{"id":11081,"date":"2025-06-24T15:43:10","date_gmt":"2025-06-24T15:43:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/11081\/"},"modified":"2025-06-24T15:43:10","modified_gmt":"2025-06-24T15:43:10","slug":"ai-optimism-masks-ad-industrys-existential-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/11081\/","title":{"rendered":"AI Optimism Masks Ad Industry\u2019s \u2018Existential Crisis\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

AI was the undisputed hot topic among the more than 15,000 attendees at this year\u2019s sweltering five-day Cannes Lions<\/a> International Festival of Creativity.<\/p>\n

In public, CMOs and agency chiefs struck an upbeat tone, positioning the tech as a tool to supercharge human creativity, not replace it. <\/p>\n

However, as the Riviera temperature climbed, so did the tension, and multiple industry execs told ADWEEK of their quiet anxieties about what AI means for creative agencies, media buying, search, industry jobs, and established business models.<\/p>\n

On the Palais stage, optimism was in the air. Apple\u2019s Tor Myhren addressed the audience with a keynote rallying for human creativity<\/a>. Microsoft\u2019s Mustafa Suleyman spoke to former Snap CCO Colleen DeCourcy about AI\u2019s creative opportunity. Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen chatted with Publicis Groupe CEO Arthur Sadoun about how AI is empowering creative teams.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Meta, Google, Adobe, and more showed off shiny new generative AI tools along the Croisette\u2014demonstrations that fueled both curiosity and unease.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sir Martin Sorrell, industry veteran and founder of S4 Capital, told ADWEEK that the mood at Cannes was \u201cnot good,\u201d saying the 2025 festival marked the end of advertising\u2019s current \u201cgolden era.\u201d \u201cHuge changes are coming,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

Sorrell described AI\u2019s impact on the traditional ad industry as \u201cexistential,\u201d noting an exec from a major ad platform told him during a dinner they were \u201cvery concerned\u201d about AI\u2019s impact not just on advertising, but on industry employment.<\/p>\n

In May, Forrester reported that the U.S. ad industry will lose 7.5% of agency jobs <\/a>(roughly 32,000 roles) to automation by 2030. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe big theme this week [was], is AI going to upend the industry? I really worry about it,\u201d Sorrel added.<\/p>\n

Michael Ruby, president and chief creative officer at indie agency Park & Battery, watched curiously the \u201cbombastic optimism\u201d around AI that was \u201cstaunchly parroted\u201d on stage. But behind closed doors, he said the tension was palpable.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe discomfort is painfully obvious,\u201d Ruby said, echoing Sorrell: \u201cWe\u2019ve got to get over it fast, because our industry is evolving in a way it hasn\u2019t in 25 years.\u201d<\/p>\n

Agencies face a \u2018Kodak moment\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

David Jones, founder and CEO of the Brandtech Group, said the ad industry is facing its \u201cKodak moment.\u201d He didn\u2019t mince words: \u201cIf you\u2019re a creative agency, you\u2019re screwed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sorrell observed that art director and copywriting jobs were most under pressure as new tools like Google\u2019s Veo 3 produce more realistic outputs faster.\u00a0<\/p>\n

S4\u2019s Monks agency has developed entirely gen AI-created commercials for Puma and other clients currently live in the market. Such projects can be produced in a matter of days and cost as little as a few hundred thousand dollars, versus spending millions on a shoot in an exotic location.<\/p>\n

According to Jones, Brandtech has produced more than 2 million AI ads across 5,000 brands since 2018, including 235,000 in just one quarter. Jones said these ads, some made for three of the world\u2019s top 10 advertisers, were produced 62% faster, 55% cheaper, and resulted in a 40% better ROI.<\/p>\n

\u201cI can now make you TV commercials whilst we sit and talk, and they\u2019re pretty good,\u201d Jones said. \u201cOur best creative people can just do stunning stuff.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Though Jones believes it\u2019s creative agencies feeling the AI squeeze most, <\/strong>Sorrell points to the impact on media buyers, whose jobs he said \u201cwill all be done by algorithms,\u201d eventually.<\/p>\n

The S4 chief added that with the rise of AI coinciding with agency mega-consolidations, \u201cwe\u2019ll lose jobs,\u201d but the full impact has \u201cnot hit yet.\u201d <\/p>\n

\"This<\/a> <\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s going to be quite a lot of displacement,\u201d Jones agreed, predicting that long-term agencies would slim down from hundreds of thousands of staff to tens of thousands.<\/p>\n

Agencies must also develop new pricing models in an AI world, where clients are demanding personalization at scale, and at reduced costs. Charging on time and materials is no longer profitable when clients will demand work gets done quicker and with fewer people.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Some clients, for instance, pay Monks on an FTE-based retainer, but also for asset usage. Models like this will become more common in the future, Sorrell said.<\/p>\n

That shift, while logical to agency leaders, is often a hard sell to procurement execs accustomed to time-based billing, Sorrell said. \u201cThat\u2019s really tough, because the agency\u2019s fee base is effectively being reduced.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s not all downside. Though Jones believes that \u201cAI will be how 100% of all content is generated within five years,\u201d he said \u201cif you\u2019re the best at [using AI], you\u2019re going to be in a business that\u2019s growing really fast.\u201d

<\/strong>\u201cThere will be opportunity, but it\u2019s going to mean huge changes,\u201d Sorrell said, forecasting a \u201cnew golden era.\u201d<\/p>\n

