• by Joe Mandese , Yesterday

Tuesday's sessions at the Cannes Lions festival got off on one of my favorite subjects: time and space. No, not the media inventory kind, but the way human being experience them.

"Brands have mastered time travel," Edelman AI Product Manager Sydney Watson explained during her "New Voices" presentation, which ran a relatively short period of time, but nonetheless made an impression on attendees, because her message was about how brands need to focus less on traveling backward and forward in time, but remaining fixed in the present with their consumers.

"We know how to make people miss something. And we know how to make people want something. We are excellent," she explained, adding, "It's selling memory and anticipation. But the generations raised on algorithms aren't craving   better recommendations, better prediction, or better personalization. They're starving for present.

"It's important to note that the present is not always better. It is not always Pleasant. It is not always preferable. And it is certainly not controllable. It can't be perfectly predicted, scripted or contained. But it is the only place where life is felt. And experience becomes real. And that is something AI can simulate, but never actually live. That's the creative opportunity -- not just model and predict behavior -- but to deepen what is happening now."

It was at least the second Lions presentation in as many days that dwelled on the nature of time and especially the value brands can play in enhancing the moments consumers spend with them. Dentsu addressed a similar theme on Monday, and asserted it was the core of Japan's "creative code."

As for space, that theme was touched on extensively during the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs' "Space Isn't The Future -- It's Your Brief" presentation, which concluded with astronaut Sian Leo Proctor asking festival attendees for a show of hands if they wanted to travel to space (see below).