Reset with AI
AI can make challenging ideas realistic, give low-budget work the option to scale and can allow brands to react to topical issues with speed. Don’t let the complexity of the technology confound you – artificial intelligence can facilitate human connections.
AI with a human touch
Speakers at this year’s Festival were aligned: despite the numerous advantages offered by AI, human insights will continue to power impactful creativity. The advice was to use AI like any other tech or tool. As David Droga, CEO of Accenture Song and this year’s Dan Wieden Titanium Lions Jury President, said when referring to 2023’s four Titanium Lion winners: “The best ideas were made possible because of technology. But they weren’t technology ideas.”
More Cannes Lions Awards entries than ever used AI. Some 7.3% of all 2023 entries mentioned AI in their synopses compared with 3.7% in 2022.
Lion-winning work showed how AI can enable human connection. For instance, Creative Commerce Lions Grand Prix winner, HungerStation’s ‘The Subconscious Order’, by Wunderman Thompson, Riyadh, used AI to solve human indecision over what food to order on a delivery app. The face-tracking, data-crunching aspects were kept behind the scenes, creating, in the opinion of Creative Commerce Lions Jury President Nancy Crimi-Lamanna, Chief Creative Officer, FCB Canada, “such a beautiful human experience that you couldn’t help but engage with it”.
THE SUBCONSCIOUS ORDER | HUNGERSTATION
WUNDERMAN THOMPSON, RIYADH | 2023 GRAND PRIX CREATIVE COMMERCE LIONS
THE SUBCONSCIOUS ORDER | HUNGERSTATION
WUNDERMAN THOMPSON, RIYADH | 2023 GRAND PRIX CREATIVE COMMERCE LIONS
With ‘The Outside In Experiment’, Silver Pharma Lion winner Horizon Therapeutics put words from gout patients describing their pain into an AI image generator to convey their experience, showing how AI can help to inform craft. The visually arresting work was by Area 23, an IPG Health Network Company, New York.
And Samsung Spain’s ‘Unfear’, by Cheil Worldwide, Madrid, used AI to help people on the autism spectrum be more comfortable in loud spaces, facilitating connection in the real world as well as with the brand. It took Silver in both the Sustainable Development Goals Lions and the Brand Experience & Activation Lions.
Infusing ideas with humanity is key. As Samantha Hernández Díaz, Creative Data Lions Jury President and Chief Strategy Officer at GUT, Mexico City, said: “You can find a really smart way of experimenting with tech, but that’s not the same as having a creative idea.”
THE OUTSIDE IN EXPERIMENT: WASPS | HORIZON THERAPEUTICS
AREA 23, AN IPG HEALTH NETWORK COMPANY, NEW YORK | 2023 SILVER PHARMA LIONS
Robert Wong
Vice-President | Google Creative Lab
Speaking at Google's session 'Bold and Responsible: The Creative and Transformational Possibilities of AI'
"The most important ingredient in AI is not AI, it’s humans. It’s all of us."
Make helpfulness the main focus of your AI initiatives. Drive brand engagement by helping to solve real-life problems.
Brand-building: an unfinished business
“ChatGPT’s ability to mimic human dialogue and decision-making is not something we’ve seen before,” said Lan Guan, Global Data and AI Lead, Accenture Song. Brands need to harness this type of conversational connection. Emma Chiu, Global Director of Wunderman Thompson Intelligence, explained that brands can experiment with virtual brand ambassadors. Not just chatbots, or hired virtual influencers, but brand representatives rooted in AI that can evolve as they interact with customers, so that each person’s virtual representative can learn their preferences and become hyper-personalised. This type of collaborative AI is already happening on Twitch. Fans of Neuro-sama, a virtual streamer who plays Minecraft, can interact with her via the chat, so “the community is able to shape her personality,” said Gemma Battenbough, Twitch Brand Partnership Studio Lead.