One senior marketer ADWEEK bumped into on the Croisette joked ad execs were \u201cdepressed\u201d about AI\u2019s impact\u2014though, like Sorrell, they remained glass-half-full on its potential.<\/p>\n

CMOs Lean In, Cautiously<\/strong><\/p>\n

The CMOs holding the purse strings will ultimately shape what this next phase of AI adoption looks like.<\/p>\n

But according to Bain partner Philip Dowling, there\u2019s still \u201cuneven maturity\u201d\u00a0 and a \u201cwidening gulf\u201d between brands investing in the tech and those struggling to keep up.<\/p>\n

Along the Croisette, CMOs were at various stages of experimentation. Many were more bullish than their agency counterparts, but still prudent about the details, sharing softer, internal examples of AI in action throughout the week.<\/p>\n

Natalia Ball, global chief growth officer at Mars Pet Nutrition, told ADWEEK: \u201cLast year I was like, \u2018Oh my God, AI, what is it going to be like?\u2019\u201d A year later, she\u2019s \u201cnot worried.\u201d In the 12 months since the industry last convened in Cannes, Mars Petcare is already using AI to deliver personalization at scale and smarter media planning.\u00a0It\u2019s also using AI in some campaigns, including one for Temptations that dressed up cats as dogs, and another that helped pet owner hopefuls convince their partners to bring home a furry friend through slick videos.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Amazon\u2019s vp of global brand and marketing, Claudine Cheever, revealed on stage that she used the platform\u2019s AI assistant Amazon Q to develop a bot that mirrors her writing style, streamlining the creation of \u201cmore Amazonian\u201d marketing documents.<\/p>\n

Netflix is cautiously exploring the tech inside its marketing department. CMO Marian Lee told ADWEEK during a press event that her team is applying AI to support tasks such as employee reviews. It also recently used Meta\u2019s AI to localize subtitled Bridgerton campaigns across markets.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t use it for creative right now,\u201d Lee said. \u201cIn terms of creative output, it\u2019s not there yet. But it doesn\u2019t mean we\u2019re ignoring it, because every week it\u2019s pretty phenomenal how much is changing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hilton CMO Mark Weinstein called AI \u201cthe great equalizer for creative,\u201d breaking down barriers previously imposed by budgets. At the moment, Gen AI is helping Weinstein\u2019s team handle routine tasks such as photo reviews and writing copy for its 13 million hotel rooms.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere, McLaren Racing CMO Louise McEwen is using AI to manage huge volumes of content, with as much as 1.5 terabytes generated per race weekend. \u201cAI helps do the heavy lifting behind the scenes,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Banana Republic\u2019s head of marketing, Meena Anvary, described her team\u2019s conversations about AI as \u201cfuture-facing,\u201d with a focus on \u201chuman-centered\u201d applications. The apparel brand is still working out what this looks like as parent company Gap Inc. cements its own AI blueprint.<\/p>\n

Gap isn\u2019t alone. \u201cThe biggest question we\u2019re getting from clients is: how do I reshape my organization to adopt AI at scale?\u201d said Bain\u2019s Dowling.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Accenture Song\u2019s incoming CEO, Ndidi Oteh, said clients were \u201cexcited\u201d by AI but lacked the data infrastructure to implement it<\/a>. Nearly a third (30%) of Song\u2019s client engagements incorporate AI today,\u00a0a number she expects to grow<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Agencies and consultancies updated their Cannes programming to cater to clients\u2019 appetite for AI. Publicis hosted closed-door sessions for CMOs<\/a> on its AI tech, while MediaLink held invite-only forums on AI\u2019s impact. Havas declared itself an \u201cAI-driven organization fueled by human ingenuity\u201d at a press call, while WPP inked a deal with TikTok to bring more AI tools to clients.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a> A Tale of Two Cannes<\/strong><\/p>\n

While marketers and agencies have their eyes on the future, the void between their public optimism and private anxiety is hard to ignore.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Few captured that tension better than legendary Grey\u2019s Anatomy and Bridgerton showrunner Shonda Rhimes, who told press on Netflix rooftop why human creativity still matters: \u201cI\u2019m not in a place where I want to walk into a writer\u2019s room to hear what a computer has to say about how we\u2019re going to tell a story,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI still am arrogant enough to believe that a person\u2019s creativity and imagination are the most important elements in storytelling right now.\u201d<\/p>\n

If the Cannes Lions Grand Prix<\/a> winners this year were any indication, ad creatives are also still not ready to cede their human oversight to the machines\u2014and neither are the juries.<\/p>\n

Amid these seismic changes, ad creatives are largely burying their heads in the sand, Jones said. They have \u201chuge anxiety\u201d about what\u2019s to come because \u201cthey\u2019re not using the tools.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPartly out of fear, partly out of ignorance, [creatives] genuinely think that it is impossible that AI is more creative than humans,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s not a question of whether it will be; it\u2019s when.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"AI was the undisputed hot topic among the more than 15,000 attendees at this year\u2019s sweltering five-day Cannes…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":11082,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[12014,691,12015,738,12016,6334,12017,834,158,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-11081","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-agencies","9":"tag-ai","10":"tag-ai-news","11":"tag-artificial-intelligence","12":"tag-brands","13":"tag-cannes-lions","14":"tag-creative-disruption","15":"tag-general","16":"tag-technology","17":"tag-united-states","18":"tag-unitedstates","19":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114739112311239382","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11081"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11081\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}