Between Thoughts -Intellectual Musings

What Google’s Global CMO Said at Cannes Lions 2026 about Toolsets,Skillsets and Mindset.

Lorraine Twohill at Cannes Lions 2026 was inspiring. She was useful and insightful.

As Global CMO of Google, she spoke about how the company identifies and bets on future-ready marketing talent in the age of AI. Most of the marketers listening had grown up on instinct, relationships, and creative flair. She said that when Google thinks about who the future-ready builders and makers in their marketing teams are, they use three buckets: Toolsets. Skillsets. Mindsets.

Simple. Almost too simple. But the simplicity is the trap.

Because when you hold that framework up to the mirror of your own practice,  your own team, your own career, your own daily behaviour,  most of us will find ourselves underweight in at least one bucket. Some of us are critically underweight in all three.

“We will build the tools and processes, but without the skillsets and mindsets none of us is going to get there.”Lorraine Twohill, Global CMO of Google, Cannes Lions 2026

Bucket One: Toolsets

The Infrastructure You Inhabit

The first bucket is about the environment in which marketing work gets done. Twohill made clear that Google will build the platforms, the AI ecosystems, the predictive analytics dashboards, the generative workspaces, the integrated data suites. That part is not optional. It is the table stakes of operating at scale in 2026.

But here is where she made a quiet but important distinction: the organisation builds the tools. The individual must master them. Inhabiting a tool and commanding it are different things entirely.

We are all sitting inside platforms we have not yet learned to drive. We use ten percent of what they can do. We skim the surface of functionality that could fundamentally change the speed and quality of our output. We attend the onboarding session, update the status, and then return to the way we have always worked.

Twohill’s challenge is not “do you have access to AI tools?” Almost everyone does now. The real question is: are you using them daily? Are you letting them reshape how you segment audiences, generate variants, track performance, and distribute content? Or are you using them as a novelty that makes a good story at town halls?

The honest question to ask yourself:

When last did an AI tool meaningfully change the outcome of a campaign decision,  not just speed it up, but change it? If you cannot answer that question with a specific example from the last thirty days, you have a Bucket One problem.

Bucket Two: Skillsets

The Capability to Direct What the Tools Can Do.

The second bucket is where many senior marketers are most exposed and most reluctant to admit it. Skillsets in this framework are not about understanding AI in the abstract. They are about the practical, high-value capabilities required to direct the tools effectively. Three skillsets in particular: prompt engineering, data synthesis, and ethical governance.

Prompt engineering first. There is a persistent myth in marketing circles that because AI tools respond to natural language, anyone who can write a brief can prompt effectively. This is not true. The gap between a mediocre prompt and a precise, context-rich one is the gap between AI that saves you fifteen minutes and AI that generates work you would actually put your name on. Prompt engineering is a craft. It requires iteration, specificity, and the discipline to give the model enough context to be useful rather than generic.

Data synthesis second. Most marketers can read a dashboard. Very few can translate algorithmic performance attribution into a strategic insight that changes a business decision. The click-through rate tells you what happened. The synthesis tells you why it happened, what it means, and what you should do next. That gap is where marketing value lives in 2026. If you are still outsourcing the interpretation to a data analyst and waiting for the “so what,” you are not directing the tool. You are dependent on it.

Ethical governance third. As AI-generated synthetic media becomes standard in campaign production, the marketer who does not understand brand safety guardrails, copyright liability, and algorithmic bias risks is a liability to their organisation. This is not an IT responsibility. It sits squarely on the desk of whoever approves the work.

“Having the technology is useless without the advanced training needed to extract its actual business value.“

Bucket Three: Mindsets

The Psychological Architecture of Everything Else

Twohill was explicit about which bucket matters most. It is not the tools. It is not even the skills. It is the mindset. Because tools and skills fail if the person holding them resists change. This is the hardest conversation in any marketing organisation right now. Not because people do not understand change intellectually,  they do. It is hard because a decade of brand intuition, earned expertise, and professional identity is sitting in direct tension with a technology that appears to devalue it.

The marketer who built their reputation on flawless execution, meticulous planning, and creative control is now being asked to run experiments quickly, celebrate failure as data, and treat their hard-won experience as a complement to AI rather than a replacement for it. That is not a skills gap. That is a psychological adjustment of significant magnitude.

Twohill’s framing is instructive here. The mindset she is calling for has three qualities: radical agility, which means the willingness to pivot strategies as technologies evolve week by week, not quarter by quarter; continuous learning as a permanent daily operational habit, not a once-a-year conference experience; and calculated experimentation, which means running bold, data-backed tests without fearing fast, iterative failure.

