Why Cannes Lions Is Embracing Artificial Intelligence
Introduction:
– The Cannes Lions advertising festival has evolved over the years and now encompasses various industries and technology.
– The inclusion of machine learning companies like OpenAI highlights the growing presence of artificial intelligence (AI) in advertising.
– Yannick Bolloré, managing director of the Havas marketing group, shares his thoughts on the festival’s transformation.
The Potential of AI in Advertising:
– Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, predicts an advertising revolution powered by generative AI.
– AI factories could create billions of ads tailored to individual consumers.
– The optimistic vision of AI in advertising is embraced at Cannes Lions, where creativity and innovation are celebrated.
– AI can help small businesses by generating affordable ads and providing AI-generated presentation choices.
The Pitfalls of AI Advertising:
– The history of automated ad buying on the web reveals inefficiencies and waste.
– A significant portion of ad spend is wasted on disreputable websites.
– The excitement around AI in advertising must be balanced with the lessons learned from past technological advancements.
– The intimate customization enabled by AI could become overwhelming and creepy for consumers.
AI in Campaign Design and Fragmented Ads:
– AI can improve the efficiency of campaign design, automating routine tasks and storing ideas for future use.
– Marketers are exploring the concept of infinite fragmentation, where ads are tailored to individual preferences and situations.
– The potential for billions of individual ads raises questions about the relevance and effectiveness of such extreme personalization.
– Advertisers must consider whether extensive customization aligns with consumer behavior and purchasing patterns.
The Future of Advertising at Cannes Lions:
– The Cannes Lions festival continually evolves to reflect the changing landscape of advertising and technology.
– Juries responsible for award presentations may face an overwhelming number of potential voices in the future, requiring the assistance of AI.
The Prominence of AI in the Advertising Industry:
– The use of AI in advertising is not limited to small businesses; large companies can also benefit from its capabilities.
– While AI has its limitations and potential pitfalls, its integration into the advertising industry is inevitable.
– Advertisers must find the right balance between personalization and consumer comfort to optimize the effectiveness of AI-driven campaigns.
Additional Piece: Embracing the Boundless Creativity of AI in Advertising
Introduction:
– While some may approach the idea of AI-powered advertising with caution, there is immense potential for creativity and innovation within the industry.
– AI can generate fresh ideas and enable marketers to explore new approaches without significant investment.
– Embracing the boundless creativity of AI can open doors to unconventional advertising strategies and campaigns.
Unleashing the Creative Power of AI:
– AI-driven algorithms can analyze vast amounts of data and identify patterns, enabling marketers to make data-informed creative decisions.
– By leveraging AI, advertisers can create personalized content that resonates with individual consumers, leading to increased engagement and brand loyalty.
– AI can generate unique content based on consumer preferences and behaviors, ensuring that each person receives relevant and customized messaging.
Breaking Free from Conventional Constraints:
– The advertising industry has often relied on conventional approaches and ideas that may limit creative exploration.
– AI can break these constraints by suggesting unexpected combinations and approaches that human minds might overlook.
– Through AI-powered collaborations, marketers can tap into fresh perspectives and experiment with unconventional ideas.
Examples of AI Creativity in Advertising:
– AI-generated ads can surprise and captivate audiences with their unique and unexpected concepts.
– Using AI to design campaigns opens up a wealth of possibilities, allowing marketers to target niche audiences and craft personalized messages at scale.
– AI can revolutionize the creative process, allowing marketers to push boundaries and create captivating advertising experiences.
Balancing AI with Human Creativity:
– While AI offers immense potential, human creativity remains irreplaceable.
– The combination of AI and human creativity can result in powerful advertising campaigns that capture attention and evoke emotions.
– Marketers must strike a balance between relying on AI and leveraging human creativity to ensure advertising campaigns remain authentic and resonate with audiences.
Conclusion:
– Cannes Lions’ embrace of AI in advertising reflects the industry’s recognition of the technology’s potential.
– From generating ads for small businesses to enhancing campaign design and personalization, AI offers exciting opportunities for creative exploration.
– By embracing the boundless creativity of AI, advertisers can push the boundaries of conventional advertising and create memorable campaigns that resonate with audiences.
Summary:
The Cannes Lions advertising festival has evolved to include machine learning companies like OpenAI, demonstrating the growing presence of AI in advertising. While the excitement around AI in advertising is palpable, there are lessons to be learned from past technological advancements. The inclusion of AI in campaign design and the prospect of fragmented ads present both opportunities and challenges. However, overlooking the boundless creative potential of AI would be a missed opportunity for advertisers seeking innovative and personalized approaches. The future of advertising at Cannes Lions may involve an overwhelming number of potential voices powered by AI, requiring the assistance of technology to navigate this new landscape. Although AI has its limitations, its integration into the advertising industry is inevitable. Striking a balance between personalization and consumer comfort is crucial to optimize the effectiveness of AI-driven campaigns. Embracing the boundless creativity of AI can revolutionize the advertising industry, enabling marketers to break free from conventional constraints and create captivating campaigns that resonate with audiences. The combination of AI and human creativity is a powerful force that can push the boundaries of advertising and captivate consumers in new and exciting ways.
