On June 23rd, Stelia joined Monks at Les Monks Café during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, where Paul Heathcote, Stelia VP of Applied AI, took part in a panel on Marketing as a Live System: Orchestrating the Agentic Supply Chain.
The session brought together Paul with Chris Wilhelmi (Monks), Tom Smith (GWI), Matt Groshong (NVIDIA), and Meg Moss (Canva) to discuss what it actually takes to run marketing as a living system – one that can plan, create, scale, and deliver at the speed of culture in an AI-first world.
Together they explored how brands are bringing together consumer signals, creative infrastructure, and precision engineering – the three pillars the group returned to as the foundation of the modern marketing supply chain.
The session followed closely on from the announcement of our collaboration with Monks on a first-of-its-kind solution which enables less money to be wasted on trial-and-error ad testing, and more return for every dollar spent. It has been built to address a shifting advertising landscape in which manual audience targeting is being largely replaced by machine learning retrieval systems. This formed part of the Monks.Flow 2.0 announcement.
On the panel, Paul spoke to how fine-tuned prediction models trained on brand-specific performance and historic campaign data are being used to pre-validate an ad creative’s projected algorithmic delivery before media spend is committed. Every campaign outcome then feeds back into the models, creating a continuous learning flywheel that sharpens future predictions and drives stronger return on ad spend.
As Paul put it on stage: “The best time to start is now. Build a system that can be the flywheel that improves your data.”
It was a great discussion on what’s genuinely changing in how brands build and run their marketing supply chains, and a great continuation of the conversation we started with the Monks.Flow 2.0 launch.
Watch the full talk here:
Read more about Stelia’s collaboration with Monks here.
