handed back to me by senior people at nearly every major publisher who wanted to keep the conversation going. Two weeks on, I’m more convinced, and we changed our roadmap because of it.

The best conversations weren’t at the big activations. They were in the houses the publishers run themselves, all working the same problem we are. Advertising figured out how to reach and target audiences decades ago. But the story it tells is always about the sale, never the full value of media, the trusted information, the entertainment, the community, the perspective. Nobody has applied that craft to premium editorial. The system is what’s broken, not the newsroom.

The festival’s own program directors kept arriving at the same place: AI is a powerful tool, but humans still create the value, and as it scales, human judgment matters more, not less.

And the weeks since have made the point for me. At Axios House, the “Future of the Open Internet” session laid out the problem plainly: reader behavior is shifting fast toward AI answers and away from clicking through to the source, and the open internet is what pays the price. Cloudflare is responding, and it’s playing a bigger game than a bot paywall. CEO Matthew Prince has been vocal about protecting the value of the open internet, and Cloudflare keeps building the tooling and infrastructure to shift the power dynamic so publishers finally have a path to make LLMs value and pay for their content.

Here’s the part that actually changed what we’re doing. We always built HyperContent to serve every audience, human readers and AI agents alike. The plan was to phase it, humans first, agents later. Cannes convinced me the sequencing could improve. If human judgment is the thing that appreciates as AI scales, you lead with it and build the agent readiness around it from the start, rather than bolting machines on later. For frontier customers, we now lead with the full audience range from the onset.

Marc Pritchard, P&G’s CBO, said it best at the official Lions wrap-up: the fundamentals of brand building haven’t changed, but brands now have to build memory in people’s minds and in algorithms at the same time. That’s a marquee CMO describing human and machine audiences as parallel, not sequenced. Exactly the lesson we took home.

To be clear, this isn’t about feeding the bots. Reaching humans authentically matters more now, not less. When an AI sits between your journalism and a person, only credible, well shaped, authentic content survives the hop. Whatever the audience, the source truth is fixed. Only the shape changes.

What we do: we take the stories a newsroom already publishes and turn them into feed, newsletter, and screen native experiences, editorial voice intact. Same story, different shape.

The most common ask at Cannes was just “send me more.” That material is now live. If you run product or digital strategy at a premium publisher or broadcaster, come see it on your own content.