—————————————————-
| Article | Link |
|---|---|
| UK Artful Impressions | Premiere Etsy Store |
| Sponsored Content | View |
| 90’s Rock Band Review | View |
| Ted Lasso’s MacBook Guide | View |
| Nature’s Secret to More Energy | View |
| Ancient Recipe for Weight Loss | View |
| MacBook Air i3 vs i5 | View |
| You Need a VPN in 2023 – Liberty Shield | View |
Receive free AI updates
We will send you a myFT daily digest email rounding last Artificial intelligence news every morning.
Yannick Bolloré, managing director of the Havas marketing group, likes to take a morning dip in the Mediterranean Sea when he attends the Cannes Lions advertising festival. He couldn’t reach it this week as the beach was taken over by couch-strewn cabanas built for Meta, Google, WPP and others.
An event that began almost modestly 70 years ago as a spin-off of the Cannes film festival it now stretches along the Croisette on chartered yachts and in decked out mansions. It has absorbed television, streaming, social media, technology platforms, and all things advertising. It now welcomes machine learning companies like OpenAI, which created ChatGPT and Dall-E.
I sat at the beach bar of WPP to listen to Jensen Huang, CEO of the $1 trillion chip maker Nvidia promises an advertising revolution powered by generative AI. “You will create AI factories where the input is creativity and the output is content. You will generate billions of ads. . . one person at a time,” he told an enthusiastic audience of marketers.
This kind of upbeat talk is always good at Cannes: a vision of the future where corporate marketing directors can do all kinds of mind-blowing things and feel hip. Cannes Lions now invoices themselves as an “international festival of creativity” and no self-respecting creative likes to be pessimistic. In broad daylight, over a glass of rosé, AI seemed less of a threat to the job than an attractive possibility.
But watch out for the AI hangover. The latest tech revolution in ads that promised magical efficiency and precise consumer targeting was automated ad buying on the Web. Basically, the ad tech industry, dominated from companies like Google, it’s been a distinctly mixed blessing.
About a quarter of the $88 billion spent on automated advertising buying by US advertisers is wasted, their trade group complained this week, with the average spot posted on 44,000 websites, some of them disreputable. “We went down the niche audience route with programmatic advertising a decade ago and were seduced by technology,” noted Peter Mears, who heads media agencies at Havas.
Generative AI undoubtedly has uses on the creative side of advertising. One is that it can help small businesses rise above the big marketing investors of Mars, Diageo, and the like. The creative brains of the agencies taking over the best hospitality spots in Cannes this week tend to be expensive to hire: they have to pay for all those parties somehow.
I came across a couple of examples, one on Sirius XM, the US radio station. It plans to use AI to produce ads for smaller businesses, giving them AI-generated presentation choices and then having their choice read by an AI voice, rather than expensive “voice talent.” The result is unlikely to be as convincing as a human production, but it will be cheaper and faster.
Similarly, marketing group McCann Worldgroup has used artificial intelligence to Do 42,000 signs and individual menus for 8,400 Mexican hot dog and hamburger stand owners who are customers of his client Bimbo, the bakery group. While having an AI-designed fast food display may not put you on par with McDonald’s or KFC, it all helps.
AI can also help in the inefficient business of designing campaigns for big companies. Instead of many initial ideas being poked around by hand, they can be crafted by AI and then discarded, or stored in a database for future use, when one or two are chosen. Humans would have produced the final ad anyway, with the routine things automated.
But most of the excitement at Cannes was about moving beyond such AI infusions. He was concerned with Huang’s vision of infinite fragmentation, or what OpenAI chief operating officer Brad Lightcap called a “Cambrian explosion” of creativity. (We met at a cafe because OpenAI is so new to town that it was missing a hut, but give it time.)
The idea is that marketers no longer have to show the same ads to different people, regardless of who they are or what they’re doing at the time. AI has the potential to dramatically reduce the cost of making small changes, from colors to shapes to background music, based on our preferences and situation. If I’m digitally signed up to purchase purple shirts, I’m likely to see purple.
This tickles advertisers, but there are some obvious pitfalls. One is that too much intimacy quickly becomes creepy. I don’t mind getting ads on Instagram for similar brands, but if all those ads started mirroring me, it would look sinister. There are limits to how deeply I want the model to learn.
Beyond that, I wonder if it’s worth it. Nvidia’s chips may be capable of processing billions of individual ads, but there’s not much reason to buy ice cream or ketchup. In fact, we mostly eat them for the same reason as everyone else, and that’s how advertising has always worked. It may sound exciting to splinter ads, but does it make sense?
In the meantime, my condolences to the juries responsible for presenting the Cannes Lions awards in another decade. If there really are billions of potential voices by then, they’ll need the help of artificial intelligence.
https://www.ft.com/content/1bbdf744-b0c5-4d8d-8c1e-f7cd95ad5658
—————————————————-