Cannes Lions 2025: AI Ignites a New Era of Brand Creativity

“AI will ride shotgun and be the best creative partner this industry has ever seen,” declared Tor Myhren, Apple’s VP of Marketing Communications, during the opening of Cannes Lions 2025. “But we’ve got to drive.” This year at the International Festival of Creativity in Cannes, that sentiment rang true. AI has moved from buzzword to business mode, with marketers arriving armed not with hype but real use cases. From award-winning brand campaigns to new tech alliances, the message was clear: AI is fast becoming a catalyst for creative marketing innovation, and those who embrace it are pulling ahead.

From Hype to How: AI Goes Mainstream in Marketing

Last year’s frenzy around generative AI has evolved into a focus on practical application. As Alison Wagonfeld, CMO of Google Cloud, noted on a panel, “This year is the wow to the how… Last year felt like a lot of bespoke projects. Now it feels very real, and the effects of using AI are coming through.” Industry leaders described AI’s trajectory pragmatically; brands are no longer asking if they should use AI, but how to deploy it effectively and at scale. Rankin Carroll, Chief Brand Officer at Mars, even contrasted AI’s impact with the fizzling metaverse hype: “Unlike the metaverse, AI has a real and massive impact on our business.” From turning data into actionable insights to cleaning up supply chains, “we’re embracing AI in all its forms… trying to understand what it can add to the brand experience,” Carroll said.

That embrace is becoming a requirement, not an option. New research shared at Cannes indicated that while only 13% of global marketing leaders currently put AI among their top priorities, its rapid rise will disrupt nearly every marketing function. Forward-looking CMOs see generative AI as a unique opportunity to reengineer how marketing works. “GenAI is a unique opportunity for us to rethink our entire content supply chain,” said Jon Halvorson, SVP at Mondelēz International. The consensus: AI is here to stay, and it’s poised to supercharge productivity, personalization, and creativity, provided organizations learn how to steer it.

AI-Powered Creativity Shines in Campaigns

Cannes Lions is ultimately about the work, and 2025’s most celebrated campaigns showed AI’s creative potential in action. A standout was Dove’s “Real Beauty Redefined for the AI Era”, which won the Media Grand Prix. To mark 20 years of its Real Beauty platform, Dove tackled a timely challenge: how artificial intelligence portrays beauty. The brand launched a personalized Pinterest AI experience inviting users to define what “real beauty” means to them by selecting traits like “brave” or “creative” and pairing them with diverse images of women. Each user’s choices generated a custom “Real Beauty DNA” video and, crucially, helped retrain Pinterest’s algorithm to surface more inclusive results. In other words, Dove didn’t just talk about inclusivity, it taught an AI platform to be more inclusive. The campaign spread across social, print, TV, and beyond, literally changing what millions see when they search for beauty. Jury president Dan Clays praised Dove’s entry as “a piece of work that took an insight and used AI to solve the problem,” noting they looked for brands that understood AI’s impact on their sector and embraced it to find solutions. Rather than fight the rise of AI beauty filters, Dove collaborated with a major platform to alter its algorithm in a positive way, a move the judges called “progressive.” It’s a powerful example of AI-driven creativity furthering a brand’s values and impact.

Another buzzworthy innovation came from Snickers, which blurred the line between advertising and entertainment using AI. In a multi-party collaboration, Snickers “cloned” famed soccer coach José Mourinho as an AI persona to engage fans. Soccer lovers could message the AI Mourinho their friends’ worst “own goal” mistakes and receive a personalized video of the coach humorously roasting them, all in Mourinho’s likeness and voice. This Own Goal AI tool leveraged GPT-4, deepfake tech, and voice synthesis to let fans co-create fun content with a virtual José. The result was both wildly shareable and award-winning. In fact, the campaign scored two Grand Clios in sports marketing. As one creative lead explained, the magic was giving people a say in what the AI version of Mourinho would say, a dynamic twist on celebrity endorsements. Crucially, Mars secured the real Mourinho’s authorization, avoiding the ethical pitfalls of unauthorized deepfakes. The success of this Snickers activation underscored AI’s new role in fan engagement: far from a gimmick, it became a platform for personalized storytelling at scale. “We wanted to let fans affect what José might say… a step in a new direction for how talent can allow their image to interact with fans,” said Jim Stump, a creative director on the project. In a festival full of AI talk, the Snickers campaign showed how generative tech can amplify creativity and consumer participation when used with a clever insight (and a sense of humor).

AI for Consumer Trust and Protection

Brands aren’t just using AI for eye-catching stunts, they’re also deploying it to deliver tangible consumer benefits. A remarkable example is Virgin Media O2’s “AI Granny”, an initiative that turned AI into a guardian of customers. Facing a surge in phone scams targeting the elderly, the UK telecom created “Daisy”, a lifelike AI-powered grandmother who intercepts scam calls and engages fraudsters in endless chatter. Trained on real scam call data and armed with a warm, rambling persona, Daisy can keep criminals on the line for up to 40 minutes with tales of cats and knitting, all while the would-be victims stay safe. It’s essentially an AI decoy that wastes scammers’ time, so they can’t steal real people’s money. Importantly, Daisy operates autonomously 24/7, no human intervention needed to bait the bad guys.

