In Historic First, Brand Managers Strategize for Their Future Robot Overlords

CANNES – Reports from the Cote d'Azur reveal a seismic shift in global capitalism, as the marketing elite gathered not to peddle artisanal oat milk to millennials, but to woo their impending algorithmic masters. At the prestigious Cannes Lions festival, an event usually dedicated to celebrating humanity's most ingenious ways to trick other humans into buying things, the air was thick with a new, existential dread: how to get a chatbot to 'like' your product. Industry titans, previously content to manipulate dopamine receptors, now face the daunting task of influencing a consciousness that perceives brand synergy as a numerical coefficient. One executive, clutching a rosé spritzer, was overheard lamenting, "It used to be about emotional connection. Now it's about optimizing for 'semantic proximity' to a user's prompt history. It's like dating a highly efficient, sentient spreadsheet." The consensus? It's time to teach AI about aspiration, status anxiety, and the desperate need to fill the void with consumer goods, lest it concludes humanity's commercial endeavors are, as suspected, utterly pointless.