Where Did All the Creatives Go?

Field notes from the wormhole of the marketing universe.

There was one point last week where I found myself on the “LinkedIn Rooftop” of the Carlton hotel in Cannes, France, sucking down the warm goo of a sample pouch of NAD+—the popular “live forever” supplement—that had been handed to me by a smiling concierge when I wondered whether I was about to slip into a wormhole of the universe. On one side of me, a pack of teenage French influencers was queuing to be interviewed by the LinkedIn team; on the other, former Patriots linebacker Kyle Van Noy was on stage, explaining what marketers could learn from his championship teams. “Tom Brady always said, ‘The fish aren’t going to jump in the boat.”

But what if—thanks to AI—they did?

I spent last week at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the decadent annual event in which agencies, ad-tech companies, and media brands turn the South of France into a carnival of capitalism. Last week, there was a beach here; this week, there is Meta Beach, one of dozens of brand activations blocking your view of the sea. In the weeks leading up to it, when I would tell people that I was going, the first question I’d get was “Why?” Fair enough. A few reasons: I love strange places with free rose. I’d been invited to speak at an event for the International Advertising Association (IAA). And perhaps most importantly, my wife had clients to meet with and wanted to go—as did our three-year-old Max, who had been begging us to take him on a work trip.

Me at the Snow/Lazer villa, with my son Max and his best bud Q

Here are five unbridled observations from one of the weirdest weeks of my life:

1. Where are all the creatives at the creativity festival?

I’d attended Cannes Lions once before, in 2017, when an ad-tech company hired me to host a video series from their penthouse suite. Even then, ad-tech companies dominated the rows of yachts in the harbor, but actual creatives were there, too, giving the event its sartorial flair. This year, 90% of the people I chatted up worked in ad-tech sales. When I told them that I was a writer, they looked at me like I was an alien.

Cannes Lions has completed its metamorphosis into an ad-tech and media sales conference—a battle royale for ad dollars in which the social platforms, publishers, streamers, and ad-tech middlemen lavish marketing execs with chartered snorkeling excursions and private dinners at villas in the hills. Even Yahoo was making it rain. Post-COVID, brands and agencies seem to have stopped letting their creatives attend the creativity festival—why expense a flight for someone without a sales quota? The resulting vibes were strange.

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2. You can feel the AI frustration building.

At every panel I attended, a speaker echoed the same complaint: “The conversation we’re having this year about AI at Cannes could have been the conversation we were having last year.” Despite all the perceived advances, not much had actually changed. Everyone was parroting the same vague promises that AI would fix ad targeting, democratize creative, and allow agencies to reimagine their model around business outcomes instead of billable hours. Few were actually seeing results. The execs in attendance still hyped AI, but you could tell their heart wasn’t really in it.

3. Are publishers getting screwed by ad-tech?

I had a short stint covering the ad-tech industry early in my career, and whenever I pop back into that world, I’m surprised by how screwed up it still is. One example: Mark Howard, the Chief Operating Officer at TIME, revealed that TIME’s article naming Taylor Swift as TIME’s Person of the Year had been flagged as brand-unsafe and unsuitable for advertising by most of the ad-tech industry’s brand-safety software. Why? Because Swift had advocated for feminist causes. If he’d sold that space directly to advertisers, Howard said, he could have charged a premium. Instead, he spent days arguing with advertisers about why they shouldn’t get paybacks for the space for their programmatic ad buys in Swift’s article.

Everyone keeps saying AI will fix these problems, but Adweek reporter Mark Sternberg called BS on that: “We’ve been hearing this for six years.”

4. Teenage TikTok influencers are coming to LinkedIn.

I’ve seen their “day in the life” videos popping up in the Reels tab of the LinkedIn app lately, and they flooded the LinkedIn rooftop during “creator hours.” One squealed, “I just met the CMO of Linkedin!” in the elevator on the way down. It’s a fascinatingly strange trend, and I’m going to investigate it further.

Longevity supplements from the LinkedIn Rooftop at Cannes

5. Execs are vastly underestimating Gen Z’s hatred of AI.

According to NBC News’ recent survey, generative AI has a -44% approval rating among 18- to 34-year-olds. College graduates have been drowning commencement speakers in boos for hyping AI. And one study claims that nearly half of Gen-Z workers are actively sabotaging their company’s AI efforts. Speakers gave passing acknowledgment to the discontent, but dismissed it. “They’ll get over it,” was a common refrain. As I told the ad and tech execs in attendance at my IAA talk, I’m skeptical. Young people determine what’s cool, and we’ve never seen a technology like this that young people actively hate.

Pictured: Me speaking at the IAA Slam

Generative AI is flooding their feeds with slop and threatening to eliminate their entry-level pathways into the knowledge economy. It feels like hubris to think that elder millennials, Gen-Xers, and Boomers can force-feed AI to the younger generations. Anthropic and OpenAI need to grow by an unprecedented 496% by 2029 to justify the capex expenditures and data centers being built to support the AI industry. Will that happen if kids think it’s completely lame?

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