• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, Yesterday

Spending a few days in Cannes this week reminds me why the advertising business is a fun one. It’s because of the creativity -- and the people that exhibit that creativity.

Of course, Cannes Lions is a “festival of creativity,” but really, it’s a festival about people.  The people who comprise the industry are passionate, they are exciting, and they are energetic.  They love what they do, and who they get to do it with.  The media and advertising world is vibrant, and that vibrancy can be infectious.  It creates a community that is strong and keeps you coming back year after year.

MediaPost does great events through the year too, on topics ranging from data and programmatic to retail or CPG. Once again, though,  the focal point is not solely the content, but rather the people that attend.  It’s always about the people and the flair they bring that makes it fun. 

Which brings me back to the primary topic of conversation in Cannes:  AI.  Compared to last year, the tone and tenor of those conversations have changed, however.  Last year it was still exciting for people to discuss how they were using these tools as a productivity boon and a time-saver.  Now some of those conversations have shifted to discussing training and responsibilities -- training people to use AI tools and get to a place where their roles are still valuable. 

There’s been buzz about the changes being made in the holding companies and top-tier agencies. Most of the people here are the ones doing the actual work -- and they are fearful their roles could be eliminated as those agencies pivot toward embracing AI.  Also, many ad-tech companies are proclaiming that their tools are based in AI -- but that’s been happening for years, whether it was true or not.  This Cannes Lions is about the intersection of creativity, the people that create, and the AI that threatens whether they will still be tasked to create in the coming years.

In my opinion, creativity is not, and will not be, threatened by AI.  I use AI tools every day in my role as a marketer, but  I’m not convinced it could replace me anytime soon.  I use it to draft press releases and narrative documents, but these outputs are still based on my ideas and creative opinions. My time is still spent refining and editing AI content into something streamlined, more natural, and simply better.  The closest to AI replacing humans is when AI is used to create content intended for an AI to read. For example, It’s easy for SEO content to be created by an AI and used to feed into an AI -- but SEO has not been a topic at Cannes Lions for some 15 years, and therefore is not truly a threat to the core business.

Cannes Lions is still about people, regardless how much of the conversation is dominated by AI. No AI would ever attend such a spectacle of an event.  Events will always survive because people need to be around people. That’s when creativity rises up, and people develop some of their best ideas.