The Premature Boredom

It was 11pm on Tuesday last week, and I was standing on the Croisette with my head tilted back like a child, watching fourteen hundred drones assemble themselves into a toucan older than I am.

Toucan Sam. Born in 1963. Hanging in the night sky above the most expensive square mile in advertising, rendered in the most advanced display technology money can currently buy. Beside him, over the course of the show: the Pillsbury Doughboy, the M&M's, and the Kool-Aid Man bursting through a brick wall.

Here is what struck me, standing there with a slowly warming beer I'd stopped drinking. There was no Claude in that sky. No Perplexity. No OpenAI, no Google, no Meta. In the year when every beach and every billboard at Cannes screamed artificial intelligence the technology company holding the controller chose to fill the heavens with a cereal mascot and a man made of red drink.

The company is called Kargo. I still cannot tell you with much confidence what Kargo does. Something in ad tech (Their website says: "Kargo engineers technology to create powerful moments of connection between brands and consumers to build businesses"… ouch) But I can name every character they put in the sky. Which is, of course, the entire point. When I argued in The Keys to the Kingdom that the real story of Disney's OpenAI deal wasn't the billion dollars but the century of characters (Mickey Mouse has been printing money since 1928) this is the same lesson, written in light over the Mediterranean. The machine borrowed its magic from assets it could never have made.

The day before, I'd been in a packed room watching the same argument, made in words.

The session was called "Five Marketing Truths We Can Actually Agree On," and it put Byron Sharp and Mark Ritson on one stage. Two men who have built careers on their convictions, often disagreeing with each other, sitting down to find common ground. The room was rammed. There was real heat in it, though not quite like the heatwave outside.

They agreed on more than anyone expected. But the moment that mattered was about distinctive brand assets. Ritson, who has spent years teaching "brand codes," publicly retired the term in favour of Sharp's language. He said, on stage, that he would "immolate the concept of brand codes." A decade of the industry calling the same thing five different names, ended in one session. A genuine ceasefire on jargon.

And then came the line I haven't been able to put down. Both men agreed that marketers are the chief saboteurs of their own best assets, because we get bored of them long before the consumer has even noticed them. You stare at your logo, your colours, your characters all day. The customer sees seven hundred brands in two seconds and notices you twice a year, half-distracted, talking to the dog. Ritson's instruction was to "push through the vomit." The moment you are sick of your own brand is roughly the moment the public starts to recognise it. Sharp's distilled version, which Ritson called one of his best: a brand that looks like itself.

One caution before anyone over-reads this. The power of the toucan is not that he means something profound. Sharp spent part of Monday dismantling exactly that comfort, noting how "shockingly low" measured differentiation tends to be and how little it moves behaviour. The asset works because it is distinctive and instantly recognised, not because it carries some deep narrative payload. Recognition, not meaning. Hold that thought.

Think about the conditions of a drone show. Three hundred feet up, at night, for maybe eight minutes, in front of a crowd that is half-watching with a drink in hand and a phone in the other.

That is not a flattering test. It is, almost exactly, Ritson's distracted consumer with her seven hundred brands and her two spare seconds. And under those conditions, only one kind of asset survives: the one already burned into memory over decades. The toucan needed no caption. The doughboy needed no caption. Nobody turned to a colleague and asked who that was.

Here's the tell. When the same drones tried to be clever by spelling out "ART & INTELLIGENCE," the wordplay on AI, the new idea needed the old characters around it to land at all. The novelty borrowed credibility from the heritage. "Push through the vomit," made literal in the air. Every brand in that sky was a brand someone, somewhere, had surely begged to modernise. And there they all were, recognised in an instant, precisely because nobody had been allowed to kill them.

The drones are bits choreographing atoms with software conducting fourteen hundred physical objects through the dark. But notice what the bits were asked to render. Not the future. Not a single thing that didn't already exist in 1975. Given an infinite blank sky and the most generative tools in history, an AI-powered company reached for 1963.

That is not a failure of imagination. It is the most honest signal at the entire festival. Because AI has driven the cost of making something new to roughly zero, and when novelty is free, novelty is worthless. The scarce, appreciating asset becomes the distinctive thing that took sixty years to build and cannot be conjured from a prompt box. You can generate ten thousand new toucans tonight. Not one of them is Toucan Sam. The asset was never the bird. It was the sixty years.

This is the dividend I described in The Fandom Dividend, paid out in a different currency: recognition that compounds, quietly, every year you resist the urge to reinvent it. Kargo understands this in its bones, even if it would never say so on a panel. The company selling the future advertised itself with the past, because even the future's salespeople know which assets survive contact with a distracted human being.

I notice all of this more sharply now, because for the first time in my career I am the custodian of an asset of exactly this vintage.

Captain Birdseye has been sailing for Birds Eye since 1967, just a little younger than the toucan. And I've heard from people expressing the temptation is to retire him for something sleeker, something that looks like it belongs in 2026 rather than on a fish-finger box your grandmother recognised. Now I can remember the sky over Cannes. I remember Ritson's vomit. And I keep the captain.

The asset most tempting to kill is usually the one most worth protecting. That is the whole discipline, and it is much harder than it sounds, because the person most bored of your distinctive assets will always be you.

The most advanced technology at the world's most advanced marketing festival borrowed its wonder from a toucan, a doughboy, the M&M's, and a man made of red drink. The drones were rented. The sky was borrowed. The assets were owned outright and built, kept, and protected across sixty years by someone who refused to be bored.

That was the lesson, written in light over the Mediterranean for anyone who cared to look up.

Most people were looking at their phones.

Brandflow is published twice-weekly for senior marketing leaders navigating transformation. Written from the intersection of physical brand-building and a whole lot of agency-side scar-tissue, as the CMO of Nomad Foods who spent seven years on the Publicis Groupe Management Committee.

First published 1 July 2026 in the Brandflow newsletter on LinkedIn.