Generative AI Steals Show at Cannes 2023 and Excites Marketers - Bloomberg

6/29/23, 7:15 AM Generative AI Steals Show at Cannes 2023 and Excites Marketers - Bloomberg
Businessweek
Technology
The Ad Industry Has No Intention of

Letting AI Ruin the Party
Among the yachting set at Cannes, the idea of AI making ads was
more cause for excitement than for trepidation.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-27/generative-ai-steals-show-at-cannes-2023-and-excites-marketers?sref=4LXAbTds 1/18
A fashion fundraiser and disco on the VX Yacht in Cannes, France, on June 22. Photo: Getty Images
By Mark Bergen
By Mark Bergen
June 27, 2023 at 1:30 PM GMT+5:30
Gary Vaynerchuk, the internet marketer and hype man, has never met a trend he didn’t love. After
pumping up crypto subcrazes such as web3 and NFTs, he’s now tinkering with generative artificial
intelligence, testing tools to translate his podcasts and videos into every language automatically. He
thinks the tech is legit. “It’s also disrupting all creative works. Like, I can write a hit song right now
based on the last 500 hit songs,” he says, perched on a barstool, barefoot, aboard his corporate yacht
parked at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in southern France.
But Vaynerchuk, who runs VaynerMedia, isn’t touching the stuff in his primary business: making
advertisements for big companies. Generative AI currently has too many trademark, copyright and data
security concerns. “It can get a little weird for brands,” he says. “They’re worried.”
Cannes itself is a little weird. The festival, held this June for its 70th year, is a celebration of well-made
commercials and a weeklong suspension of economic reality. Ad agencies dealing with inflation and a
looming recession throw decadent client dinners. Tech companies that just canned thousands of
employees host sprawling beach outposts with endless bottles of rosé and late-night concerts from the
Foo Fighters, A$AP Rocky and Lizzo. Middle-aged executives clamor to get into the party that Paris
Hilton is DJing.
And, new for the 2023 edition, everyone talks about generative AI.
Vaynerchuk Photographer: Getty Images
It’s a buzzword, a talismanic phrase to prove one’s embrace of the future. The companies building
generative AI like to point to advertising as a natural initial use case. The AI-assisted digital ads business
is expected to draw $192 billion annually by 2032, according to Bloomberg Intelligence research. Even in
its infancy, generative AI has shown that machines can write copy and create lifelike virtual photos.
Soon enough they may make TV commercials on their own, faster and cheaper than people can. And
then there’s the potential to further automate the vast operations the ad industry uses to persuade you
to buy things.
“Huge change,” says Sir Martin Sorrell, an industry luminary and founder and executive chairman of S4
Capital. He only has time to discuss this change at Cannes on a boat en route to his next meeting. As the
dinghy sputters off, Sorrell points to the beach cabana of ad agency giant WPP Plc, his old company,
which employs thousands of people to manage ad buying for clients. Not for much longer, he predicts.
“Why depend on a 25-year-old media planner when you’ve got an algorithm?” he asks. He recounts how
a mother of a junior staffer at another agency recently asked him if her daughter’s job was in jeopardy.
She must learn to master AI tools, he replied. “As rapidly as possible.”
The dinghy arrives at the Île Sainte-Marguerite, where Sorrell disembarks for a chummy luncheon
hosted by Salesforce. The lunch topic is AI.
At the festival, ad agencies showed off ways chatbots can drum up concepts for ad campaigns or
consumer surveys in a few minutes, shaving days or maybe weeks off what Ad Land calls the “ideation”
process. Executives mostly stuck to the line that such wondrous tech will reshuffle jobs at their
companies, not gut them. “It augments human interactions. It doesn’t replace them,” says Sheri
Bachstein, chief executive officer of the Weather Co., an IBM subsidiary that sells advertising technology
—and that shuttled its guests at Cannes to a Michelin star restaurant soiree. (The CEO of IBM recently
said AI systems could replace 30% of his back-office staff within five years.)
Jonathan Nelson, CEO of Omnicom Digital, believes his agency will add jobs during the next few years as
it hires programmers to train AI tools specifically for marketing. “Someone has to do all this plumbing,”
he says.
And there’s broad agreement that even if AI can generate compelling ads on its own, the algorithms will
still need the creativity of advertising professionals. “There still has to be room for the new, for
originals, for rule breaking,” says David Droga, CEO of ad agency Accenture Song, while standing on his
company yacht, a few yachts over from Vaynerchuk’s. (Droga is interrupted by a nearby helicopter,
which he guesses is Jeff Bezos, whose megayacht was spotted floating around Cannes.)
Lizzo performs at a VIP dinner party hosted by iHeartMedia and MediaLink at Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Antibes, France,
during the Cannes Lions Festival. Photographer: Getty Images
There are reasons for creative types to feel secure in the near term. Fashionable visual AI tools such as
Midjourney and Stable Diffusion often misspell brand names and botch logos. Worse, the available
models were trained on data from the open web, without thought to copyright. Ryan Detert, CEO of
Influential, a creator marketing firm that nabbed its first Cannes beach—after Twitter bailed on its spot—
enthuses about the generative AI possibilities. Imagine creators doing sponsored deals from Paris
without leaving home, or co-starring with a Frank Sinatra avatar. But that’s all hypothetical; a fear of
infringing on expensive trademarks is keeping him, like Vaynerchuk, away from the tech for now. “Even
the Eiffel Tower has IP rights,” Detert laments.
This could be a temporary wrinkle. At Cannes, Mark Read, CEO of WPP, says a new deal with Nvidia
Corp. will let his clients fiddle with AI tools using their own proprietary data and other approved source
material, reducing concern for faulty logos or trademark violations. Omnicom Group Inc. announced
similar partnerships with Amazon, Google and Microsoft during the week.
For years now, ad agencies have repositioned themselves as data scientists and consultants, rather than
just creative types. The industry spends considerable resources delivering online ads to people most
inclined to click and buy. Generative AI could, in theory, spit out so many ads so fast, with endless
variation, that it might easily tailor online banners or commercials to specific shoppers. “We haven’t
really used AI to figure out what the right message is,” says Read. “There’s a massive opportunity.”
There’s even a Cannes buzzword phrase for this strategy: “hyper-personalization at scale.”
Still, few at Cannes had evidence that marketers were spending serious money on generative AI tools to
make this a reality. “They’re dipping toes in,” says Droga. Early experiments still feel gimmicky. And all
the AI chatter on panels and yachts felt similar to the buzz last year about the metaverse, which was
mostly absent this year. Many people in Ad Land are well aware of their own tendency to chase crazes.
“Next year it’ll be kittens,” Droga jokes. Yesterday’s fads are never invited to the best parties.
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6/29/23, 7:15 AM Generative AI Steals Show at Cannes 2023 and Excites Marketers - Bloomberg

The Ad Industry Has No Intention of

Vaynerchuk Photographer: Getty Images

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