AI technology will dominate conversations at Cannes Lions 2023 – here's why

From the rise of short-form video and the rapid adoption of generative AI, to the decline of the third-party identifiers and social media’s proliferation as the place for search and sharing, we find ourselves at the center of a creative renaissance.   

Close to half of the world’s population uses social networks monthly. Today, the average person bounces between seven different social networks per month, requiring brands to have fresh, tailored content - and a lot of it. Creative, not media, serves as the performance lever in this renaissance. 

Although much about the industry ecosystem is changing, marketers’ goals remain the same: delivering timely creative that drives conversion and conversation, all while maximizing return on ad spend (ROAS). The rise in social media consumption and the subsequent fragmentation of digital and social channels means that brand marketers must find better ways to scale creative and maximize their media investment or risk missing their goals. 

There’s no question that generative AI will play a central role in advancing the renaissance.   The technology is well on its way to dominating conversations along the Croisette in Cannes this year. And for good reason. 

AI can assist marketers with automating repetitive tasks, generating creative content, and personalizing experiences. Specifically, generative AI can help marketers save time, improve efficiency, and increase engagement. What used to take weeks, can now take minutes.

In this way generative AI serves as a co-pilot to platforms - which feeds the infrastructure that marketers, creators and even designers use, helping them to create more with less. Platforms that adapt generative AI seamlessly will ultimately create the early winners in this decades long race.

For marketers and creators, this technology makes bringing campaigns to life as easy as typing out an idea. The tech is now used for text and content generation, for optimizing code for better performing ads, and to reimagine and scale their short-form video campaigns across channels and markets. This gives any marketer / creator more freedom and a different starting point to lessen the burden, lighten the workload and shift the work to be more strategic.

While it’s now easy to generate beautiful content at the snap of a finger with the suite of recent tools announced like Adobe’s Firefly, the challenge is how to apply it across the consumer journey and actually breakthrough to customers with it? The key will be using AI technology, such as generative AI, to know when to serve creative, and how to scale and optimize for the best results.

Viewed from another angle, a paradigm shift effect of this technology will also ultimately make social media and the open web more visual, more creative and more video driven.

With the bridge between creative, intelligence and media buying already on the scene, generative AI technology has the potential to make creative the most powerful performance lever of our time.

To win in this new frontier and to lead in the next age of creativity, marketers must test and apply generative AI technology and tools as their co-pilot. The performance of your creative depends on it.

Smartly will be at Cannes Lions this year discussing generative AI in advertising, creative commerce, and smart tech solutions for bringing it all together across the social ecosystem. Read about Smartly.io’s AI Lab launch here.