- At Cannes Lions 2017, Publicis was mocked for announcing that it was pausing investments for AI and creating the Marcel platform.
- Now, at Cannes Lions 2023, they launched a print campaign recalling their previous bet on a festival dominated by AI events.
- The campaign shows AI-generated ads with surprised, confused, and laughing faces.
At the 2017 Cannes Lions, Publicis was mercilessly mocked for announcing that it would pause all its award submissions and conference budgets and instead use that money to invest heavily in AI and the creation of a platform called Marcel.
Six years later, the French advertising giant aired a print campaign at the same 2023 Cannes Lions festival to remember what it did to an industry now obsessed with AI several years earlier.
This year’s Cannes Lions has an agenda dominated by conferences, panels and presentations dedicated to new technology.
The campaign, created by AI, recreates those reactions to early investment in AI, displaying AI’s generative ad showing shocked, confused and laughing faces.
The ads run with the tagline “Is it okay to talk about AI in Cannes now?”
But Publicis doesn’t want “revenge” only on rival holding companies, its own staff were among the biggest detractors.
In 2017, CEO Arthur Sadoun used that year’s Cannes setting to tell his then-employees (some 85,000) around the world that he would stop participating in awards and trade shows for a year to develop the project management platform. AI-powered, public The Drum.
Cannes Lions 2023, Publicis and AI
Very little else about the idea was revealed at the time, leading his own staff to complain about a lack of transparency and general internal confusion about what it was all about. Sadoun took to Twitter for a question-and-answer session, which only seemed to prompt more questions from the bewildered staff.
A year passed without much being said about Marcel. And then, seemingly out of nowhere, a partnership with Microsoft was born.
A year later, as the pandemic gripped the world and people were forced to work from home, the first version of Marcel was released in the UK and then the US and has continued to be developed ever since.
Seven years later, AI has become the industry buzzword, with industry giants making investments.
WPP, S4 Capital, Dentsu, Interpublic, Havas, and Omnicom have launched their own AI platforms.
Now read:
Mexico with the possibility of winning lions in Brand Experience & Activation
DDB Mexico is on two shortlists at Cannes Lions 2023
MullenLowe SSP3 Mexico is at Cannes Lions 2023 with these shortlists