After a 2-year hiatus due to the Covid pandemic, the ad industry’s 5-star luxury version of Burning Man, the Cannes International Festival of Creativity, finally brought ad industry folk together in person again.
We can’t give you the yachts, or the fancy cocktails, or the beautiful people – but we can give you the top six news and trends from the festival on the sunny and warm Côte d’Azur.
1. Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Advertising: At the top of everybody’s agenda was the question of how to use AI and large-language models (LLM) such as ChatGPT to automate the workflow, improve creative work, create millions of personalized ads, and target ads more precisely.
2. Sustainability: Brands are increasingly emphasizing sustainability and using advertising to communicate their environmental commitments. Even more importantly, players in digital advertising have come to realize just how wasteful the current programmatic ecosystem is. How can we reduce the amount of cycles needed to optimize programmatic? How can we reduce traffic? Leading the charge is Scope3’s Brian O’Kelley of AppNexus fame.
3. TikTok Ambivalence: Buyers on the one hand love TikTok for it’s ability to reach the Zoomer audience. On the other, they’re wary of TikTok for its addictiveness (potentially bad PR), its lacking protection of minors (same) and it’s murky relationship with China’s Communist Party (same).
4. Twitter’s Pitch: Elon Musk’s company, in dire need of more brand advertising revenue, highlighted its brand-safety measures. Surprisingly, neither Musk nor Twitter’s new CEO Linda Yaccarino attended Cannes. But then, perhaps brand advertisers are already coming back even without the company’s two top-tier VIPs. Chris Riedy, Twitter’s VP, Global Sales and Marketing, tweeted that “more than 75% of 2022’s Top 100 advertisers have returned to paid media on Twitter”.
5. Meta’s Pitch: The company also highlighted brand safety in its presentations, AI in advertising, and an increased availability of inventory on its Reels platform (Meta’s TikTok clone, which seems just as seedy as its competitor).
6. Lagging The Trends: Brands and agencies highlighted the use of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in advertising, exploring how to utilize them for limited-edition products, exclusive experiences, and gamified marketing campaigns. Likewise, the Metaverse was featured as one future of advertising. But of course, both of these presentations seem strangely out of time. NFTs became hot in 2021, and Meta announced its Metaverse foray in 2022 – a year later, brands and agencies finally have something to show. But by now, it is clear that NFTs will remain a niche application, and that there is no consumer use-case in sight for virtual reality products save for a handful of gamers. All focus should be on AI, ML, and LLMs.
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