Hegarty on Targeting: 'We've Traded Resonance for Relevance'

Sir John Hegarty does not attend Cannes to congratulate the industry. He attends, as he has for four decades, to challenge it. His 2026 address at the main stage was consistent with that tradition, and it landed harder than many expected. "We've traded resonance for relevance," he said. "And we think that's progress." The argument was surgical. Hegarty granted the efficiency case for precision targeting—the ability to reach exactly the right person with exactly the right message at exactly the right moment is, in isolation, a genuine advance. But he argued that this efficiency has come at a catastrophic cost to the cultural power of advertising. "Advertising used to interrupt culture," he said. "Now it hides inside it. We've become so afraid of being irrelevant that we've forgotten how to be memorable." The data he cited was from a long-running effectiveness study tracking recall and emotional response across two decades of British advertising. The finding: aided recall of advertising has declined by 34% since 2015, despite—or perhaps because of—the explosion in targeted placements. People are seeing more advertising that is technically addressed to them and remembering less of it. Hegarty's explanation is that resonance—the quality that makes advertising stick in memory—requires a kind of creative risk that precision targeting actively discourages. When you know exactly who you're talking to, you optimize for their known preferences. You confirm rather than challenge. You reflect rather than provoke. "The best advertising I ever made," he said, "was not relevant to everyone. It was resonant with everyone. That's a completely different thing." The distinction is not merely semantic. Relevant advertising speaks to a specific person's specific situation. Resonant advertising touches something universal—grief, ambition, humor, desire—that transcends targeting criteria. Hegarty's argument is that the industry, in its rush to relevance, has lost the craft of universality. Several jury members in attendance nodded audibly. Several brand marketers in the same room looked uncomfortable. That tension—between the efficiency imperative that now governs most marketing budgets and the creative ambition that the industry still celebrates at Cannes—is not new. But Hegarty named it more precisely than most.