Delivered Isn’t Received: What Three Marketing Leaders Said at Cannes About the Metrics That Actually Matter

A month out from Cannes, most of the “here’s what we learned” recaps have already come and gone. But one panel is aging better than the rest — because it wasn’t about creative trends or the next platform to chase. It was three marketing leaders from Kraft Heinz, McDonald’s, and L’Oréal — describing, in plain terms, the same problem we spend every day trying to solve: the gap between what marketing does and what marketing can prove.

None of them used the word “incrementality.” They didn’t need to.

The gap between delivered and received

Kraft Heinz CMO Todd Kaplan put it as cleanly as we’ve heard it said on a panel stage:

Just because your message was delivered doesn’t mean it was received [by] the consumer.

That’s the whole measurement problem in one sentence. Delivery is what ad platforms report. Receipt — attention, impact, actual behavior change — is what the business needs to know. Most reporting still treats those as the same thing, because delivery is easy to measure and receipt is not. That gap doesn’t close on its own; it closes with the right measurement infrastructure.

Performance marketing’s built-in illusion

Kaplan went further than most CMOs are willing to go on stage, and took a direct swing at the metric most performance marketers still lean on as their proof point:

Performance marketing is amazing, but [it] gives that illusion that you’re going to get the response right away.

His argument: real brand and business effect compounds over time. It doesn’t show up neatly in a last-click dashboard the next morning, which means the channels that look best in real-time reporting aren’t necessarily the ones doing the most work. That’s not a knock on performance marketing — it’s a knock on using speed-to-report as a proxy for effectiveness. That’s also, functionally, exactly the argument for incrementality measurement, coming from one of CPG’s most senior marketers rather than a vendor with a deck. Closing that gap — what’s delivered versus what’s actually received — is the entire idea behind Outcome Intelligence.

Even the brand voice has the same short-term/long-term problem

McDonald’s Paloma Azulay, VP, Global Brand Marketing, wasn’t talking about media measurement when she said this — she was talking about brand consistency. But the shape of the problem is identical:

You have to be true to what’s timeless about the brand and stay consistent about what people love — the promise — while still pushing the brand to be timely in culture.

Swap “timeless” for long-term and “timely” for short-term, and it’s the same tension Kaplan just described from the media side: the fast signal and the durable signal are both real, and neither one alone tells the whole story. Azulay never mentioned incrementality. She didn’t need to — she was describing the brand-side version of the same math.

Even L’Oréal is building this by hand

L’Oréal’s Chief Digital & Marketing Officer, Asmita Dubey, didn’t just agree in principle — she described the system her team built to get around the problem: BET IQ (Beauty Engagement Touchpoints IQ), a proprietary tool that runs short-term market mix modeling but refuses to let it stand alone. In her words, the tool “doesn’t perform without the long term” — every short-term read gets a mandatory long-term multiplier applied before anyone trusts it.

L’Oréal puts more than 30% of net sales into advertising and promotion. That’s not a brand being cautious with measurement. That’s a brand spending enough money that they had to build their own hybrid short/long-term system in-house, because nothing off the shelf answered both questions at once.

That’s the tell. If one of the most sophisticated marketing organizations in the world is hand-building a workaround for short-term vs. long-term measurement, it’s not a niche problem — it’s the problem. It’s the one we built InMarket’s outcome intelligence approach to solve, without asking a brand to construct their own version of BET IQ from scratch.

Why this still matters three weeks later

Cannes conversations are usually gone by the time the yachts leave the harbor. This one isn’t, because it wasn’t really about Cannes — it was three of the most senior marketers in CPG, QSR, and beauty independently describing the same measurement gap, unprompted, on a panel that had nothing to do with measurement. When the people who don’t sell measurement solutions start describing the problem measurement solutions exist to solve, that’s worth paying attention to. Three marketing leaders building three separate versions of the same bridge is a market signal, not a coincidence. 

InMarket’s Outcome Intelligence closes the delivered-vs-received gap and the short-term-vs-long-term gap in one system — so brands get the answer L’Oréal spent years building in-house, without the build. InMarket helps brands turn real buyer signals into measurable business results through activation, measurement, and audiences. The leaders of the Outcome Era don’t rely on assumptions—they have the data to prove what’s working. Let’s talk: InMarket.com/Contact.

Quotes drawn from the Cannes 2026 CMOs in the Spotlight panel featuring Todd Kaplan (Kraft Heinz), Paloma Azulay (McDonald’s), and Asmita Dubey (L’Oréal).