These new-wave AIs aren’t immune to hateful inputs, so brands need to factor that in. But they shouldn't be scared to loosen their grip: giving fans and customers ownership over the brand will deepen their relationship with it. “Designing and building brands is becoming a lot more open-ended,” said R/GA’s Global Chief Creative Officer Tiffany Rolfe. “A brand is more of an iterative work in progress… it’s not a finished work of art that needs guarding.” Rolfe suggests ditching the ‘brand bible’ model, in favour of one “that’s constantly evolving”.
NO NEW NORMAL: REWIRING CREATIVITY FOR AN UNIMAGINABLE FUTURE
EMMA CHIU | GLOBAL DIRECTOR WUNDERMAN THOMPSON INTELLIGENCE
Tom Morton
Global Chief Strategy Officer | R/GA
Speaking at the session 'Building Your Brand as an Operating System'
"You have to build and design your brand with the expectation that it’s going to be changing shape."
Adopt a ‘never finished’ approach. Effective creative work keeps iterating. Involve your audience and make sure their voices are heard.
Bye bye blank page
“AI is great at getting creatives unstuck,” said Margaret Johnson, Chief Creative Officer at Goodby Silverstein & Partners. Creatives paralysed by a blank page can throw a few prompts into a generative AI system to get a starting point. “The limiter is your imagination,” said Brad Lightcap, Chief Operating Officer at OpenAI. These tools are there for experimentation; play with them and see their potential. Ogilvy UK Vice-Chairman Rory Sutherland said: “What we want as marketers is artificial inquisitiveness, not artificial intelligence… because it’s the outlier that’s interesting to us.” AI isn’t going to change the power of a wild idea. In fact, as we pull more from the past via generative AI, the value of genuinely new ideas is going to increase. “If you want to create value, be audacious,” advised Nick Law, Creative Chairperson at Accenture Song. “Because average is going to come for free.” Food delivery app PedidosYa used AI in an emotional push off the back of Argentina’s World Cup victory. In its Mobile Lions Grand Prix-winning 'World Cup Delivery' work by GUT, Buenos Aires, the brand sent six million push notifications informing its customers that the cup itself was on its way home. This built its brand in a crowded sector without PedidosYa or GUT having to write a single line of code.
WORLD CUP DELIVERY | PEDIDOSYA
GUT, BUENOS AIRES | 2023
David Droga
CEO | Accenture Song Jury President | Dan Wieden Titanium Lions
"Generative AI will bring up best practices for everybody, but it’s not going to create next practices or fresh practices – that's the responsibility of the human, the imagination, the creative, and they can work together."
Use AI when you’re facing a blank page or a flashing cursor. Be open to where it takes you in terms of a prompt for your creativity.
BrandGPT
AI is becoming intertwined with daily lives everywhere; it’s no longer confined to the tech community. “I believe all creative people need to be idea engineers,” said Jean Lin, Global Chief Culture Officer at Dentsu Group Inc. and Jury President for the Sustainable Development Goals Lions. “You need to understand how your idea will be empowered by new tech around the world.” Current AI tech can already elevate creativity, and partnerships are useful, but companies can also construct bespoke AI tools. Rather than using “homogenous, pre-trained AI models”, such as ChatGPT and Midjourney, OK Tomorrow Founder and CEO Nilesh Ashra said: “We could build small, bespoke AI.” Gucci’s marketing team, for example, could train a generative, LLM algorithm using its 100 years of brand legacy, then use this highly intelligent, highly specific tool at the centre of its creative process. In Google's session, 'Bold And Responsible: The Creative And Transformational Possibilities of AI', Google VP, Creative, Robert Wong, showed how feeding a few brand assets into an AI could generate new brand assets, including an entire pixelated world from Google's pixelated dinosaur. "Imagine what any brand could do," he said.
ROBERT WONG | VP, CREATIVE | GOOGLE
YOUR FINAL THOUGHT:
Use generative AI to bring ideas to life or build an engine to inspire and power future creations. It is already unlocking a new level of creativity, but only with human input. As Jonathan Johnsongriffin, Vice-President and Head of Global Brand Creative, Brand Studio Google, summed up: “We can say AI stands for artificial intelligence or we can say it stands for audacious imagination. Creatives have to be the ones to make it fly.”