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Hello and welcome to a special edition of Modern CEO! Im Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs; this week Im dropping a few extra newsletters from the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. Engaging with consumers and clients has traditionally been the purview of customer service teams and chief marketing officers (CMOs) who communicate with customers through advertising and messaging. CMOs are the folks gathered at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity this week. But thanks to social platforms, consumers now have the ability to tarnish or burnish brands, impact revenue, and even hurt or help stock pricesall part of the CEO remit. Consumers are more powerful, and they have more access and more tools, says Anton Vincent, president, Mars Wrigley North America and global ice cream at Mars. The creator economy will only help to accelerate consumer power. Straight from the top As a result, more CEOs are going direct to consumer. LinkedIn says it has seen a 52% increase in posts from CEOs in the past two years. We think about [posts] as a conversation, says Dan Shapero, LinkedIns chief operating officer. Executives feel safe posting because it is a platform for constructive conversation. Indeed, comments on LinkedIn are up 32% year over year. The most progressive companies and CEOs arent just talking to customers, they are harnessing customers energy to help build loyalty and support for their waresand even to help companies build new products. Research from ad agency TBWA\Worldwide found that 15% of adults globally would spend more for a brand that lets them participate in collaborative projects via co-creation, decentralization, or crowdsourcing. The customer connection Thanks to generative AI, consumers are already creating art, marketing messages, and other content for brands, much of it unauthorized and much of it technically impressive but conceptually shallow, says Jen Costello, global chief strategy officer for TBWA\Worldwide. A better approach is where co-creation is less about spectacle and defined more by transparency, reciprocity, and the infrastructure for true partnership, she says. Think co-branded product lines with fans, closed-loop design labs with select contributors, and shared revenue or credit for substantial contributors. With that in place, AI becomes a powerful accelerant rather than the showpiece. Vincent of Mars Wrigley says the company engages consumers by offering superfans a peek under the tent of what may be coming next. The M&M candy brand, for example, has embraced personalization, selling customized packaging and candies, and its Fun Club community engages members with quizzes, surveys, recipes, and more. Vincent says he also is upskilling his employees to become fluent in technologies and platforms that consumers are using to communicate displeasure or loyalty. CEOs who cede responsibility for engaging with consumers do so at their peril. Says Jim OLeary, North America CEO and global president at Weber Shandwick: Consumers are much more important to CEOs today because they have a much greater ability to influence things. How are you connecting with customers? CEOs, how do you engage with customers? Are you posting on LinkedIn or TikTok? Send me your examplesand links. Id love to feature helpful examples of CEO-consumer interactions in a future newsletter. Read more: CEOs go direct to consumer What its like to be a female founder in the age of Instagram MillerKnoll CEOs lessons from a town hall that went viral Mighty Networks CEO says community is key to building business
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The official posters for the 2026 Winter Olympics and Paralympics were revealed today, and theyre designed to introduce the world to some of Italys foremost emerging artists. For next years Milano Cortina Games, 10 posters have been created: 5 for the Olympic Games and 5 for the Paralympic Games, featuring the work of 10 Italian artists (all younger than 40) hailing from different regions of the country. According to a press release from Milano Cortina, the artists were chosen in collaboration with the Triennale di Milano, an art and design museum in Milan that displayed the torches designed for the 2026 Games earlier this year. The tradition of Olympic posters goes back to the 1912 Stockholm Games, when Swedish painter and illustrator Olle Hjortzberg was tasked with advertising the Games as a newly global media phenomenon. More than a century since then, the posters have become an integral symbol of each unique edition, ranging from an explosion of color for the 2016 Rio Olympics to a series of trippy designs for the 2020 Tokyo Games and a multimedia collection of high art for the Paris Games in 2024. Giorgia Garzilli, 2026 [Image: courtesy Fondazione Milano Cortina 2026] The Olympic posters The five designers tasked with creating posters for the 2026 Olympic Games are all women: Flaminia Veronesi, Beatrice Alici, Giorgia Garzilli, Martina Cassatella, and Maddalena Tesser. Maddalena Tesser, The Mountain [Image: courtesy Fondazione Milano Cortina 2026] Veronesi, a 39-year-old from Milan, took the prompt in a whimsical direction with her work The Oasis of Play, a bubbly portrait overflowing with bright color and dynamic shapes. Flaminia Veronesi, The Oasis of Play [Image: courtesy Fondazione Milano Cortina 2026] It tells how we create a parallel world when we play that is an oasis of joy, Veronesi explained in a video promoting the designs, adding that the paintings subject represents a young athlete or young spectator dreaming about the Games. Sprinkled throughout the work are Easter eggs referencing the Biscione of Milan, a symbolic dragon; the Dolomites mountain range; and the five Olympic rings. Beatrice Alici, Silver Peaks, [Image: courtesy Fondazione Milano Cortina 2026] Alici, a 33-year-old from San Don di Piave, took a more literal approach with her work Silver Peaks, opting to render three true-to-scale Olympic athletes in the foreground of the Venetian Prealps. The compositions cold, subdued color palette draws viewers eyes to the medals held by each figuregold, silver, and bronze. In contrast, 28-year-old Cassatella, hailing from San Giovanni Rotondo, chose a warm palette for her painting Torch. The poster spotlights a close-up of two glowing, intertwined handsreminiscent of the Olympic torchin a deep range of reds and yellows. Martina Cassatella, Torch (Olympics) [Imge: