Conscious Advertising Network Calls for a Reset on AI, Social Media and the Addiction Economy at Cannes Lions
(Left to right) Jake Dubbins, Ian Russell, Charlotte Scaddan, Rupen Desai and Anna Zeiter speak during ‘A Sense of Impending Doomscrolling: Rebooting AI and Social Media’ on Day 1 of Cannes Lions 2026 in June in Cannes, France. Photo by Xavi Torrent / Getty Images for Cannes Lions
Roast Brief
At Cannes Lions last month, Conscious Advertising Network brought one of the industry’s most urgent conversations to the stage: whether advertising is funding an online ecosystem that captures attention, amplifies harm and risks repeating the same mistakes with artificial intelligence that it made with social media.
In the session “A Sense of Impending Doomscrolling: Rebooting AI and Social Media,” Jake Dubbins, Chair of Conscious Advertising Network, was joined by Ian Russell, Chair of the Molly Rose Foundation, Charlotte Scaddan, Senior Advisor on Information Integrity at the United Nations, Rupen Desai, CMO of Una Terra, and Anna Zeiter, CEO and Founder of W, for a direct challenge to marketers, agencies, media owners and technology platforms.
The message was clear: the advertising industry cannot treat platform safety, AI governance and information integrity as someone else’s problem. If advertising money powers the digital economy, then advertisers have both the responsibility and the leverage to reshape it.
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