The rosé will flow freely this week at the Cannes Lions Festival, but beneath the glitz of yacht parties and seaside panels flows a darker undercurrent: “The advertising world might be at their funeral without even realizing it,” said Geoffrey Colon, a veteran of both ad agencies and tech companies, to NYT. “Iceberg ahead.” That iceberg is AI, and it’s arriving faster than many agency execs will admit on stage.
Officially, AI will be everywhere at Cannes. On every panel and in every pitch. Unofficially, the talks on the Croisette will mask a more uncomfortable truth: the platforms (the Metas, the Googles, the Amazons) have begun building tools that might render the traditional agency irrelevant for all but the most high-concept creative briefs.
Meta’s recent announcement about fully AI-generated ads, produced without any agency involvement, sent its stock up 3%. Shares in WPP, Omnicom, and IPG fell. The message was clear. “In the not-too-distant future, we want to get to a world where any business will be able to just tell us what objective they’re trying to achieve… and then we just do the rest for them,” Mark Zuckerberg said at Meta’s annual shareholder meeting.
It’s not just Big Tech. Startups like Creatify and Streamr.AI are capitalizing on this shift by offering scalable, affordable, and lightning-fast ad generation. “Creating video ads used to take weeks, cost thousands of dollars, and require a full creative team,” said Creatify CEO Yinan Na. “So we built the first AI-powered video ad generator that can turn a product link into high-performing video ads within minutes.” The company has attracted over 1.5 million users and surpassed $9 million in annual recurring revenue in just 18 months.
Streamr.AI takes it further, automating video ads for streaming platforms by pulling in a business’s Instagram content or website URL. “I wrote a post about our blueprint for building the AGI-powered ads manager back in January,” said CEO Jonathan Moffie to VideoWeek. “So I’ve got receipts!” Streamr recently inked a partnership with SportX to bring AI-powered branded entertainment to premium sports inventory. Their pitch? Democratize access to TV and sports media for SMEs: no agency needed.
This is the reality agencies won’t talk about this week, even as they scramble to embrace the tools they fear. WPP is investing $400 million annually in AI, Publicis has acquired Influential and taken stakes in generative content companies, and Omnicom is merging with IPG in a $13 billion deal to harness AI at scale. “We’re putting [Omni AI] on every employee’s desktop in Omnicom right now,” said Jonathan Nelson, CEO of Omnicom Digital, on the Digiday podcast. The goal is to shift from time-based billing to outcome-based remuneration: if the tech delivers.
Yet even the most advanced platforms can’t outrun commoditization. When every brand uses the same tools to target the same users on the same platforms, what’s left to differentiate them? “It’s going to be bumpy,” Moffie admitted. “But in the meantime, what we’re doing is just reducing friction drastically for agency teams.”
Some are still clinging to the belief that human creativity will find new ways to matter. “What is it that humans are bringing to the game?” asked Margaret Johnson, chief creative officer at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners to NYT. “The answer is originality.” Her team will be screening a trailer for an unreleased Salvador Dalí script, generated using AI, to underscore the potential of blending human inspiration with machine efficiency.
But originality is hard to quantify in a market obsessed with scale and speed. “The creative industry post-Cannes is staring down the biggest transformation since mobile and apps,” said Nick Pringle, chief creative officer at R/GA, to AdWeek. And when AI can instantly produce, iterate, and test ads, even Sam Altman’s prediction that 95% of creative marketing work will be done by AI at nearly no cost starts to sound more plausible than provocative.
They are optimistic. But, the inconvenient question many brand CMOs may be asking themselves this week, but few will voice out loud: Why do we need agencies at all?
In 2024, 12% of Cannes Lions entries used AI. This year, that number will almost certainly climb. And soon, the barrier to entry for creating award-caliber campaigns may drop low enough that a founder with a credit card, a product URL, and a well-prompted AI tool could produce something good enough to bypass agencies altogether. Perhaps even win.
What will ad execs talk about at Cannes this year? Emotional connection, brand storytelling, retail media. What they won’t talk about, except in hushed tones: the threat AI poses to their very relevance.
