Cannes Lions is next month and I already know what the deck is going to look like. Every case study will mention AI. Every agency will claim to be at the forefront of AI-powered creativity. Every panel will feature someone with "Head of AI" in their title saying vaguely profound things about human-machine collaboration. And I am already tired.
Not because AI is not important. It obviously is. But because the advertising industry has a pathological habit of turning every genuine technological shift into a buzzword arms race that drowns out any actual insight about what the technology means for the work.
We have seen this movie before.
2016: "Everything is VR." (It was not.) 2018: "Everything is blockchain." (It very much was not.) 2020: "Everything is purpose." (Partially, temporarily.) 2022: "Everything is the metaverse." (Absolutely not.) 2024: "Everything is AI."
The pattern is always the same. New technology emerges. Early experiments are genuinely interesting. The awards circuit incentivizes everyone to attach the buzzword to their existing work whether it is meaningfully relevant or not. The resulting inflation of claims devalues the term. And then we move on to the next thing without ever fully reckoning with what the last thing actually changed.
The problem with AI-washing at Cannes:
When every entry claims AI, the conversation stops being about whether the AI made the work better and starts being about who can tell the most compelling origin story about their AI usage. The craft becomes the narrative about the tool rather than the quality of the output.
I do not care that you used AI. I care that the work is good. I care that it moved people. I care that it solved a genuine business problem. The tool is the tool. The work is the work. These are different things.
What I actually want to see at Cannes this year:
Work that used AI in a way that was genuinely impossible without it. Not "faster" or "cheaper" versions of things humans already do well. Actual new creative territory that only exists because this technology unlocked it. That is the work worth celebrating.
I also want to see honesty about what AI did not do. The strategic thinking. The cultural insight. The human intuition that said "this is the right idea for this moment." Those are still human contributions and they still matter, arguably more than ever when execution is being commoditized.
A plea from a strategist:
Can we please, as an industry, skip the part where we spend three years pretending AI changes everything about advertising and then quietly admit it changed some specific things about workflow and production while the fundamental challenges of connecting with humans remained stubbornly human? Can we just go directly to the honest assessment and save ourselves the whiplash?
Probably not. That would not make for very good panel descriptions.
I will be following Cannes from Portland, drinking coffee and reading the trades, waiting for the one or two pieces of work that are genuinely transcendent regardless of what tools made them. That is always the real list. It is always shorter than the awards suggest.
That is always the real list.