Cannes Lions 2024: Much ado about AI, Olympics frenzy and Elon Musk’s apology tour

CANNES, France — If there’s one takeaway from this year’s Cannes Lions, it’s that the industry is contending with growing pains.

Advertising spend is forecasted to be on an optimistic upswing from years past, with IPG’s Magna estimating 6.6% growth this year to $357.3 billion, and yet there’s an underlying current of pressure that advertisers continue to grapple with.

Along with celebrating the creativity of the industry, marketers gathered along the Croisette in the south of France to discuss — and often debate — the hot topics of the moment, such as AI, brand safety and the state of news.

Despite the heaviness of some of the conversations, the festival retained a lot of its joviality, with the likes of Deepak Chopra, Queen Latifah, Tyla, The National, Arcade Fire and John Legend entertaining the masses. And those lucky enough caught Halle Berry parading on the stairs of the Palais with the Olympic Torch. Sadly, the rumors that Taylor Swift would make an appearance (since her Chiefs boyfriend Travis Kelce was set to speak at Stagwell’s Sports Beach), remained a Cannes Lions wish.

Bingeing on AI

This year, AI evolved from concept to use case. Artificial intelligence was quite literally everywhere at the festival — from panels where celebrity figures like will.i.am and Elon Musk spoke out, to activations along the Croisette like Amazon Port’s post-card creation station. Not everyone was sure why they were talking about AI. “Why am I on this panel about AI,” asked Princess Beatrice. The other panelist's response: “Don’t worry, every panel is about AI.”

At several sessions throughout the week, brands showcased ads created by AI or delivered stats that were eye-opening. Toys “R” Us, for instance, shared a branded film about the origin story for its mascot Geoffrey the Giraffe, created by OpenAI’s text-to-video tool Sora. At a Stagwell Sports Beach panel on the state of news, Business Insider CEO Barbara Peng said its AI-powered paywall has driven 75% more subscriptions.

AI ads also nabbed Grand Prix awards, such as Mercado Libre’s “Handshake Hunt” for Media and French telecom company Orange’s “WoMen’s Football,” from ad agency Marcel — which uses deepfake technology to showcase biases around women’s sports — won the Entertainment Lions for Sport Grand Prix. There were also some major announcements, like Havas’s four-year $428 million investment in AI, and WPP rolling out an AI-powered production studio. A new United Talent Agency survey of 500 creatives found that 75% say they are creating higher-quality work with AI.

But every session wasn’t entirely well received, bringing up fresh wounds about just how much AI will impede on creativity and jobs held by creatives. A 2023 Forrester study predicted  up to a third of U.S. ad agency jobs would be lost to AI by 2030. At the panel “When AI Challenges and Champions Human Creativity,” creatives were rattled when advertising veteran and Accenture Song CEO David Droga sat down with OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati and expressed that not all creativity was worth saving after showing an AI-generated ad.

“People want to be black-and-white about this but my thing is that not all creativity is worth saving,” said Droga. “That sounds like a crazy thing to say as a creative person…but the majority of advertising is not creative. It’s written by something far more dangerous than AI, which is research.” 

Meanwhile, Dove was running ads on the Palais, asking for advertisers to change representation in AI to #KeepBeautyReal, and Publicis launched a “BSbot” meant to detect jargon in AI writing.

Overall, marketers felt the festival working toward bringing back creativity as a primary focus, pointing to moves like a new humor category and the enforcement of a new policy around AI usage in ads for award submissions.

“Our own group creative is always an inspiring thing to see, bringing back the essence of what we do, which is creativity and not losing that in all the technology and all the AI and platforms,” Joshua Campo, CEO at agency Razorfish, tells The Current. “It’s incumbent on all of us to do that. That is a big part that hopefully we do not see diminish.”

“This year, there’s more diversity and emotion of what’s being shown because it’s not just reflecting on a lot of the pain and suffering that’s been going on or the heaviness, but a lot of the work is finding ways to bring joy,” Mona Munayyer Gonzalez, chief growth officer at Pereira O’Dell, tells The Current.

Brand safety in news and social media

One of the week's hottest panels was no doubt the one where Elon Musk faced some cutting facetime with WPP CEO Mark Read, who started off the 45-minute conversation at the Lumiere Theatre with hard-hitting questions like why did Musk tell advertisers "Go f**k yourself" last November?

In what was clearly the start of an apology tour, Musk walked back on his divisive comments, saying they weren’t aimed at all marketers, but said to advocate for freedom of speech.

Read also pressed Musk to address brand safety. "Of course, advertisers have a right to appear next to content that they find compatible with their brands. That's totally fine," Musk said. "What is not cool is insisting that there can be no content they disagree with on the platform."

Brand safety talks also extended to publishers during the week, as legacy publications from The New York Times to The Wall Street Journal flocked to Cannes Lions for panels on the future of news at a time many are calling a critical juncture. Lou Paskalis, chief strategy officer at Ad Fontes Media, said that what started as brand safety fears has grown into a war on truth and threat to democracy during an extremely important election year. He says there’s been an 80% decline in advertising in news over a 15-year period.

“Advertisers have largely abandoned news because of unfounded fears about adjacency and potentially getting the brand caught up in what’s been called the culture wars,” Paskalis tells The Current.

Publishers are starting to come together, he says, to combat unfair practices like keyword blocking. Stagwell recently published a study with publishers like The Washington Post that found that even ads placed alongside polarizing news didn’t lose their effectiveness.

“Marketers are returning to the realization that if they don’t fund news, news dies,” says Paskalis.

Sports — and particularly women’s sports — dominated the conversation

It would be impossible to attend Cannes this year without seeing the sway that sports have had in conversations within and outside the Palais. Between Stagwell’s Sports Beach, which was resurrected for a second year and Axios’ new Women’s Sports House, there was no shortage of sports content. Disney’s Rita Ferro discussed putting women’s sports on TV, Gayle Troberman, CMO of iHeartMedia launched a new women’s sports audio network and sports stars from Sue Bird to Carmelo Anthony to the Kelce brothers appeared throughout the week.

Of course, the upcoming Olympics are also spurring attention, with the torch upending traffic plans and executive meetings alike as it was paraded around Cannes on Tuesday. NBCUniversal is still selling Olympics spots, including new programmatic opportunities on Peacock. Alison Levin, president of advertising and partnerships at NBCUniversal, took the stage at Axios’ Women’s Sports House to make one last major pitch to advertisers ahead of the Paris Olympics in just a few short weeks, and to discuss the increased women’s viewership, growing from 2.7 million in 2009 to a projected 18.9 million.

“As we continue to move into the Olympics again, [we’re] having advertisers that are supporting big, big moments. For instance, in August, there's going to be one day where you have Simone Biles, Sha'Carri [Richardson], and Katie [Ledecky] all going for the gold on the same day,” said Levin.