Published June 25
Heading into the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity this week, marketers had AI on their minds. That may be obvious, but they were specifically focused on ROI from their AI investments.
That was still the case as I walked around Cannes Lions, but marketers had different viewpoints on how to achieve that goal. I observed how AI is helping advertising become more informed, more defensible and, in some cases, even more creative. Even in the age of AI, ad campaigns today are as likely to start from a bolt of divine inspiration as they are from a data point.
But it’s also tough for CMOs refuse the call of data-driven technology in an AI-powered sector, after all. Companies like Snowflake and Databricks are now table stakes partners for the world’s biggest advertisers, helping them make sense of the vast amounts of data generated by digital ad campaigns. The emergence of Hightouch, which recently raised $150 million and is now valued at $2.75 billion, is another example of how much marketing is now as dependent on interpreting data as it is on using creativity to drive business outcomes.
It is clear, then, that advertising's center of gravity has shifted towards AI and data, but there is still a tug-of-war taking place between that tech-forward mindset and how to keep creativity human.
Ultimately, influence might be accruing around the platforms enabling that creativity, rather than the creatives themselves. You could almost feel the creative life force of advertising branching out from the basement of the Palais, powering up the beach clubs, rooftops and yachts set up by advertising’s new ruling class.
Sure, there was talk of the huge changes facing agencies’ business models, of fandom and trust and of live sports. But the conversations du jour, just like in the past few editions, revolved around data and AI.
Still, that doesn’t mean big, bold brand campaigns are dead, just that the infrastructure powering them might be a much larger focal point. After all, there is now an AI Craft subcategory in the Awards. This has led some advertisers to feel more comfortable signing off on media plans, something I heard across several talks. It all results in ad campaigns that can be planned, tested and executed faster and with a higher degree of personalization.
It also means more advertisers are doubling down on brand campaigns and brand-friendly channels, like streaming and connected TV (CTV). An editor at a major trade publication even told me he expects a “brand renaissance” in the near future. That renewed optimism around CTV reflects an increased focus on performance-driven outcomes; and CTV is increasingly being positioned as a performance channel as much as a brand one.
Ebiquity held a session at the Netflix activation presenting their latest research on the effectiveness of streaming TV, which found that non-linear TV now accounts for 43% of total TV’s profit contribution in multi-channel campaigns.
What’s behind this mad scramble for outcomes? Does the changing CMO-CFO relationship have anything to do with it? Consumers around the world are feeling the pinch of years of inflation, high interest rates and seemingly never-ending geopolitical chaos. It’s no surprise that CEOs and boards now demand much more from every dollar spent to retain or go after new customers.
That brings us back to the ROI on AI, and the push-and-pull between tech-forward thinking and creative freedom.
In the last two or three years, creatives faced the prospect of generative AI wiping out creative jobs. Alas, Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, was the one giving creatives a reality check this year: “There's still a couple of really big pieces missing from AGI [artificial general intelligence], one is long-term reasoning and planning, and another is true creativity, so not just iterating on a known idea or remixing of existing things but actually coming up with a leap into the new.”
Perhaps that’s a sign that creatives still have the edge. Media Lions winners like “Dark Mode Ads” and “Build Your Own Super Bowl Commercial” showed how creatively deploying AI at scale can deliver incredibly compelling campaigns that were cost-prohibitive just a few years ago.
A senior media strategist told The Current that this year she was most impressed by how creatives managed to develop campaigns hand in hand with data and insights extracted from the platforms themselves. It sounded like an acceptance that culture can indeed be quantified, and that the data can be that bolt of divine inspiration.
Until next year, at least.
