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Cannes Briefing: The AI search crisis everyone’s talking about at Cannes is actually about brand coherence
By Seb Joseph For two decades, Cannes Lions has been the advertising industry’s high church of the campaign — the ad, the stunt and the killer creative idea. This year, the conversations actually happening in the villas and the beach cabanas aren’t about creative execution at all. They’re about something closer to brand infrastructure: how brands get discovered, trusted, and recommended by AI systems that don’t care about a media plan. That’s a quieter, less glamorous story than the one Cannes normally embodies, but it’s the one playing out behind the closed doors.
Take one exchange overheard in a meeting earlier in the week, where an exec running media and analytics for a major platform laid out the unglamorous part nobody wants to talk about: coordination. When someone gets a single answer back from an LLM, they said, that answer was assembled from everywhere — SEO, PR, content and product — whether the company meant it to be or not. So the job isn’t optimizing one channel anymore. It’s making sure every function is pointed at the same message because the model doesn’t know or care which team owns which piece.
P&G’s Marc Pritchard made a version of the same point from the main stage, minus the anxiety. “AI and algorithms can certainly amplify these voices at scale, but they really don’t originate them,” he said, arguing that the brand’s voice, the expert’s voice and the consumer’s voice all still have to start from something genuinely human before any model can spread it. The machine assembling the answer is only as coherent as what it’s been given to assemble.Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV. …read more
Source:: Digiday
