Cannes Lions 2025: Brand agents and Showroom ads with Brava Fabrics and Mercedes-Benz USA

At Cannes Lions 2025, creativity and innovation take center stage as the industry imagines what’s next.

Microsoft shares this passion for groundbreaking ideas—and we believe the future of digital engagement is conversational, personalized, and agentic. AI should amplify human creativity, not replace it, and products like Microsoft Copilot help everyone from creatives to advertisers to global brands build richer, more meaningful connections with their audiences.

As the advertising industry embraces a new era of audience engagement, our aspiration is to deliver innovations that help marketers create, connect, and convert with greater ease and impact. We’re not just imagining the future of advertising—we’re building it. 

At our flagship event in March, Microsoft Advertising Accelerate, we announced a wave of new product innovations natively designed for this new era of engagement. These were not incremental updates; they were bold steps toward redefining traditional advertising experiences, where adaptive tools make every person-to-brand interaction feel perfectly crafted and a welcomed part of the digital experience.

This week at Cannes, we’ll be sharing our progress on the groundbreaking AI ad formats and capabilities we announced at Accelerate, and we’re excited to share the latest with you in this blog post.

Getting conversational with Brand agents and Showroom ads

Two new experiences are reshaping conversational engagement: Brand agents and Showroom ads.

A Brand agent is an AI-powered digital assistant that acts as a personalized, empathetic extension of your brand’s voice, interacting with customers to help them identify relevant products, useful add-ons, and otherwise experience your brand in a rich and immersive way. This is an important stepping stone to an agentic future, where everyone and every brand have agents to help them save time, improve results, and create better experiences.

We’re delighted to announce our first Brand agent to go live: Brava Fabrics. It’s trained on the brand’s product catalogue, brand guidelines, and tone of voice to truly represent the brand to the consumer. Brand agents like Brava’s personalize the shopping experience for users, making it easier and more enjoyable for them to uncover exactly what they want, leading to a better experience with the brand and guiding them through the path to purchase. They also uncover friction points and track engagement patterns throughout the conversation that reveal richer, invaluable insights for brand owners.

For brands, Showroom ads represent an opportunity to join the conversations users are having about their brand with their best foot forward, complementing Copilot organic answers with rich, branded content that can showcase product details in a delightful way. We’re continuing to co-develop the ad format with Mercedes-Benz USA and other clients in our pilot through the summer. At Cannes, we’ll be meeting with advertisers on the possibilities with Showroom ads as we get ready to expand to even more brands and industries.

Making a difference with real results

Generative AI is also for marketer workflows. Copilot in Microsoft Advertising Platform is making a meaningful impact on marketers’ daily lives—marketers like Simona Leseanu, Head of Marketing D2C at Samsung Electronics Germany.

Partnering with their media agency Starcom, Samsung used Copilot in Microsoft Advertising Platform to reduce campaign analysis and reporting time by 30% to 40%, enabling faster optimization and a shorter learning phase. The results were impressive: Samsung's ROAS more than doubled during Black Friday 2024 and their 2025 campaigns were the most efficient yet, with conversion rates staying consistently strong.

They also embraced AI-driven campaigns to expand channels and kickstart sales. By using Performance Max alongside traditional search campaigns, they maximized the potential for their ads to appear in Microsoft Copilot experiences—integrating the brand into conversational chat flows for a unique and engaging consumer journey.

Overall, Samsung's strategic use of AI tools and expert collaboration allowed them to reach new audiences, drive more conversions, and achieve ongoing campaign success. As we look ahead, one thing is clear: the future of audience engagement is not only more intelligent—it’s more human. AI should amplify creativity, not replace it. That’s why we’re building tools that help marketers connect more meaningfully with audiences, through experiences that are personal, conversational, and grounded in trust.

Together, let’s shape the next evolution of audience engagement

We look forward to continuing this journey and sharing even more success stories. Join us at Cannes Lions to see these innovations in action—and be part of the next chapter in audience engagement. 

To learn more about brand agents or Showroom ads, please reach out to your account manager. Want to dive deeper? See these innovations live at Cannes Lions from June 16 to 20 by signing up for sessions at the Microsoft Advertising Beach House.

In the meantime, you can download our generative AI guide.

And, if you’re new to Microsoft Advertising, take advantage of a free consultation with our team of experts to help you set up an account or get started today.