Day three of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity saw Shantanu Narayen, chairperson and CEO, Adobe, in conversation with Arthur Sadoun, CEO, Publicis.

Narayen will be awarded with ‘Creative Champion of the Year’ later this week. 

The talk started with Narayen stating that Publicis will be marketing its 100th year and asked Sadoun how creativity has changed over this period.

“I have been coming here for 30 years. Earlier, we were looking at five hours of films and then saw the print work. That was work done. We thought creative excellence would look like that. Now, media fragmentation has been complex but the industry needs to have the same level of creativity,” he said.

He then added that work created specifically for awards needs to be stopped.

“The biggest risk is that we love doing a great piece of work for a single touchpoint that ends up winning an award. If one really needs to do good work for our clients, we need to take the risk and stop doing that. No other industry can use data, creativity and technology like we do,” stated Sadoun.

Giving his perspective, Narayen said, “There is so much creative content being created. At Adobe, we want to unleash people who have creative ideas to express them using technology. With every single new media type, we want to deliver a set of tools to creative people to help them get the best out of them.”
            
He added, “When the mobile phone was launched, we thought of it initially as a consumption device and not a creative device. That has changed. Now, with AI, the question we are asking ourselves is how can we use it to make our products more accessible and democratise the ability for people to use it.”

On the topic of AI, Sadoun said, “A competitor called us an AI company. But with 1,20,000 people and a market cap of USD 25 billion, we would have been a terrible AI company.”

“When I took the job (of CEO), in 2017 we stated how AI will be part of the future and it will enable our people to do more things.  Not only did we see the change, we saw how AI can help the creative industry do a better job. AI is particularly important for us because it connects sources of data with other sources of data. I’m super optimistic about what can be done with AI if we don’t forget that the core of our business is people who can deliver the ideas and look towards creativity for everything we do,” he added.

Creativity and AI  

Narayen stated that AI can help enhance creativity.

He listed an example of Sadoun and Publicis’ holiday greetings.

“A couple of years ago, they used AI to personalise messages for thousands. What they did was that so unique and created an emotional connection. You created thousands of videos and the emotional connection AI has is unique,” he said. 

Sadoun added, “I joined this business 30 years ago for a simple reason. It was an idea of changing the future of companies. We should never forget that it's human creativity that will give that differentiation. We all have a responsibility today that work is awarded not that is used at a single touchpoint. It should be for those pieces of work that impact brands. The ones that are for a single touchpoint will be forgotten by Monday (the week after the festival).  As long as we stand for big ideas, we’ll take control of the media landscape.”

He also stated that he thought he’d leave advertising in 10 years but didn’t.

“When I started, advertising was a declining industry. I thought I’d leave in 10 years. But I have never been so optimistic about it. We need to understand what we are doing for our clients. Clients need to understand success will come from talent. If we stand together as an industry and use tech power with new ideas, this industry can grow and be better,” he said.

Narayen surmised, “It’s about getting a vocab to improve marketing and creativity within the company. We are forgetting we can improve the business of our clients with creativity, tech, data, and accelerate it with AI. As a young kid, the power of the written word appealed to me and my first job was as a journalist. People talk about STEM roles – we talk about STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Technology) at Adobe. The importance of art is important. We want to continue being the company that everyone can look towards and say it helps getting work done easier and faster.”