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This year's Cannes Lions film festival is trying to bring humor back to advertising, but a new category celebrating witty work is rooted in wider anxiety about the creative future of an industry that is rapidly adopting artificial intelligence tools.
The annual awards, held in the south of France, showcase the industry's best campaigns from the past year and for the first time will include a humour category.
Organizers are looking for examples of “wit and satire that entertain audiences and create memorable, comedic connections,” according to the awards criteria. The festival begins on Monday.
But the new category also reflects an underlying anxiety in an industry facing a creativity crisis: Industry executives say the category will help highlight the importance of the human element in advertising as AI struggles to create entertaining ad campaigns that combine creativity with irreverence and absurdity.
“AI can tell jokes, but they're not particularly funny yet,” said Rory Sutherland, vice-chairman of Ogilvy UK. “I think it's evidence of a lack of human connection. There's a level of common understanding with AI that just isn't there yet.”
The importance of this missing ingredient – human creativity – will be a hot topic on the Croisette in Cannes this week, as major ad agencies show off their latest investments in AI.
Ad agencies from Havas and Publicis to WPP and Dentsu have all announced plans to adopt and integrate AI, putting the new technology at the heart of how advertisers plan, create and deploy campaigns.
Executives say AI technology is proving useful in creating realistic imagery at scale and optimizing ads for use across platforms, from social media to television and billboards.
AI has already started to take over some tasks, such as quickly sourcing imagery and mocking up potential campaigns, sources said, and tasks that once took days can now be completed in hours.
But executives are also eager to take advantage of the added benefit that better creativity can bring to advertising: Campaigns that incorporate humor often perform better, they say.
Karen Martin, managing director of UK-based advertising agency BBH, said this could be the year of a “humor resurgence,” noting that humor is becoming a rarer differentiator in advertising than it used to be.
BBH is running a campaign this month to celebrate Paddy Power's Euro 2024 football tournament, featuring British actor Danny Dyer and aiming to discover the fun in being an England fan.
“Some of the best ads always make you laugh,” she said, adding that they also serve as a counterpoint to the more sober economic, political and social issues in the news and current affairs. “Can advertising make you laugh in a world of perpetual crisis? We've lost our way a bit.”
The introduction of a humor category also reflects a second change in tone at Cannes this year, with many executives frustrated by what they see as an emphasis on awarding weightier, cause-driven work rather than effective campaigns that help sell products or brands.
The use of humor in advertising has been steadily declining over the past two decades, and the pandemic has accelerated the decline, according to research firm Kantar. This is happening despite humor being “the most powerful creative booster of receptivity” — more expressive, more engaging and more unique, Kantar said.
Simon Cook, chief executive of Cannes Lions organisers, agreed that after several years of “serious and heavy” campaigns, this year's campaign had returned to the use of humour.
Many of the most highly rated ads during this year's Super Bowl, a key event for the creative advertising industry, attempted to incorporate humor.
“Humor works,” Cook said, “and we're going to see a continued humour resurgence this year. We're going to see the kind of absurdity, the funniness and the irreverence that we've come to expect from human creativity.”
“There's a shift towards effectiveness,” said Miranda Hipwell, CEO of Adam & Eve DDB, adding that marketing chiefs are under pressure to demonstrate value to their boards for the money they are spending on creative campaigns.
“Advertising has long been trying to make people cry, but making people laugh can be just as effective,” Hipwell says. “Whatever the emotion, campaigns not only need to be purpose-driven, but also show results.”
But she also warned how difficult it can be to be “globally funny,” given that not every region finds the same things funny.
And given how subjective humor can be, it can also be divisive, as evidenced by a short film released last week by advertising agency Publicis, which features many of the world's top AI experts and advertising executives.
Publicis president Arthur Sudden described the film in an email as a “not-so-serious movie” about the AI craze at Cannes, but advertising executives said some people who attended the film didn't get the humor.
