Amidst all the glamorous events surrounding this year's Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, three topics garnered particular attention: creators, Elon Musk and AI.
AI was a hot topic in the South of France this year, as it was last, but the conversation around the technology has matured from early speculation about how AI might transform advertising to practical discussions about implementing the technology into business operations.
Havas made its biggest AI-related announcement of the week, with CEO Yannick Bolloré revealing that the company will invest 400 million euros ($428 million) over the next four years in AI and other key technologies.
Meanwhile, OpenAI CTO Mira Murati joined Accenture Song CEO David Droga to discuss job stability and how brands can make the most of AI.
AI also had a strong presence at the awards ceremony, where it was recognized for contributing to the Grand Prize-winning works in the Media, Sports & Entertainment and Innovation categories. This year marked the first time that entrants were required to disclose whether AI was used in their submissions.
But according to the Cannes jury president and other members, whether a campaign used AI was one of the final things judges took into consideration.
The innovation judges said they first looked at how novel the campaign idea was, how the technology was developed and how simple it was for consumers before moving ahead with the execution.
Only after taking these points into account did the judges move on to considering the AI. And even then, AI only contributed to a submission's final score if the campaign couldn't have been created without it, said Diego Machado, AKQA's global chief creative officer and chair of the innovation judging committee.
“Take the Grand Prix for example, probably a year ago such an idea would not have been possible,” Machado said.
The top prize went to KVI Brave Fund's Klick Health's “Voice 2 Diabetes” campaign, an app that uses AI to detect differences in the voices of people with type 2 diabetes and those without, to detect diabetes. The app also won a Gold Lion in the pharmaceutical category.
Machado said AI is enabling brands to execute ideas that would have been too complicated a few years ago.
“This is my 10th year coming to Cannes,” Machado said. “For years, there have been so many ideas floated around, but 70% of them never got done because they were too complicated, too expensive or required more than two or three vendors to work with. AI is eliminating that, and the gap between what's created and how it's executed is closing.”
But judges in other categories downplayed the importance of AI, saying it didn't directly lead to big wins, but rather played a small role in realizing ideas that were primarily executed by humans.
Elda Choucair, CEO of Omnicom Media Group MENA and a judge in the media category, was surprised to see the Grand Prize winner described as an AI campaign.
“I don't even remember if it had AI in it, because that wasn't what led us to believe this was a great piece of work,” she said.
Gutto São Paulo's “Handshake Hunt” for Mercado Libre won the media grand prix by using AI to scan TV shows for the e-commerce company's handshake logo. When it finds two interlocking hands, a QR code appears on the screen, directing viewers to Black Friday specials.
Choucair said the campaign's use of AI was not a primary factor in the judging criteria: instead, judges focused on the campaign's objectives, the consumer insights that drove the idea, the quality of the idea, how well it was executed, and the business results the campaign achieved.
Advertisers, especially creatives, have had a tense relationship with AI lately. Last week, Toys R Us launched a campaign created with OpenAI's Sora, which drew the ire of creatives. In May, creatives were similarly critical of Apple's Crush ad, saying the visuals were outdated, with machines destroying and co-opting various art forms, as the industry nervously anticipates AI taking over jobs. CEOs and senior advertisers have tried to refute this narrative.
In the Entertainment for Sports category, the judges also downplayed the presence of AI in the Grand Prix-winning submission.
Marcel's women's football campaign for telecommunications company Orange, in which he deepfakes women's football highlights to look like they came from men's matches, won the grand prize in the same category, proving that women's football can be just as entertaining as men's.
“This entry was about 10% AI and 90% human,” said Louise Johnson, CEO of Fuse UK and EMEA and chair of the Entertainment for Sport judging committee.
But Marcel sees the role of AI differently, as Marcel CEO Gaétan du Péroux puts it: Advertising Age AI wasn't just a useful creative tool; it helped the team realize that their ideas could become reality.
Cannes juries also had no established plan for how to use AI in their judging process. AKQA's Machado said that while generative AI had helped him understand an industry he knew little about, there was no process or standard for using it to ease the jury's overall workload.
OMG's Choucair said that while the judges may have used AI individually before splitting into groups in France, they didn't use it formally during the judging process. Instead, the judges worked with the paper submissions as they always have.
But Choucair believes there will be use cases for AI adjudication in the future.
“If you take all the data that's already been written, and you feed all these videos into a machine, and you give that machine certain criteria, can the machine spit out a winner based on those criteria?,” she said. “That's an interesting thing, but there was a tremendous amount of deliberation and debate during the sessions.
“It's all a matter of perspective. That's why we have juries.”
