Cannes Lions 2023: key takeaways for marketers
Generative AI: Adland’s frenemy, or marketers’ partner?
Generative AI was certainly the buzzword of the week and there was certainly a danger of becoming obsessed with the latest shiny trend. Marketers maintained their focus, raising above discussions on how generative AI will unlock creativity, instead moving the goalposts to whether and how the latest developments in generative AI can unlock commercial growth for the brands they look after. Generative AI is yet another tool in the marketers’ toolkit – with huge potential to bring efficiency, scale, and if leveraged cleverly, even commercial impact.
Generative AI ads didn’t grab many Lions this year (despite there being a specific AI storytelling track in Digital Craft). That signals that adland is just beginning to engage with generative AI and we will surely see more entries next year.
This year’s Grand Prix winner in Creative Effectiveness demonstrates what we see every year, that creative agencies can leverage the latest tech in ways that benefit brands as well as communities. Cadbury’s Shah Rukh Khan-My-Ad combined the power of a Bollywood celebrity with AI. Shah Rukh Khan – a Bollywood celebrity – was featured in a Diwali ad for Cadbury asking people to stop by specific small businesses, who faced tough recovery following the pandemic, around the holidays. Machine learning was used to create over 130,000 unique versions of the ad so that the name and location of the small business were said in Shah Rukh Khan’s voice and facial expressions. The campaign used AI to create hyper localized content in unparalleled ways, with the onset of generative AI, we are likely to see the ceiling raised on this one even further. This was also a multi-award winner last year in the Creative Data and other categories, and this demonstrates the power of a powerful and holistic campaign.
Cadbury, Shah Rukh Khan-My-Ad
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