Cannes Lions 2026 was full of noise about AI, attention and creativity. But one conversation kept surfacing beneath all of it: brands still can't properly connect what happens on a screen to what happens in the real world.
That's the gap our new series, Closing the Gap, is built to explore. Presented in partnership with Adsquare, the show sees host Luc Benyon, Adsquare's marketing director, driving around Cannes in a taxi, picking up guests from across the location intelligence, digital out-of-home and sports marketing worlds for a series of insightful and unfiltered conversations.
In the hero film, Luc is joined by three guests: Tom Laband, CEO and co-founder of Adsquare; Laure Malergue, CEO and co-founder of Displayce; and Ronan Healy, CEO and founder of This is Catapult.
Between them, they unpack why brands are shifting spend and measurement away from purely online outcomes, why physical experience still does something digital can't replicate, and what it actually takes to prove a campaign worked once someone steps outside their front door.
Watch The Subthread's short film below as we explore the online-to-offline story:
There's a case study on how a major sportswear brand rebuilt its retail stores around community rather than product. There's a stat on just how much of global commerce still happens entirely offline, and why that number should worry anyone optimising only for clicks. And there's a running argument about whether the "outcomes era" everyone keeps name-checking is real, or just the industry's latest reframe of the same old measurement problem.
This is a partner feature with Adsquare - the real-world data platform designed for the outcomes era.
