What you didn’t hear at Cannes: everyone’s now an ad agency – which is bad news for ad agencies

David Jones’ Brandtech Group was one of the two big new tech-based outfits that set out to change ad holding company land a few years ago. The other was Sir Martin Sorrell’s S4 Capital and its manifestation, Monks.

For a while it looked as though Sorrell was winning, provoking the usually affable Jones into grumpiness by pinching his “better, faster, cheaper” mantra although, currently, it’s looks as though Brandtech is winning as S4 grapples with over-eager expansion including thousands of bodies around the world (not really the point of tech.) It’s worth adding that Brandtech is not a listed company so it’s impossible to look under the bonnet in quite the same way.

That rivalry aside, both men have weighed in on the AI debate that dominated Cannes Lions, Sorrell saying it’s the end of a “golden era” for ad agencies (it certainly was for him, becoming the best part of a billionaire) while Jones (above), more bluntly, told Adweek that creative agencies are “screwed.”

This is not quite what we heard from the various speakers at Cannes, where agencies and Big Tech strove to maintain there was room for both: human creativity and AI. From here it looks like Jones got it more or less right. As Brandtech’s website puts it: “the mobile phone made everyone a creator, generative AI makes everyone an ad agency.”

It’s worth remembering that ad agencies began as servants of the media, J. Walter Thompson (he did exist) oiling the wheels by funnelling ads to newspaper in the 19th century. Creativity came rather later as agencies enlisted talent (often artists) to make print and poster ads more attractive. The late 20th century manifestation of creative directors, executive creative directors and chief creative officers (god help us) lording it over all they surveyed inevitably followed. Now even clients have CCOs.

That’s not to say this didn’t produce some rare talents: in the UK we had John Webster at BMP, Alan Parker at CDP, David Abbott and John Hegarty. Charles Saatchi, before he set out to take over the modern art world, was arguably the most talented of the lot. But that was before digital turned the world upside down and there’s no longer the canvas for such people to lovingly craft their award winners. Among this year’s Cannes Lions big winners there’s hardly anything that cries out: I’m a great ad.

There’s ingenuity aplenty of course but it takes different forms and we’d better get used to it. Just as, these days, people go to university to learn how to code rather than how to think (you can see the consequences of that among the ghastly tech bro’s), creatives in adland (mostly, it’s not a zero sum game) lack the craft skills and canvas (you need that too) that, for a while, seemed to put them on a par with the best writers, artists and film-makers.

As Jones’ Brandtech says: “everyone (can be) an ad agency.” The role of a creative director may well be to perm the best ideas from this democratisation of communications and leave it to AI to finish the job.

Maybe this was the dog that didn’t bark loudly enough at Cannes. But you’ll be hearing more from it from now on.