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This year’s Cannes Lions festival wants to restore humour to advertising, but underpinning a new category celebrating witty work is wider unease over the creative future of an industry rapidly adopting artificial intelligence tools.
For the first time, humour will be added as a category in the annual awards in the south of France, which showcases the industry’s best campaigns in the past year.
Organisers are seeking examples of “wit and satire to provide amusement and create memorable, laughter-inducing connections with audiences”, according to the awards criteria. The festival begins on Monday.
But this new category also reflects the underlying insecurities of a sector going through a crisis in creativity. Industry executives say it will help highlight the importance of the human element in advertising, with AI seen as struggling to create funny advertising campaigns that combine creativity with irreverence and silliness.
“AI can produce jokes, but they aren’t yet very funny,” says Rory Sutherland, vice-chair of Ogilvy UK. “Which I think is evidence that there is still a missing human connection — some level of shared understanding in AI that is not yet quite there.”
This missing component — the importance of human creativity — will be the talk of much of the Cannes’ Croisette this week as the large ad 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 executives plan, make and roll out campaigns.
Executives say that AI technology is proving useful in creating realistic images at scale, and optimising advertising for use across platforms spanning social media to TV and billboards.
AI has already started to replace some jobs, say insiders, such as in helping to quickly source images and mock up potential campaigns — work that would have once taken days now can be done in hours.
Executives are, however, also keen to exploit the additional benefit that great creative minds can bring to advertising. Humorous campaigns, executives say, can often prove more effective.
Karen Martin, boss of UK-based ad agency BBH, says that this year could be the “return of funny”, with humour a rarer differentiator in the advertising world than it used to be.
BBH is this month rolling out a campaign for Paddy Power around the Euro 2024 football tournament featuring English actor Danny Dyer that is aimed at finding the humour in being an England fan.
“Some of the best advertising always made you laugh,” she said, adding that it also served as a counterpoint to the more sober 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 little bit.”
The introduction of a humour category also reflects a second shift in tone at this year’s Cannes, with many executives frustrated by what they see as a focus on giving awards to more weighty, purpose-driven work rather than to effective campaigns that better serve to sell products and brands.
The past 20 years have seen a steady decline in the use of humour in advertising, according to Kantar, the research company, with the pandemic accelerating this fall in use. This slide has occurred despite humour being the “most powerful creative enhancer of receptivity”, says Kantar, being more expressive, more involving and more distinct.
Simon Cook, chief executive of Cannes Lions, the event’s organiser, agreed that there was a return to using humour in this year’s campaigns after several years of more “serious, sombre” work.
Many of the best regarded ads in this year’s Super Bowl — a banner occasion for the creative advertising industry — sought to use humour.
“Humour works,” Cook said. “We will see the continued renaissance of humour this year. The sorts of silliness, zaniness and irreverence we’d expect from human creativity.”
“There is a shift to effectiveness,” said Miranda Hipwell, chief executive of adam&eveDDB, with marketing bosses under pressure to show their boards the value of spending on creative campaigns.
“Ads have been trying to make people cry for some time. But making them laugh can be just as effective,” said Hipwell. “Whatever the emotion, campaigns need to show results, not just be purpose-led.”
However, she also warned how hard it was to be “globally funny” given that not all regions find the same things humorous.
It can also prove divisive given how subjective humour can be, as witnessed last week in a short film launched by advertising agency Publicis that features many of the world’s top AI experts and ad executives.
Described by Publicis boss Arthur Sadoun in an email as a “not so serious film” about the AI hype of Cannes, some of those featured in the film failed to see the funny side, according to advertising executives.
