Amplifying Innovation with Purpose: Why We Must Leverage Human Creativity Amidst AI Advancements
Digital Visionary David Shing Recounts the Challenges and Opportunities of Fusing AI with Human Creativity and Shares His Standout Winners from This Year’s Cannes Lions Festival
It’s been almost two weeks since the start of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, where many of the world’s top marketers, advertisers, technologists, strategists, and media minds converged to celebrate groundbreaking work and discuss where we are as an industry and where we are heading. The Continuum checked in with one of our favorite contributors—artist, globe-trotting speaker, and market seeker Shingy.
He was a major presence at the festival, and we asked him about his biggest takeaways. Here’s what he wrote:
After pulling the shade on my return flight from my 17th Cannes Lions, I thought I had seen and done it all. I'm very comfortable navigating The Palais, the Promenade, the panels, the Poisson, and even the late-night pizza! But the one thing that keeps me in awe each year is the people. They never cease to surprise me. At times, this festival of creativity feels like a festival of productivity, as AI dominated the conversation as much as human creativity. And it was truly inspiring—not the AI domination part of the festival, but the human creativity. You see, I’m an active participant in using AI tools to solve problems. I’ve moved away from discussing their merits for over a decade and become someone who is using them, reviewing them, and in awe of them. I even reframed AI to Artful Interfaces because the better the interface becomes, the more flexibility we will have to maximize its usefulness, just as an artist works with a great studio assistant.
However, I'll say this year, I felt tension—a change in the attitude of the participants. The overexcitement, almost giddiness, about AI was palpable, but so was the fierce defense of human ingenuity. But it feels like many talking about AI aren’t experienced practitioners, and that's a problem. Without a doubt, AI is helpful. But as the marketplace is flooded with AI creative, that creative will swing from tonnage creative designed to saturate placements with AI efficiency to dystopian, cold generative AI marketing. Neither trajectory is capable of maximizing the true co-creative potential of AI.
The giddiness about AI was evident in some of the conversations and panels, but it felt more like discussions by people who don't actively use the tools. As these talks were being had in Cannes, the Toys R Us dystopian ad, Elon's live Crypto fake ad, and that eyebrow-raising interview with OpenAI's CTO about "creative" being a problem to solve all underscore the fast-fail, fast-try, fast-figure-it-out culture we're grappling with. Not all of this AI-wesomeness is utopian.
But here's the thing: when I was a young designer, my AI industry disruptor was DTP, and desktop publishing meant many jobs and industries went away. The saving grace for design? Taste, style, and point of view. As tools democratize creativity as a problem to solve, it will be harder and harder to reach real people at the end of our screens. So please go ahead and experiment with dystopian AI brand executions. While at first those moments will be awesome, be careful because the cost of holding a real person's attention—or better still, actioning their intention—will go up if they continue to ignore this creativity and become dull to your communication. Like a filament holding an electric current, the value of human presence on both ends cannot be overstated.
Many of this year’s Cannes Lions winners had a dash of fun and a lot of human presence. Some of my favorites included:
DoorDash’s Super Bowl spot, in which the delivery service gave away a prize from every one of the 76 brands that advertised during the big game, won the Titanium Grand Prix at the 2024 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
I love the category of Craft. One of the winners, “The Square Meter” by Hornbach, D.I.Y. Home Improvement Superstores, did a lovely little 60-second story about utilizing every square inch of space. A great idea that AI wouldn't have achieved.
JCDecaux did a fun outdoor idea. Utilizing unused outdoor advertising to make someone who barely had any followers become known throughout the country. In that search, they found the profile of Marina Prieto, a 100-year-old grandmother from Galicia whose life and stories deserved to be seen by many more people.
It was hard to avoid the power of sports at this year's Cannes Lions. And thankfully, women in sports were the real highlight. Undeniably, people want to know the person behind the sports persona, just like fans have asked about musicians, artists, and all people in popular culture. It's not new news, but it's really fascinating to see this transparency. Orange’s “WoMen’s Football” went viral for highlighting gender bias in soccer and won the Entertainment for Sport Grand Prix at Cannes Lions, marking a cultural moment in the rise of women’s sports and the caliber of marketing behind it. And Xbox's ‘The everyday tactician’ is also super interesting. It taps into the sports games culture. Xbox kicked off a recruitment drive using the Football Manager 2024 video game. The winner would then be invited to join Bromley FC (the real football team) as a tactician—a documentary of the process and the winner.
Renault is thinking beyond the campaign – beyond the 30-second ad. Last year, they had an interesting project: “Cars to Work,” an offer that provides cars for free to people during their three-month job trial period. Last year, they did something equally as interesting in sustainability: “Plug Inn” offered home chargers to all, extending the charging network to previously inaccessible locations in France.
The well-executed “The Last Barf Bag,” a lighthearted 12-minute mini-documentary, looks more broadly at the decline of air sickness bags on commercial airlines, which has followed a major drop in air nausea rates over the past half-century as improved planes and flight paths have reduced turbulence—a great twist to traditional storytelling in longer form.
Lions for Good also extends to brilliant design. Cemento Sol, a renowned cement company, has introduced an innovative series of cement tiles called "SightWalks." These tiles feature numbered lines designed to assist visually impaired individuals in identifying various types of businesses or establishments as they pass by.
Using existing elements to emphasize design brilliance was another theme this year. A great example is 855-HOW-TO-QUIT, a helpline that reaches people in the most critical moment—when they have a pill in their hand. It turns the mandatory imprint codes on opioid pills into phone extensions: codeine (IP33).
In celebration of its 50th anniversary, WWF aimed to raise awareness about protecting endangered species and habitats, focusing on umbrella species. They decided that there was no better representation of this chain of protection than nesting dolls—design collectibles.
Brands need to educate, inform, and inspire, which means making stuff that isn’t always literal and provides real entertainment. AI isn’t necessarily going to help you here. You need to inject incredible lateral thinking into the new marketing mix. The paid part of marketing is easy. But buying eyeballs is not creating culture. Entertainment is something you pay for; you don’t pay for marketing.
We used to use the term “fail fast;” the modern translation is to make small bets and many of them to help you find the big wins. You need volume to find the hits. So, treat marketing like a product worth paying for. Treat marketing as a separate product—something people are going to want to share. The emotional part of marketing cannot be achieved by the machine. It’s founded upon that energetic connection of real humans through the filament.
Every discussion outside of the Palais focused on the importance of distribution. I've been discussing the concept of "niche is the new mass" for years, and it's catching on. Whether it's social media platforms, entertainment platforms, or programmatic platforms, everyone wants to prioritize holding people's attention in a world where mind share equals market share. Naturally, the power of influence and the importance of creators have become dominant topics. This focus was so significant that it became a new initiative at Cannes Lions this year aimed at accelerating the growth of the creator economy within the creative marketing mix.
Why? For one, there are almost 1 billion ad blockers installed, and no one wants to acknowledge that. People have become blind to traditional forms of digital ads, and it seems everyone wants to be a creator because of it. Athletes, celebrities, and brands themselves are the new publishers and media platforms of the future. Now, they just need to find someone to pay attention.
The 2024 Cannes Lions Festival reminded us all that while AI might be the new shiny toy, human creativity is a timeless masterpiece. The challenge—and the opportunity—is to use these new tools to amplify our creativity, not replace it. Because, at the end of the day, it's not about technology. It's about connecting with people in ways that surprise, delight, and move them to action. That's the offer. Surprise me, and I'll surprise you.
July 2, 2024
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