That last one is worth sitting with. Most large marketing organisations are structurally hostile to fast failure. The approval chains are long, the brand safety reviews are extensive, and the performance review cycles reward certainty over experimentation. If you want a team with Bucket Three mindsets, you have to create conditions in which those mindsets are rewarded rather than punished.

A note for marketing leaders:

You cannot ask your team to embrace agility inside a system that punishes speed and celebrates caution. Mindset change without structural change is just a motivational poster.

Bucket Four: The Heartset

The How That Lorraine Didn’t Name. Because it’s foundational and should be obvious..

Twohill’s three-bucket framework is rigorous and necessary. But there is a fourth bucket that did not make it onto the Cannes Lions stage,  partly because it is harder to quantify, and partly because in rooms full of high achievers, it tends to be assumed.

It should not be assumed. And the organisations that treat it as assumed are the ones producing brilliant jerks at scale.

The Heartset is the How.

When I worked at Unilever, Vodacom, Google, and Canva, I was formally measured on two dimensions in every performance cycle: What I delivered and How I delivered it. The What was the commercial output,  targets hit, campaigns landed, teams led, growth driven. The How was the human execution,  how I treated the people around me, whether I created psychological safety, whether I had the courage to speak useful, uncomfortable truths upward and downward, whether I lifted the people I worked with or merely stepped over them on the way up.

“You do not get extra points for not being an asshole. Basic human decency is the floor, not the ceiling.”

That is the point that does not get said clearly enough in leadership frameworks. Decency is not a bonus category. It is not a soft skill that rounds out an otherwise impressive profile. It is the minimum barrier to entry. And if you violate it, your five-point performance score does not stay at five with an asterisk. It collapses. You can exceed every target, deliver every number, and still be formally rated below expectations,  because you broke people on the way to the result.

The Heartset has several components, and all of them are learnable. None of them are optional.

Radical Candor

This is the intersection of challenging directly and caring personally. It is forthrightness without cruelty. Accountability without humiliation. The ability to give feedback that is specific enough to be useful and delivered with enough respect that the recipient can actually hear it. Kim Scott’s framing remains the clearest: ruinous empathy,  where you are kind but silent,  causes as much damage as obnoxious aggression. Radical candor is the narrow, demanding path between them.

Deep Self-Awareness

Know thyself is not a philosophical nicety. It is a professional prerequisite. The leader who does not understand their own blind spots, emotional triggers, and patterns of behaviour under pressure cannot lead other people well. They react when they should respond. They protect themselves when they should protect the team. Self-awareness is the precondition for everything else in the Heartset.

Courageous Ownership

This is the willingness to speak truth upward and useful truth downward. To name what is not working without waiting for someone with more authority to name it first. To deliver uncomfortable, actionable feedback to a team member when it would be easier to stay quiet. To push back on a strategy you believe is wrong, even when the room is already decided. Courageous ownership is what eradicates corporate politics and creates the kind of high-trust environments where genuine merit has room to surface.

Together, these three components of the Heartset produce the performance profile that the best organisations actually promote, not the person who delivers results at any human cost, but the person who delivers results while making the organisation stronger in the process.

The Performance Reality: What the Ratings Actually Say

Scenario- What (Results) & How (Heartset)

The Star Leader. Exceeds Expectations 5/5.. Promoted

The Cultural Anchor. Meets Expectations  3/5.  Coach/Upskill. Development Needed.

The Brilliant Jerk. Does not meet expectations

< 2/5. PIP, Step Up / Exit

The ratings  above are  not abstract. These outcomes played out in real performance cycles at the organisations I worked in. The Brilliant Jerk scenario,  exceptional What, failed How,  was not protected by the results. The results bought some time. They did not buy permanent safety. Eventually, the cost of keeping that person in the organisation outweighed the revenue they generated, and they exited. Sometimes with a PIP. Sometimes with a quiet package. Always with a pattern of damage that took years to repair.

The Cultural Anchor scenario is the one most organisations misread. A person with genuine alignment to the Heartset, who treats people with respect, gives honest feedback, creates safety, and leads with integrity, is not a problem to be managed. They are a person to be invested in. Upskilling that individual’s What is far easier than trying to rehabilitate someone whose How is broken.

“It is not enough to be great at What. You also need to be great at How. High performance scales results by lifting the organisation up, not by tearing individuals down.“

The Case Study in the Room

When All Four Buckets Are Empty at Once

Let me make this concrete, because the framework only becomes useful when you apply it to a real situation.

