• by Maarten Albarda , Featured Contributor, Yesterday

So the 2025 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is ending today, June 20. Depending on whom you listen to or follow, it was either a joyous celebration of creativity, a journey to explore the edges of what martech is capable of --  or a week filled with doomsday warnings about the end of creativity, agencies and marketing jobs, because… AI.

All these takeaways are true.

Let’s keep the best for last, and start with the doomsday scenarios. MediaPost’s Joe Mandese reported this week about the ominous and dire forecasts for our industry, quoting Just Capital chair and former PayPal CEO Dan Schulman: “I don’t think many of us have fully intellectualized in our brain and accepted in our heart that everything is going to change in like a three-year time frame and we’re going to see a collapse of the 21st Century – a hundred years of progress – that will happen in the next five years.”

An opinion piece in another ad trade noted: “AI is transforming every aspect of marketing: insights, creative, content, media, targeting, and optimization. Meta, Google, TikTok, Amazon, Microsoft and others are all building toward a future where marketers contribute little beyond budget inputs. This is not hype, it’s the roadmap.”

In a roundup of opinions about Cannes and AI, Matt Weiss, former Huge executive, stated that we are beginning to reach “AI maturity, from novelty to infrastructure," a sentiment echoed by Winston Binch, chief brand and experience officer at GALE, who said “As economic uncertainty persists, I expect efficiency will take center stage—particularly in how AI is applied. We’re moving beyond the hype cycle into a phase of real commercial adoption.”

You can see how the last two opinions are slightly more optimistic, while the first two are decidedly not. Personally, I feel myself ebbing and flowing back and forth between both feelings. And both versions of our future are probably true.

So let’s instead focus on the real reason for the ad festival season: award-winning creative. The first thing to note is that despite the dystopian future for agencies and their holding companies, many winners came from well-known network legacy agencies such as Grey, DDB, W&K and BBDO. And the clients for which the work was created were also largely legacy brands such as Stella Artois (about 600 years old), Heinz Ketchup (156 years old), Coca-Cola (133 years old) and Volvo (98 years old). Even the Creative Advertiser Of The Year was not all that new: 49-year-old Apple won it for the second time (first in 2019). There was of course also plenty of work nominated from in-house agencies, for new and edgy businesses and brands, as well as work by some smaller, independent agencies, or challenger brands.

But by and large, the celebrated work would have you believe that agency networks and their clients are still killing it. Sure, we might tussle about procurement and KPIs, but the 2025 list of brands, agencies and winners does not read dramatically differently from the list of, say, five years ago.

So that is when I feel optimistic. Perhaps Rishad Tobaccowala was right when he said a long time ago that agencies are like cockroaches: experts on finding ways to adapt, figuring out how to find their next meal, and surviving. Perhaps AI will drive out many cockroaches -- but it’s perhaps inevitable that they will always be part of the ecosystem.