courtesy Fondazione Milano Cortina 2026] Representing a poster for the Olympic Winter Games has been, especially at the beginning, a challenge, since I did not want my work to be too explicit, too didactic, Cassatella shared in a video interview. Instead of leaning too literally into the symbolism of the winter season, she chose to highlight a warmer image of unity and inclusion. Andrea Fontanari, Together We Play, Together We Transform [Image: courtesy Fondazione Milano Cortina 2026] The Paralympic posters Of the five posters created for the Paralympic Games by artists Roberto de Pinto, Andrea Fontanari, Giulia Mangoni, Aronne Pleuteri, and Clara Woods, several take a distinctly unexpected direction. Aronne Pleuteri, Untitled [Image: courtesy Fondazione Milano Cortina 2026] Perhaps the most abstract among them is 24-year-old Pleuteris Untitled. The piece is a burst of brightly colored shapes made using digital sketches on paint, inkjet prints, and mixed-media add-ons, resulting in a composition that verges on chaotic. According to an interview with Pleuteri, the poster works with the idea of escaping from visual stereotypes. Roberto de Pinto, Untitled (Snowdrops) [Image: courtesy Fondazione Milano Cortina 2026] For his work Untitled (Snowdrops), 29-year-old De Pinto chose to forgo color altogetherrelying only on black charcoal against a white background to depict a field of snowdrops, white flowers that bloom in late winter and early spring, often when theres still snow on the ground. Its captioned, Cracking the limit just like snowdrops crack cold ice. Clara Woods, You Love [Image: courtesy Fondazione Milano Cortina 2026] [I compared] the figure of the para-athlete with the snowdrop, since it is a flower that breaks the ice and snow to blossom, De Pinto said in an interview. It is a symbol of hope.” Giulia Mangoni, Victory is more than a moment [Image: courtesy Fondazione Milano Cortina 2026]
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More than $60 billion of investment will be spent by Texas Instruments to build and expand seven semiconductor factories in the United States, creating more than 60,000 jobs in the country, the company said today. The announcement, which will see the investment spent across seven semiconductor fabrication sites, is a boost for President Donald Trump, though it is not exactly new cash, some experts argue. “I think its exactly what they’ve been saying for the last four or five years,” says Stacy Rasgon, a senior analyst at Bernstein who covers semiconductors. “Theyre probably one of the few thats actually put massive amounts of dollars in the ground in the U.S. already. So you might as well get credit for it.” The announcement also does not include a time frame. Texas Instruments CEO Haviv Ilan said in a statement: “TI is building dependable, low-cost 300-millimeter capacity at scale to deliver the analog and embedded processing chips that are vital for nearly every type of electronic system.” While the announcement may be aimed at pleasing Trump, it reinforces a strategy to ensure the survival of the U.S. AI sector at a time when the country is increasingly at odds with China. The threat of a potential invasion by China looms constantly over Taiwan, the worlds main manufacturer of computer chips. “Personally, I think TI has been preparing for a decoupled world, where its no longer viable, for whatever reason, to source parts from Asia. And theyll be sitting here with a whole bunch of capacity,” Rasgon says. “TI’s latest investment is another move for the U.S. legacy semiconductor player to show its determination in strengthening its production capacity in the United States, which aligns with the current administration’s agenda,” says Ray Wang, research director for semiconductors and emerging technology at the Futurum Group. Others believe the announcement is a move to onshore chip production in an uncertain world. “This announcement builds on Texas Instruments’ long-standing efforts to build new chip factories in Texas and Utah,” says Chris Miller, professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. Miller points out that Texas Instruments is already “a key supplier of the foundational semiconductors that industries from autos to smartphones require.” He adds that the company seems poised to grow its footprint even more, having steadily added new facilities and ramped up capacity in recent years. That puts TI in a position of relative strength, giving the company the ability to ramp up domestic production and reduce reliance on overseas partners like the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) by bringing more manufacturing back in-house. A $100 billion deal, announced in March 2025, would also see TSMC bring more chip production capacity to the United States. At the time, experts questioned whether the move might result in Taiwan losing its economic defensive shield against a Chinese invasion. “This is the exact countermove that the U.S. needed in the context of increasing its annual chip output,” says Koray Köse, founder and chief analyst at Köse Advisory. “This enhances the U.S. supply chain resilience and the security of it, especially when we look at the geopolitical tensions and the over-reliance on Taiwan from foreign chipmakers.” This, Köse says, shifts the balance in Americas favor by giving the country a stronger, more self-reliant supply chain. It also helps Texas Instruments be insulated from Chinese competition. “Those segments they are in are really commodity segments, where a lot of that supply, Chinese manufacturers are trying to take share from them,” says Willy Shih, a professor at Harvard Business School. Beyond cash, more work is needed to keep the U.S. up to pace with China and others, says Miller, the Tufts professor. “Facilitating chip production will require streamlining regulation, training more workers, and ensuring that U.S. firms don’t face unfair competition from heavily subsidized companies in China,” he says. “The U.S. needs to continue to invest in training programs at universities and community colleges to produce a strong supply of fab technicians, trained construction workers, and engineers to build and operate chipmaking facilities.” But Trump may resist one key step that Miller says is vital for the U.S. to become a chipmaking champion: immigration. “It also needs to facilitate immigration of high-skilled engineers with unique, chip-specific capabilities,” he says.
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