Consider a Senior Marketing Manager with a decade of experience who is consistently missing performance targets. The campaigns are competent but slow. The data insights are surface-level. The team is frustrated. The manager is defensive.

The instinctive response in most organisations is to question the strategy. Is the brief clear? Is the budget sufficient? Is the agency delivering?

But run the four-bucket diagnostic and the picture becomes clearer.

Bucket One: The manager is still running campaign reporting on manual spreadsheets and legacy dashboards. They have access to the company’s enterprise AI marketing stack but use it intermittently and reluctantly. The toolset is available. The toolset is not being used.

Bucket Two: The manager is an excellent traditional copywriter with strong brand instincts. But they cannot write an effective prompt to save a campaign. They look at algorithmic performance data and see numbers rather than insights. The skillset has not kept pace with the environment.

Bucket Three: The manager views AI as a threat to the expertise they have spent ten years building. They are not resisting the tools consciously. They are resisting the implication that those tools carry: that the craft they mastered may no longer be sufficient on its own.

Bucket Four: And here is the dimension that often goes unexamined. The frustration has curdled into behaviour. The manager dismisses team members who are more fluent with AI tools. They give feedback that is indirect at best, demoralising at worst. They are not creating psychological safety,  they are consuming it. The Heartset is depleted, and the team knows it, even if no one has named it formally.

The fix is sequential and it is not quick. Move the manager into the AI marketing stack with structured mandates for daily usage. Invest in targeted practical training. Reframe their decade of brand intuition as the irreplaceable ingredient that the AI cannot replicate. And then,  most importantly, have the honest conversation about the How. Because a technically upskilled manager who still breaks people is not the goal. A leader who delivers results and builds the organisation while doing it is.

What This Means for African Marketers

I want to bring this closer to home, because the Cannes Lions context can make frameworks like this feel like they belong to someone else’s reality.

African marketing is operating in a genuinely complex environment. We are navigating infrastructure constraints, multilingual audiences, economic volatility, and cultural nuance that no AI model trained primarily on Western data fully understands. The tools are not always built for us. The data does not always reflect us. The platforms make assumptions our markets do not validate.

This could be a reason to disengage from Twohill’s framework. It could equally be a reason to engage with it more urgently.

Because the marketers who will shape the AI tools that serve African audiences are not going to be the ones who waited to see how the technology evolved. They are going to be the ones who got inside it early, understood its limitations through direct experience, built the prompt libraries and data frameworks that made it work for their context, and developed the mindsets to iterate rapidly when the first approach failed.

And the leaders who will build the high-trust, high-performance marketing teams that African businesses need are not going to be the ones with the most impressive What. They are going to be the ones whose Heartset is as developed as their skillset. Whose teams stay, grow, and deliver, because the environment makes that possible.

The four buckets are not a Western framework applied to Africa. They are a universal diagnostic applied to a specific, high-stakes context. And in that context, the urgency is even greater.

The African marketing question:

If we do not build the AI fluency to shape how these tools serve our markets, someone who does not understand our markets will build it for us. And if we do not build the Heartset to lead the people who will do that work, the results will be technically impressive and humanly empty.

The Mirror

What Twohill offered at Cannes Lions 2026 was not a framework for evaluating other people. It was a mirror.

Hold your toolset up to it.

Are you inside the platforms that your organisation has invested in, using them in ways that materially change your output? Or are you adjacent to them, aware but not fluent?

Hold your skillset up to it.

Can you prompt precisely?

Can you synthesise algorithmic data into strategic recommendations?

Do you understand the ethical risks of the content you are approving?

Hold your mindset up to it.

Are you genuinely agile, or are you using the language of agility while maintaining the practices of certainty?

Are you experimenting and learning from failure, or are you managing perception and protecting your track record?

And now hold your heartset up to it. Are you the kind of leader that people grow under?

Do you give feedback with forthrightness and care, or do you choose the comfortable silence?

Do you speak truth upward when it is inconvenient?

Do you treat the people below you on the organogram with the same respect you extend to those above?

Most of us will flinch at one of those questions. That flinch is information.

The most expensive mistake a marketer can make right now is to assume that talent and experience will be sufficient without all four buckets being filled. They will not. The table has changed. The players who will be invited back are the ones who understood that early enough to do something about it.

“We will build the tools and processes. But without the skillsets, mindsets, and the heartset to lead with integrity, none of us is going to get there.”

A framework Lorraine started, and one we all need to finish.

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Dr. Mzamo Masito
Between Thoughts-Intellectual Musings

Where the uncomfortable questions get a seat at the table..