How the advertising industry plans to coexist with generative AI
Hello and welcome to a special edition of Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs; this week I’m dropping a few extra newsletters from the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning.
To hear the creative leaders assembled at Cannes Lions this week, reports of the advertising industry’s death by AI are greatly exaggerated. In keynote speeches and panel discussions, advertising and marketing executives say they are wholeheartedly embracing generative AI as a partner they are integrating into their work.
“In 2023, AI were the two most-used letters at Cannes,” Josh Rosenberg, cofounder and CEO of Day One Agency, an independent creative and communications shop, tells Modern CEO. “Fast-forward two years, and the conversation has evolved from novelty to practicality. We’ve moved beyond the hype into implementation, and with that comes a more grounded understanding of both the potential and the limitations of the technology.”
The AI advantage
Susan Howe, CEO of the Weber Shandwick Collective, says the communications advisory group uses GenAI to create synthetic personas to understand how different demographics and constituencies might respond to a client’s message. Other executives have talked about using AI to review written work to query what questions they forgot to ask or topics they failed to address.
The AI enthusiasm is tempered by an admittedly self-serving belief that the technology is a tool that will help—not replace—the human touch. “The good news is AI is not going to kill advertising,” declared Tor Myhren, Apple’s vice president of marketing communications, in his keynote speech here. “The bad news is AI is not going to save advertising. We’ve got to save ourselves by believing in what’s always made this industry special: human creativity.”
Day One’s Rosenberg concurs, noting, “The dominant theme at Cannes isn’t just what AI can do but how it should coexist with human creativity. AI will never replace our most powerful creative asset: emotion. It can accelerate workflows and expand possibilities, but it can’t replicate taste, intuition, or the spark that makes a piece of work truly move people.”
Exceptional work still requires humans
Of course, Rosenberg’s and Myren’s organizations are responsible for award-winning, groundbreaking campaigns that embody the ingenuity, heart, and humor that feel viscerally human—at least for now. Apple is the 2025 Cannes Lions Creative Marketer of the Year, and Day One was short-listed in the last year for a Chipotle social campaign. So while a computer might not be able to conceive, script, shoot, edit, and recruit talent such as Pedro Pascal to star in a short film promoting AirPods, it is pretty easy to imagine GenAI capably replacing mediocre or uninspiring advertising—of which there is plenty.
In fact, AI is just one of the forces buffeting the ad business: The large holding companies that dominate the industry are consolidating (Omnicom late last year agreed to acquire rival Interpublic Group, prompting fears of layoffs).
Taking the lessons from AI in advertising
What lessons can the rest of the business world learn from advertising’s experiences with AI? Companies in the space have successfully moved beyond “proof of concept” into adoption of the technology, but what’s perhaps most striking is the way AI has galvanized agencies and brands to move quickly and take risks. In an environment where products and services need to constantly differentiate and reach new audiences, such nimbleness is a good skill to have—whether or not your company is responding to the potential disruption of AI.
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