- Artificial intelligence is set to dominate the conversation at the Cannes Lions ad festival.
- Brands are exploring AI for tasks like copywriting and automating campaigns, raising efficiency.
- But there are concerns about AI disrupting agencies and making ads blander.
Artificial intelligence is expected to be the topic du jour at Cannes Lions this week, when the ad industry descends on the French Riviera for its annual shindig in the sun.
The mood should be buoyant.
In a year containing the Olympics, several global elections, and the Euro 2024 soccer tournament, marketers are spending more on advertising than ever. And while there's expected to be plenty of chest-thumping by winners of the creativity festival's coveted Lions awards, there's set to be some trepidation in the air, too.
Businesses are exploring how they can use AI to perform tasks like copywriting, research, and automating ad campaigns. Those are tasks they might outsource to agencies, which typically charge clients for the number of people and hours they worked on their business. The buy-now, pay-later company Klarna recently ruffled feathers in the industry when it said AI had helped it cut its marketing-agency spend by 25%.
"The agency world is under pressure in a business that's built on human capital," said Wayne Levings, the chief client officer and Americas CEO at the research company Kantar. "If that gets replaced by some degree of automation, in the end, advertisers expect some sort of efficiency."
CMOs will return to Cannes in droves
MediaLink, the United Talent Agency-owned management consultancy that always has an outsize presence at Cannes Lions, estimates there will be about 20% more marketers at the event this year than last.
A Cannes Lions spokesperson said the festival was expecting 12,000 delegates, though many more ad execs and vendors forgo the official festivities to hobnob at the fringe events.
Mark Wagman, MediaLink's managing director for data and technology, said marketers were keen to learn how AI could speed up areas like production and reporting. But there are still concerns about privacy, copyright, bias, and the energy required to power AI models. At this point, he added, marketers at large companies are likely to entertain serious partnership conversations only with established players like Google, Microsoft, and Adobe.
"When a marketer has to take an AI vendor through procurement and legal right now — good luck, my friend," Wagman said.
Jessica Apotheker, Boston Consulting Group's chief marketing officer, said she wanted to see more marketers publicly setting strong branding guidelines for the way they use AI. This year, Apotheker set rules to prevent BCG's AI assistants from being anthropomorphized — they must have clearly robotic voices and nonhuman names and attributes.
Recalling the recent OpenAI-Scarlett Johansson voice debacle, Apotheker said, "I'm super sensitive on the impact it will have to a generation ordering women around all the time if you call your assistants women, you have female voices, and you train a generation to believe women are there to serve."
Cannes Lions has set its own rules around AI. For the first time this year, awards entrants must disclose whether they have used AI in their work. A spokesperson for the festival said this was so its juries could more fairly judge work, but also so it could better understand how the industry was using AI.
AI will have a major presence in the Palais, where the main Cannes program takes place. Accenture Song's David Droga will appear onstage with OpenAI's chief technology officer, Mira Murati. Elsewhere, Vidhya Srinivasan, a vice president of Google Advertising, and Alexander Chen, a Google Creative Lab director, will showcase the tech giant's Gemini model.
Agencies to position themselves as AI agents
For all the talk of agencies under threat by AI, these companies have been through many waves of disruption before — including economic downturns and the shift to digital. The main agency holding groups are expected to set out how they're harnessing the technology, partnering with innovative startups, and securing access to lucrative computing power.
"The challenge clients have is getting their heads around how to piece all the moving parts together," said Greg James, Havas Media's North America CEO. "The benefit of AI is that if you ask the right question, you get incredible answers, but a lot of marketers are still trying to figure out what the right question is."
In time for Cannes, Publicis Groupe announced a "BSBot," where it says users can upload audio, images, articles, press releases, or presentations and get translations that cut out AI jargon.
Anthony Yell, the chief creative officer of the Publicis agency Razorfish, said that the company was treating AI as more of a creative collaborator and that the technology isn't yet at the point where it's replacing people.
"It doesn't replace human creativity, because creativity is very abstract and AI is very structured," Yell said. "I'm at Cannes for the work and the conversation surrounding that — to create work that puts a dent in the world."
The influencer influx
With a proliferation of content, partly driven by the AI boom, and myriad new media channels — from ad-supported streaming to retail media — many marketers will be looking for inspiration for how they can cut through the noise.
"There's a real fear in the industry that AI will be the grand equalizer, and everything will soon sound the same, and you'll lose brand influence," Apotheker said.
Step up, influencers. Actors, sports stars, and creators will be flooding La Croisette en masse this year — Queen Latifah, Lando Norris, John Legend, Chrissy Teigen, Deepak Chopra, Jason and Travis Kelce, Lenny Kravitz, and Janelle Monáe among them.
"Those who will win will figure out the right mix of AI plus the right influencers plus the right concepts," Wagman said. "It takes more than just taking one thing and turning it into 500 or asking an AI model, 'What do I say?'"
