Recapping Cannes 2024: AI, Authenticity, and a Transforming Industry

As the dust settles from this year’s festival of creativity, main themes emerge. Perhaps the clearest is that a connection must be drawn between the informal conversations happening on the beach around topics like AI and emerging technology to the traditional creative work on display and earning recognition in the Palais. 

To do my part in sustaining the momentum of these conversations beyond the Croisette to the entire industry at large, here are my main takeaways from Cannes 2024.

We have a lot of work to do on AI. Although AI was the hot topic in 2023, the conversation remains fresh, notably matured from a year ago. While it is imperative to understand our legal obligations, industry leaders should lean into the ethics of artificial intelligence. What kind of world do we want the models trained on? How do we contribute to a future with unbiased data and generative outputs?

The industry is in the midst of a transformation. While Cannes Lion winners may have been heralded as provocative deviations from the norm, they still represented traditional creative overall. DoorDash’s superbowl ad is one such example, taking home a titanium lion for the way it represented an overhaul of its business model despite coming to life in a very traditional medium, the Super Bowl ad. Wins like this suggest that even the main stage is aware that the industry must adapt alongside our business partners.

Everything is commerce, and everything is creative. It’s tempting to distinguish our work into categories like retail or social, but they often converge into one brand experience. Finding ways to deliver unified commerce experiences continues to be an important topic as brands explore effective strategies for shoppable content and loyalty programs.

Authenticity performs. We often talk about authenticity in clichés because it’s difficult to measure, even when inauthenticity is easily recognized. Many, if not all, of the Cannes Lion winners were an authentic and relevant manifestation of a brand’s purpose. While authenticity tied to a higher purpose tends to win big, like grand prix winner ORANGE by Publicis Marcel, others like More Tide remind us that authenticity need not always be serious. While authentic tied to a higher purpose tends to win big, like grand prix winner ORANGE by Publicis Marcel, others like More Tide remind us that authenticity need not always be serious. This showed up differently on the fringe of Cannes, with marketing leaders spanning retail to insurance and beyond exploring the ways modern brands must stay true to decades—sometimes even a century—of brand legacy.

While much of the work in the Palais and on the award stage represents traditional creative (just 12% of Cannes award entries in 2024 used AI), the vast majority of conversations happening on the sponsored beaches and fringe event panels were wrestling with the future: data, emerging tech, AI, and more. As the festival drew to a close, the distinct conversations seemed to converge on a shared truth: Brands that hope to remain relevant must embrace the changing times and remain focused on the human behind the numbers.