What Cannes 2024 Told Us About Craft in the AI Year

We are back from Cannes Lions, jet-lagged and oversaturated in the specific way only a week of rosé and case study films can produce. As always, the festival was two festivals: the one on the stages, where the panels happen, and the one in the Palais basement, where the work sits quietly and tells you what the industry actually values. The distance between the two this year was the whole story.

On the stages, it was the AI show. Every second session, every yacht, every earnest fireside: models, agents, the future of creativity, delivered mostly by people selling the shovels. Down in the basement, among the Grands Prix, the work that won was overwhelmingly, almost defiantly, human. Ideas rooted in cultural insight, executions obsessed over at the level of the frame, campaigns that took years of patient brand-building to earn their payoff.

The pattern in the winners

Strip the categories away and this year's most awarded work shared a spine:

• A truth about people, found before any tool was opened
• Bravery at the level of the idea, not the technology
• Craft executed past the point of diminishing returns, which is exactly where distinctiveness lives
• Time. So much of the best work was the visible compound interest of brands that have held a position for years

Where AI did appear in winning work, it appeared as an instrument in service of an idea, usually invisibly, occasionally as the subject itself. What did not win: work whose central claim was that it was made with AI. The juries have already priced that in. "Made with the new tool" was a story for about eighteen months, and that window has closed. Nobody gives an award to a typeface for having been set in software.

What I told the team on Monday

We held our usual post-Cannes download in the studio, and I found myself making three points that I will repeat here because they are the actual takeaways, more than any shortlist.

First, the floor is rising fast and the ceiling is not moving. Competent is becoming free. Everything we sell has to live in the gap between competent and unforgettable, and that gap is defended by taste, insight, and nerve, none of which were on sale at any booth on the Croisette.

Second, brand is back as the industry's center of gravity. After a decade of performance-marketing triumphalism, the pendulum at Cannes has swung hard toward long-term brand building, distinctive assets, and creativity as a compounding financial asset. The econometricians and the creatives are finally quoting each other. We have been arguing this position since we founded Slipway, and it is pleasant to watch the industry's most expensive week agree.

Third, and I say this with love for our own industry: the gap between what gets discussed and what gets awarded is a map. The discussions chase what is new. The awards reveal what is scarce. Follow the scarcity.

The quiet encouragement

Walking the basement on the last afternoon, I felt something I did not expect: reassurance. In a year when our whole industry has been asking whether the machines make us redundant, the collective judgment of several hundred jurors from every market on earth was a fairly emphatic answer. The work that mattered was the work someone cared about unreasonably.

Unreasonable care is the business we are in. See you next June.