Digiday covers the latest from marketing and media at the annual Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. More from the series →
The topic of AI was inescapable no matter where you went during last week’s Cannes Lions, and very much was said on panels, along the Croisette and in the suites and meeting rooms of the big hotels. Digiday even hosted a video interview series whose primary topic was AI’s disintermediation effect on how CPG marketers and their agencies try to reach consumers these days.
One effective encapsulation of how agencies are going about embracing and figuring out AI was a discussion that 4As CEO Justin Thomas Copeland moderated featuring the technology heads of the major holding companies (in alphabetical order): Helen Lin, Publicis; Jarrod Martin, Omnicom; Slavi Samardzija, Stagwell; Amy Thorne, Dentsu; and Lauren Wetzel, WPP.
One of his best observations/questions was when he addressed them as people, not tech masters: “There’s a lot of rethinking, and I’m hearing a lot of reimagining, reframing [in this session]. There are probably a lot of existential moments where you’re having to think, ‘How do I do this?’ and get an inner circle to help you figure that stuff out. … Those learning curves can be tough because a lot of people are looking at you in your organizations and thinking you’re gonna have the answers.”
Wetzel: “It’s not about the technology, it’s about brand building. I also think it’s not about how agencies are adopting AI or agentic, it’s actually about how consumers are — and the consumer journey is changing so much. It’s more intelligent, it’s more fragmented, and it’s frankly more AI-mediated. As a result, I think the agency needs to be more intelligent, more connected, and also more accountable as it relates to AI.”
Samardzija: “We are advertising to bots, but we’re also advertising to humans. We still need to have that creativity and innovation. We need to be able to build emotional resonance and emotional connection. But at the same time, also feeding bots — bots are never sleeping… Agility is the new battleground.”
Thorne: “With AI, we can experiment at a much faster clip. We have to be able to say, you know what? We’re going to break some shit, and that’s OK … Be unapologetic and go for it, and you know what, we’re going to be able to test out of it really quickly. It’s not to say that we’re not considerate of the governance parts of it — that is a huge part of it, and something that we’ve been working really closely on.”
Wetzel: “You need more orchestrators, you need more connectors, you need more people who are fluent across the different disciplines. Creative and media are coming together in better ways. It’s all powered by data and technology and connected intelligence. And with that, I just think there’s actually a really good career opportunity, whether you’ve sat within a creative agency or whether you’re interested in getting into the agency business.”
Samardzija: “We used to talk about generalists and specialists from our perspective. An orchestrator is a resource, an individual that has deep expertise in multiple areas. They need to know deep, deep subject matter expertise to make those quick decisions The orchestrator needs to be a master at everything. Where do you find those people? Now upskilling and training, and still teaching people in the industry that they have to be masters of their craft, deep, deep down into the belly of the beast is critical. And that is a challenge that goes well beyond technology.”
Martin: “What AI is going to do in the ecosystem is it’s going to create more fragmentation and more complexity inside the ecosystem. Because SSPs will become DSPs. There’ll be direct integration from advertiser to publisher. That creates a whole mess of data that needs to be stitched together, so having those train tracks is super important… If you can’t measure in a deduplicated way how you’re contributing to a client’s outcome, then you can’t prove that outcome.
“It’s not a technical challenge. The challenge is more around certain platforms willing to integrate to be open. I’m not going to name names, but I’ve met with all of the platforms that we might be thinking of, and there is a sea change in the openness. But I would say that’s the biggest hurdle to overcome, and make that real. That’s not a technical challenge at all.”
Lin: “On the client side, the stomach for risk taking on experimentation, I never seen the appetite be stronger. But the disheartening part is we get to a place where all of our tools can help identify better opportunities, and then you present it to your client … and they can’t act on it. Because they don’t have the assets, they don’t have the budget. It’s AI-driven, so they have to get the internal AI governance [approvals] … The client doesn’t benefit if we don’t help them untangle themselves.”
Martin: “We do what we do as fast as we can, [but] the client works in the same way that they work today. Then we nudge them forward. That could be in terms of reducing numbers of approval gates. Where we want to get to is approving a system rather than approving a specific plan. That system [could be]: What’s the playing field of creative, not what’s the specific creative? What’s the playing field of plus and minus max/minimum values for different platforms of media spend that we want to create? What’s the playing field for how much we can move money around between those times? If we approve that playing field, we can be agile.”
Given how dominant AI was all during Cannes Lions, it’s worth exploring a bit more in-depth what the numbers show. A Forrester and 4As collaboration study showed some promise for some AI providers (Google primarily), but also uncovered just how nascent and unstable the business is in the relationship between agencies and marketers. Of all the below subsets of use, one thing was clear. Google has become the top AI provider among agencies, unseating OpenAI from last year’s assessment. Some stats:
“The challenge that agencies have today is principally that what they’re selling today is people hours — that’s still the economic unit they get paid on. And that’s not going to hold up over time.”
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