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This year’s Cannes Lions festival aims to restore humor to advertising, but at the heart of a new category celebrating witty work lies a broader unease about the creative future of an industry rapidly adopting artificial intelligence tools.
For the first time, humor will be added as a category to the annual awards in the south of France, showcasing the industry’s best campaigns from the past year.
Organizers are looking for examples of “humor and satire to provide entertainment and create memorable, laugh-out-loud connections with audiences,” according to the award criteria. The festival starts on Monday.
But this new category also reflects the underlying insecurities of a sector experiencing a crisis of creativity. Industry executives say it will help highlight the importance of the human element in advertising, with AI struggling to create funny advertising campaigns that combine creativity with irreverence and silliness.
“AI can produce jokes, but they aren’t very funny yet,” says Rory Sutherland, vice chairman of Ogilvy UK. “Which I think is evidence that there’s still a missing human connection – a level of shared understanding in AI that isn’t quite there yet.”
This missing piece – the importance of human creativity – will be the talking point on the Cannes Croisette this week, as the big advertising agencies show off their latest investments in AI.
Agencies from Havas and Publicis to WPP and Dentsu will all unveil plans to adopt and integrate AI, putting new technology at the heart of how advertising managers plan, create and roll out campaigns.
Executives say AI technology is proving useful in creating realistic images at scale and optimizing ads for use across platforms, from social media to TV and billboards.
AI has already started to replace some jobs, insiders say, such as quickly finding images and simulating potential campaigns – work that would once have taken days can now be done in hours.
However, executives are also eager to take advantage of the additional benefits that great creative minds can bring to advertising. According to executives, humorous campaigns can often prove more effective.
Karen Martin, boss of British advertising agency BBH, says this year could see the “return of funny”, with humor a rarer differentiator in the advertising world than it used to be.
BBH is launching a campaign for Paddy Power this month around the Euro 2024 football tournament featuring English actor Danny Dyer, which aims to find the humor in being an England fan.
“Some of the best commercials always made you laugh,” she said, adding that it also served as a counterpoint to the more down-to-earth economic, political and social issues in news and current affairs. “Can advertising make you laugh in a world of permanent crisis? We have lost our way a bit.”
The introduction of a humor category also reflects a second shift in tone at Cannes this year, with many executives frustrated by what they see as a focus on awarding prizes to tougher, more targeted work rather than effective campaigns that better serve to sell. products and brands.
According to Kantar, the research firm, the use of humor in advertising has steadily declined over the past two decades, with the pandemic accelerating this decline in usage. This slide has occurred despite humor being the “most powerful creative amplifier of receptivity,” says Kantar, which is more expressive, engaging and clear.
Simon Cook, chief executive of Cannes Lions, the event’s organizer, agreed there was a return to the use of humor in this year’s campaigns, after several years of “more serious, somber” work.
Many of the top-rated ads in this year’s Super Bowl — a banner event for the creative advertising industry — attempted to use humor.
“Humor works,” Cook said. “We will see the continued renaissance of humor this year. The kind of foolishness, silliness and irreverence we would expect from human creativity.”
“There is a shift towards effectiveness,” says Miranda Hipwell, managing director of adam&eveDDB, as marketing bosses are under pressure to show their boards the value of spending on creative campaigns.
“Ads have been trying to make people cry for a while now. But making them laugh can be just as effective,” Hipwell said. “Whatever the emotion, campaigns must deliver results and not just be targeted.”
However, she also warned how difficult it was to be “funny globally” as not all regions find the same things humorous.
It can also be divisive given how subjective the humor can be, as evidenced last week by a short film launched by advertising agency Publicis, featuring many of the world’s top AI experts and advertising executives.
Described by Publicis boss Arthur Sadoun in an email as a “not so serious film” about Cannes’ AI hype, some of the film’s stars didn’t see the funny side, advertisers said.