Welcome to an unparalleled helicopter view of the 70th edition of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. This Wrap-Up will share the creative insights and expertise from across the stages, as well as spotlighting winning work.
AI was everywhere. One 2022 Lion-winner that used AI at scale, ‘Shah Rukh Khan-My-Ad’ for Mondelēz in India, returned to take the Creative Effectiveness Lions Grand Prix, showing how AI can help deliver business growth. This year, AI was referenced in the synopsis of 8.3% of winning entries, up from 4% in 2022, and was referred to across the stage sessions as a tool that can enhance creativity.
Google discussed the prevalence of AI in a Lumière session. James Manyika, Google’s SVP, Research, Technology and Society, drew a parallel to art and photography, explaining how photography, rather than obliterating painting, ended up complementing it. In the same way, AI will be additive to creativity, eventually evolving into an art form of its own. You can read more from Google in its Foreword below.
Other themes that dominated this year’s Festival included a plea to go back to the basics of building brands. In the first section of this report, you can learn how heritage brands are successfully leveraging what makes them unique, while new models and frameworks of creative communication are modernising brand experience.
Central to that brand experience is often how brands show up authentically within communities. Over the past few years at the Festival and in the winning work, there has been a focus on building fandoms. This year, we saw how those investments in highly targeted groups were really paying off through some of the winning work, especially Clash Of Clans’ ‘Clash From The Past’, by Wieden+Kennedy, Portland, the inaugural winner of the Entertainment Lions for Gaming.
Communities, creators and influencers, when used well, continue to offer effective ways for brands to engage. The ‘Community-first creativity’ section in this report will show you what best practice looks like.
The Creative Impact track, curated by LIONS in partnership with WARC, our sister company and the authority on marketing effectiveness, reinforced the relationship between creativity and business growth. It gave the Festival audience tips and tricks on how to build a culture of creative effectiveness in their own organisations. The track was designed to help delegates articulate the business case for investing in creativity and demonstrate the impact creativity has had on businesses. We share the highlights from the track in the ‘Go for growth’ section.
Finally, brands are navigating their way through multiple crises at once – that’s become the normal way of working. Our last section, ‘Seize the future’, shows how to work in a more agile way to cope with the polycrisis.
Foreword from Google
“We’re all at the beginning of this AI journey. No one has all the answers. AI is just raw clay. It takes people with curiosity, creativity and compassion to harness AI’s rich potential.” Robert Wong, VP Creative Lab | Google
We are living in a time of unprecedented change and opportunity. Artificial intelligence is already having a profound impact on the world around us, transforming products, accelerating scientific research, improving healthcare, and changing the creative landscape.
At Cannes Lions this year, our industry’s energy and excitement for the potential that AI brings was palpable. We learn from LIONS that this year saw a huge increase in award entries using AI. Nearly 2,000 Cannes Lions award entries cited AI in their synopses, more than three times the number cited in 2022. We also heard the concerns — around jobs and trustworthiness.
The next chapter on AI is just beginning, and will impact us all. We will continue to work with the industry to meet challenges head on as we collaborate to unlock the creative and transformational possibilities of AI.
Google has been an AI-first company since 2016. Across our business we’re using AI to be helpful to people and benefit society. AI enables us to supercharge what creativity can achieve, building on human strengths and reinforcing the powerful connections that brands forge with people. With generative AI, marketers have a rapidly expanding set of AI-powered tools with the potential to revolutionise every single part of marketing — from how we gather insights, brainstorm ideas, and generate content, to how we connect with people, drive growth, and measure performance.
At Google, we’re taking a bold and responsible approach to AI. This is a collective effort and we are excited to partner with the industry to address the opportunities and answer the questions around AI for people, businesses, and society.