The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, which convenes each June along the picturesque French seaside boulevard La Croisette, has always served as a reliable barometer of where power resides on Madison Avenue. For decades, the answer was obvious: it resided with the people who made the ads.
Laura Rogers, the executive creative director of AMV BBDO, recalls her first visit to the festival in the early 2000s as something of a creative playground. She mingled with other young advertising professionals, attended awards shows and talks at the Palais des Festivals, and capped one evening at a glamorous beach party hosted by the legendary agency DDB. Creative agencies and production companies dominated the proceedings.
Two decades later, Ms. Rogers would find the Croisette much changed — a shift that reflects how dramatically the balance of power in advertising has been rearranged.
The transformation has been gradual enough to miss if you were not paying attention, and sudden enough to startle if you were. Technology companies, once peripheral visitors to a festival built around the craft of persuasion, have become central players. The beach parties are now as likely to be hosted by platforms as by production houses. The conversations in the hotel lobbies have turned, with increasing frequency, to the question of artificial intelligence.
(Whether the creative community finds this development thrilling or alarming depends largely on whom you ask, and perhaps on how many glasses of rosé have been consumed.)
The festival, which has spent six decades celebrating human ingenuity in the service of selling things, now finds itself grappling with tools that promise — or threaten, depending on your disposition — to automate portions of that ingenuity. It is the sort of existential question that advertising has faced before, in various forms, and survived. Whether it will survive this one in recognizable shape remains, for the moment, an open file.
Original story published in adweek.com: "The New Power Player: How Cannes Lions Is Grappling With AI"