Walking along the Promenade de la Croisette during Cannes Lions 2024, you'd be forgiven for thinking you were in the middle of a global tech conference: tech companies proudly displayed their presence on billboards along the Croisette, and tech chatter blared on the stage among the white tents clustered on the beach.
The debate was: “Is technology killing or enhancing creativity in advertising and marketing?”
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This question shook the industry to its core. Cannes Lions has been the creative industry's annual celebration of excellence for 70 years, and advertising and marketing agencies and their clients gathered on the French Riviera, passionate about the impact of technology on creativity.
Technology is helping bring ideas to life in smart, efficient, and vivid ways. Billboards with realistic, moving 3D images are becoming more popular in many markets. Design software has enabled creatives to efficiently amplify human creativity. Software tools now allow campaigns to be customized with local models, language, and context. However, with the increasing use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), some agencies are replacing creatives with AI bots.
GenAI allows visuals for print media and videos for social media to be created in seconds and deployed at scale. Clients are increasingly demanding that advertising agencies use technology to quickly respond to rapidly changing market impulses. Global consumer brands believe that the best way to meet the changing demands of social media-influenced consumers is to deliver highly personalized messaging. They believe AI can deliver such solutions much faster than human creators can.
Industry leaders at Cannes Lions 2024 were concerned about the future of designers and creatives. GenAI offers a quick option that delivers multiple derivative products almost instantly. GenAI solutions are easily available and are now in the form of mobile-enabled apps. Large marketing and advertising groups such as WPP, Havas, Dentsu and Publicis announced plans to embrace technology more closely. Tech giants Adobe, Amazon, Meta, IBM and Microsoft had their presence at Cannes Lions 2024. According to Statista, AI in marketing will be an industry worth more than $100 billion by 2028. “AI is deeply rooted in the world of digital marketing, and according to the latest report, more than 80% of industry professionals have integrated some form of AI technology into their online marketing efforts,” the data collection company's report said. “Such widespread adoption of artificial intelligence for marketing purposes is not surprising, given the benefits it offers, such as task automation, campaign personalization and data analytics.”
AI can provide insights into the effectiveness of each campaign's ad spend. Based on the feedback, reallocation of advertising budgets to products and markets can be made more quickly. What's even more interesting is that AI is helping brands track the performance of their rivals' campaigns. AI can help monitor the ads of competing brands and analyze their impact on different consumer groups.
For marketers looking to get inside the minds of consumers, AI can help use data about buyer lifestyles to create deeper, richer profiles of buyers and their demands. Understanding consumer behavior using data generated from buyers' digital footprints is already helping companies develop new products. AI can also help predict market behavior so that product and service providers can anticipate change.
Many industry leaders have concluded that technology will have a fundamentally profound impact on their industry. But Cannes Lions attendees on the Croisette and in beach tents felt that the industry will remain more creative and smart than technology. AI may be able to churn out creative work with speed and scale, but innovation and talent remain the human domain. Hopefully, human ingenuity will stay a few steps ahead of AI.
