The AI low-down at Cannes Lions 2025
AI Creativity Panel at Cannes Lions 2025
The ‘Olympics of Advertising’ combines a week long advertising award show, keynote speakers, product launches, lunches, yachts and celebrity parties. Here’s what we took out of it.
“Human” was the biggest buzzword of 2025
Apple’s Tor Myhren opened the festival at the Palais with the ‘Case for Human Creativity’, his slides were hand illustrated (on an iPad) and his thesis that ‘Human touch is the super-power for marketers was a big theme echoed in a lot of the discussions over the week. “You drive; AI rides shotgun” was his advice to creatives working with AI.
B2B Adtech marketing mainly sucks
Cannes provides a captive audience of B2C marketers, so it’s a key moment for B2B companies in the adtech space who want to shout about their new AI product.
The problem is this is a sophisticated audience and the majority of adtech marketing looks like someone has thrown as many buzzwords as they can onto a giant poster.
This approach doesn’t work with communications professionals who spend a lot of time finessing every vowel, and it’s made worse when all these posters are next to each other.
What does it mean? Who is it for?
B2B Adtech marketers would do very well to work with the same agencies that B2C marketers use.
AI Video is still really hard
AI generated video was the hot topic of conversation from the platforms and startups. We got a sneak preview of LTXs new studio product and it was impressive. However if you’re trying to originate video with the level of control that big brands need, we’re not there yet.
Keep the Glitches
AI’s got a tendency to make everything a little too smooth and bland, as creatives get more experience with AI video they are learning to keep the tension through making things imperfect. From a character stumbling as they walk or a slightly off frame shot, keep the glitches to make things less bland.
Make engines not campaigns
In a great talk from R/GA’s Tiffany Rolfe, she demonstrated how they’re shifting from making one off adverts into building generative story engines. Think of it like a creative mail merge, taking what you know about the client with a modular script and an AI engine trained on the brand.
Uber-ization of AI
With a single short Veo3 clip costing $6 in compute power to create, there’s a narrative that we’re being deeply undercharged for AI to get us hooked before the prices go up. When Uber launched in Manhattan you could get across the city for $4, the price / value combination was so compelling everyone got on board. When the price went up, the habit was built.
