At Cannes Lions, marketers wrestle with the implications of AI on creativity

Does creativity need defending amid the rise of artificial intelligence?

Former Snap Creative Chief Colleen DeCourcy asked Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman that question on Tuesday during a chat at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

It was a topic permeating the year’s biggest week for the advertising industry.

“I don’t want to dismiss or judge the fear, because I also share that fear,” Suleyman said. “What we’re creating is incredibly powerful and unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.”

Still he added: “The friction of producing an idea and getting my imaginative thought out not just on paper, but to execution, is just going to completely collapse. I can see how that is both terrifying but also exhilarating because everybody is just operating on a much more level playing field than we’ve ever seen.”

At an event focused on creativity — specifically the human variety — many marketers are grappling with how to balance real ingenuity with AI innovation.

Stagwell CEO and Chairman Mark Penn, who appeared on a panel on Tuesday called “The Human Touch: Creativity Can’t be Automated,” echoed the “level playing field” sentiment.

“I’m optimistic about AI, but if brands don’t invest in using it responsibly, or they delegate the real creative work to AI, misunderstandings can occur,” Penn tells The Current.

“Messages can land wrong, and consumers will know the difference. But that just means the most innovative companies will differentiate themselves further — what AI does is democratize the playing field.”

The AI conversation moves beyond curiosity toward implementation

At last year’s Cannes Lions festival, just 12% of creative submissions used AI, suggesting the tools still hadn’t been fully embraced by marketers.

That could soon change. As AI steadily weaves its way into many aspects of the ad community, conversations are moving past the curiosity phase toward questions of implementation.

While 70% of brands, agencies and publishers have yet to fully integrate AI into their strategies, according to the IAB, half of those expect planning, activation and analysis to be completely AI-powered by next year.

Holding companies, as well as those in tech and media, haven’t been shy about their intentions to infuse AI into the creative process further.

Last year, Publicis announced a major AI investment, saying in part that “personalized content will finally be realized at scale, with efficiencies and highly relevant, desirable creative.” Amazon has introduced an advertising tool to create “photorealistic video assets.”

“AI adoption is accelerating across every layer of the advertising supply chain, from creative production to media buying to measurement,” IAB’s new VP of AI, Caroline Giegerich, told The Current last month. “If we don’t establish practical, responsible frameworks now, we risk fragmented practices, brand-safety missteps and missed opportunities for publishers and marketers alike.”

Using efficiency to support ingenuity

Even if there is anxiety around AI, many marketers are still focusing on the upside.

“When you think about what AI can do in terms of automating the ‘boring’ bits of the business, that allows your creatives so much more space and time to come up with the big, amazing ideas because they’re not doing 300 versions of a Facebook ad — you could potentially use a tool for that,” Crispin CEO Maggie Malek tells The Current.

“At the end of the day, we are human beings, and human beings love nuance and feeling and magic, and that is what our teams do,” she adds. “AI is a tool that enables that. It can’t replicate it.”

Beyond the creative execution, Stagwell’s Penn says that AI can help “get the right message to the right people at the right time” and “synthesize useful insights.”

“Stick to your core values and what you want to communicate about your brand — and use AI to completely reimagine how you want to interact with your consumer,” he says.

At the end of their conversation, DeCourcy asked Suleyman what a world would look like where both creativity and AI were abundant. Suleyman replied that while there will be a lot of “garbage” produced, the “quality bar is about to go through the roof” — and that will feed competition.

“That’s what we want from the [advertising] field, is higher quality everywhere,” he said. “Because judgment is still going to matter, curation is still going to matter, brand is still going to matter more than ever before. People make decisions based on trust … We care about the style and the tone and the aesthetic.”