Marketing Vanguard continues live from Cannes Lions as Jenny Rooney hosts a special ADWEEK House conversation with Mainardo de Nardis, global president and COO of Edelman, and Rani Al Hajji, chief growth and transformation officer of personal care at Unilever.
This conversation cuts straight to one of marketing’s biggest modern problems: Everyone has infinite opportunities, infinite channels, and infinite reasons to do more. But the best marketers are not winning by doing more. They are winning by making sharper bets and doing less for more.
What you’ll learn:
- Why visibility is not the same thing as attention
- How brands can move from attention to real engagement
- Why saying no is now one of the hardest and most important marketing skills
- How clear KPIs make distractions easier to spot
- Why cultural relevance starts with knowing what each brand actually stands for
- How Unilever is building around FIFA without buying its way into the moment
- Why paid should amplify earned relevance, not replace it
This episode is part of a special vidcast series that was recorded live during Cannes Lions 2026 and presented in partnership with Edelman.
About our guests:
Mainardo de Nardis is the global president and COO of Edelman, with deep experience across full-service marketing, PR, digital, media, startups, adtech, martech, and global agency leadership. His perspective centers on how brands earn relevance and trust in a world where attention cannot simply be bought.
Rani Al Hajji is chief growth and transformation officer of personal care at Unilever. With more than 25 years in marketing and consumer goods, including roles at L’Oréal, Colgate and Unilever across Europe, the U.S. and China, Rani focuses on redefining how brands create connection moments that matter. In this conversation, he brings that lens to Unilever’s personal care portfolio, cultural relevance and the FIFA World Cup.
Episode Highlights:
[04:21] Visibility Is Not Attention — Rani explains that the way people discover products has changed completely. It is no longer just TV or the store shelf. Discovery now happens through Instagram, communities, friends, creators and cultural conversations. That shift makes visibility a weaker goal on its own. You can be seen and still be swiped away in half a second. The sharper job is turning visibility into attention, attention into engagement and engagement into something that makes the brand matter.
[08:06] Saying No Is the New Marketing Muscle — Mainardo argues that one of the biggest changes in marketing is the shift from learning how to say yes to learning what to say no to. In the past, opportunities were limited, so the hard part was moving fast enough to take them. Now there are too many opportunities, and the danger is distraction. The advantage belongs to marketers who can choose the few big bets that matter and cut everything else before it eats time, money and focus.