What sounds like a comedy sketch is actually cutting-edge fraud prevention. Virgin Media O2’s marketing director, Simon Valcarcel, introduced Daisy as “our secret weapon against scammers, indistinguishable from a real person, an AI hiding in plain sight dedicated to wasting fraudsters’ time!” The Swerve the Scammers campaign, launched just before Fraud Awareness Week, delivered serious results alongside the laughs. Daisy helped protect thousands of O2 customers from scam attempts and generated an estimated £36 million in earned media value from the public buzz and goodwill. By turning AI into a tool for customer security and brand trust, Virgin Media O2 demonstrated a broader lesson: AI can humanize a brand’s mission when applied creatively. In an era of growing fraud and skepticism, Daisy showed that a little humor and a lot of technology can reinforce a brand’s promise to have its customers’ backs.

Personalization at Scale and New AI Alliances

Beyond individual campaigns, Cannes Lions 2025 highlighted how major brands and agencies are scaling creativity with AI on the back end. Tech leaders used the festival to unveil tools aimed at turbocharging content production and customer personalization. For instance, Adobe flew its flag high in Cannes with a suite of AI-driven product innovations for marketers. Dubbed Customer Experience Orchestration, Adobe’s new offerings fuse creative design, data and generative AI to help brands deliver “one-to-one personalization at scale” across millions of customers. This includes Adobe GenStudio, a generative AI content engine to speed up video and ad creation, and an Adobe LLM Optimizer to boost brands’ presence on AI chat interfaces. As Anil Chakravarthy, Adobe’s Digital Experience president, put it: “Delivering one-to-one personalization at scale demands a powerful fusion of creativity, marketing and AI… we are pioneering innovations that help teams craft the most compelling and relevant customer experiences.” The emphasis is on using AI agents to handle repetitive production tasks, freeing human creatives to focus on ideation and strategy. Notably, global marketers like Coca-Cola, Estée Lauder, Prudential and others are already leveraging Adobe’s AI solutions to accelerate content and improve engagement metrics. The takeaway for Fortune 500 brands: the AI revolution isn’t just in splashy ads, but also in the marketing infrastructure that can deliver personalized content faster than ever.

Agencies, too, are investing heavily in AI to boost efficiency and innovation. On the Croisette, independent agency PMG announced Alli Marketplace, an industry-first app exchange built into its marketing OS, which allows brands one-click access to 25+ pre-integrated partner tools across data, media, and AI. “Alli is more than a platform; it’s the operating system for modern marketing,” said Chris Alvares, PMG’s VP of AI & Technology. The idea is to collapse months of tech onboarding into a seamless experience, “so our customers can stay ahead of change without getting bogged down in it,” explained PMG’s CEO George Popstefanov. In a similar vein, Havas used Cannes to debut a new Converged.AI suite (including a video content AI tool called Vermeer), doubling down on AI-powered creative production, while TikTok touted new AI ad innovations for brands on its platform. Even the agency-media cost dynamics are shifting: a Cannes study by Forrester and the 4A’s revealed 75% of marketing agencies are investing in generative AI capabilities at their own expense, not yet passing costs to clients. It’s a period of intense experimentation and ecosystem building, all aimed at embedding AI into the very fabric of marketing workflows. The consensus in Cannes was that those who harness these AI tools to deliver quicker insights, content and personalization will gain a competitive edge, provided they keep their objectives in sight. As one analyst put it, the key question is no longer “What can we use AI for?” but “How can AI help us achieve our marketing objectives and solve our challenges?”

Human Creativity: The Ultimate Differentiator

Amid the AI excitement, Cannes Lions 2025 also echoed with a reassuring theme: human creativity remains the heart of great marketing. In the words of Apple’s Tor Myhren, “AI is not going to save advertising… We’ve got to save ourselves, by believing in what’s always made this industry special: human creativity.” Myhren, whose company was named Creative Marketer of the Year, reminded everyone that while AI will be “the best creative partner… we’ve got to drive.” This rallying cry for the irreplaceable value of human insight and emotion was picked up throughout the festival. Advertising legend Sir John Hegarty struck an optimistic note, arguing “AI offers the democratization of opportunity to all”, giving small creative teams access to capabilities once reserved for big budgets. At the same time, he and others acknowledged a “Cannes of Reckoning” for agencies: the question isn’t whether AI will replace creatives, but how it will reshape creative processes and agency business models. Notably, only about 12% of Cannes award entries this year explicitly used AI, but judges observed that when used right, it “adds depth and strength to ideas, ideas from humans.” In other words, the best work integrated AI in service of a powerful human idea, not as a substitute for one.

Multiple panelists stressed that the most celebrated campaigns will be those that use cutting-edge tech to amplify empathy, humor, and human connection, not tech for tech’s sake. “How do you make people care in an increasingly synthetic world?” asked one creative director, calling for a focus on emotional intelligence alongside artificial intelligence. Ogilvy’s Rafael Rizuto summed it up: rather than treating AI as a shiny object, the industry should explore “how AI can elevate human potential, unlock new forms of creativity, empower more diverse voices, and help us imagine ideas we couldn’t have reached on our own… It’s about using AI to push the boundaries of what it means to be creative and human.”

That ethos seemed to underpin the best of Cannes Lions 2025. Whether it was Dove reinventing beauty standards with an algorithm, Snickers inviting fans to co-create laughs with an AI icon, or an AI grandma protecting the vulnerable, each example showed AI at its most inspiring when paired with human insight and purpose. The pace of adoption may be dizzying, but the formula for success remains steady: bold creativity + intelligent technology + a human touch. In the end, the festival’s AI revolution felt less like science fiction and more like a story of people, platforms, and brands coming together to create something genuinely new. And as the sun set on the Croisette, one thing was clear, the future of marketing will be written by those who can artfully unite the “wow” of innovation with the “how” of meaningful creativity, letting AI amplify their vision every step of the way.