Cannes Lions 2018 has come a long way from its traditional advertising beginnings. Once grounded in TV and cinema, the festival has demonstrated its ability to withstand the test of time and innovate with new categories, creative e-commerce and data to name a few. Now, Cannes Lions professes its ambition to unite diverse industries and businesses in the name of creativity.
Such a diverse combination of creativity will produce wide-ranging topics for discussion. Numerous speakers from the Accenture Interactive family have shared their take on the hottest topics or events likely to emerge over the week in and around the Palais:
1. AI goes for gold
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is front and centre of most conferences and shows today. Cannes Lions 2018 will see AI-created work gaining recognition alongside the best in the industry. Why? Because AI is a key part of the creative industry. The Lions festival this year will show how AI is instrumental to produce great creative work today, not just in the future.
Alan Kelly from Rothco, an agency within Accenture Interactive, believes that the response of creative leaders to the rising influence of AI will determine their chances of success, not just at this years’ Lions, but their success overall as an effective, creative business. According to Kelly, this watershed moment for AI is not the death knell for creativity, but a new dawn for new creatives.
The most successful creatives will ultimately consider how to work in collaboration with AI. This begins with redefining what creative talent looks like. For example, rather than the traditional copywriting and art director duo, creative skills now belong to roles like data-designers, engineers, coders and technologists of other kinds, who have until recently been ignored and placed in a decidedly non-creative box.
2. Believing in blockchain
Thomas Mueller of Fjord, Accenture Interactive’s design and innovation agency, believes that one of the big priorities for the creative and technology industry leaders gathering in Cannes will be to apply blockchain technology. Mueller believes that applying this technology will help individuals manage their data, especially when the data is obscured or so hard to access.
The Lions festival this year will show how blockchain, a shared decentralised and secure database, can help put data back into the hands of individuals. Take the interactive blockchain seminar, which will explore the creative ways blockchain is being applied across industries and value chains.
3. Transparency all around
Transparency has been an industry buzzword for years. Jon Wilkins of Karmarama, a creative agency within Accenture Interactive, believes that this year’s debate and award recognition will draw the distinction between the old model of transparent communication, and the future of connected experiences which tackles scrutiny from any angle, not just through its preferred filter.
Accenture Interactive believes that the big shift in mindset should be for businesses to consider their work not as consumer ‘touch points’ but rather ‘trust points’. This approach will set the priority for organisational transparency and individual agency in the digital world, a standard which will eventually become the norm.
4. Designing for ethical impact
We may not know exactly how, but AI will impact our society profoundly. The steps we take to design it today will determine the effect – positive or negative – that it has on our lives tomorrow. In designing an AI utopia, as opposed to the dystopia some are warning against, we have to shape every single interaction between humans and machines.
While the introduction of AI into the creative industries has led to many questions about the future of creative skills: have we spent years mastering our craft only to be rendered useless by machines in the near future? As members of the creative, tech, and design industries, it is ultimately our role to encourage transparency, fairness and trust into these systems from the outset. If we can, we may affect positive change faster than legislation can hope to.
Accenture Interactive’s Cannes Lions 2018 predictions all argue for the importance of innovation. Whether this is achieved through introducing new technologies, such as artificial intelligence or blockchain, or transforming old models to champion a new world of transparency and ethics. Human impact is bigger than any advertising challenge and the best Cannes Lions entries are ones that demonstrate innovation, not just noise.
By Accenture Interactive managing director Michael Buckley