Dubbed the ‘biggest week in marketing’, this year’s Cannes Lions Festival saw global brands and tech giants converge on the French coastal resort to showcase some eye-popping innovations in advertising, helped along by splashy campaigns and celebrity cameos.

But behind the glitz and glamour, this year’s festival made one thing abundantly clear – the marketing industry is fighting for relevance against the quiet, relentless march of AI, with the only question being whether today’s marketers will harness the emerging tech, or be outpaced by it. 

Scraped, Summarised, Forgotten

With the impact of genAI dominating nearly every stage, the overriding feeling of the festival was more of a battleground than a celebration, as influential speakers from both marketing and tech outlined just how precarious this moment is for the industry.

Cloudflare CEO Mattew Prince summed up the problem best when talking about how embedded AI tools have abruptly changed the online advertising environment, and left content creators reeling.

Prince told the Cannes crowd that just a decade ago, content creators could count on Google to send back one visitor for every two pages it scraped, a healthy return for publishers and marketers. But six months ago, that ratio had dropped to one in six.

Today, it’s already plummeted to just one visitor for every 18 pages scraped.

The cause behind this collapse in traffic? According to Prince, it’s Google’s AI-embedded overviews, which, by his estimate, see 90% of queries to the world’s biggest search engine answered without anyone clicking on a blue link. 

OpenAI’s return ratio is even worse, at 1,500 pages scraped per visitor, while Anthropic’s is an almost unbelievable 60,000 to one.

The takeaway is essentially that no one is following the footnotes. People now trust AI to such an extent that Prince argued the technology could soon kill off content creation altogether. 

“If you believe that the business model of original content creation is driving visitors to that content, I have a really bad story for you,” he said.

“The future of the web is going to be more and more like AI, and that means people are going to be reading the summaries of your content, not your content.”  

Humanity is a Competitive Edge

Elsewhere, Cannes speakers were more optimistic about the future of web-based marketing, with AI being discussed less as the advertising industry’s grim reaper and more like rocket-fuel for a newly emerging creator economy.

Industry leaders spoke about the competitive edge that uniquely human traits like humour, empathy and storytelling can offer business, with executives from big brands like Disney, LVMH and Procter & Gamble agreeing that while AI can offer a ‘hamster wheel’ of content, it can’t replace the emotional heart of a marketer’s work.

“Making people laugh is one of the strongest superpowers you have as an advertiser,” argued Chris Charles, executive creative director at digital communications firm 21GRAMS.

For those left fearing the AI boom, Cannes thought leaders had a simple message. Marketers should use the technology to take more risks, focus their strategies, and adapt to consumers’ shifting expectations. Advice echoed across every industry being overturned by AI.

As Apple’s VP of marketing communications, Tor Myhren, told Cannes’ audience: “The good news is, AI is not going to kill advertising. The bad news is, AI is not going to save advertising. We’ve got to save ourselves.”

Think Like Marketers, Act Like Creators

Across the board, executives from tech firms and big brands were clear that winning in this new, AI-powered environment will take a cultural shift defined by how brands choose to innovate.

First, marketers should prioritise creativity over efficiency, with research showing that brands taking this approach enjoy a 2.7% bump in profits and 4.7% rise in market caps that their peers.

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One of Cannes’ award winners provides the perfect example of this in action. Beauty brand Dove won the Media award this year for a campaign that turned AI bias into an interactive experience, allowing users on Pinterest to navigate an endless scroll of diverse images to pick those that resonated with their definition of beauty.

Those were then transformed into a custom video with one-click integration so users could save their selections directly to Pinterest boards, influencing the platform’s algorithm and promoting a shift towards ‘natural beauty’. 

The success of Dove’s innovative ad campaign drove a 2.9-point brand lift, as well as outperforming Pinterest’s CPG benchmarks by 25%.

As well as showing what’s possible when AI is combined with human ingenuity, the Dove campaign is evidence that incorporating technology doesn’t necessarily mean losing the creative tension that leads to breakthrough ideas.

“You need to partner with aliens and heretics…with people you don’t quite understand and people you don’t agree with,” said Nick Law, creative chairperson with Accenture Song 

“Get some friction back in this bloody industry.”