Miriam Wells: Cannes 2025 – Human creativity as a competitive advantage in the Age of AI
By Miriam Wells, Co-founder, Allegory
In a world dominated by headlines about automation, algorithmic filter bubbles, and the AI-pocalypse, this year’s Cannes Lions offered something unexpected: hope for humanity.
Naive? Perhaps. Motivating? Definitely.
If Cannes were a drinking game (and for some, of course, it is), “human creativity” and “human impact” would have you on the floor. But rather than eye-rolling repetition, this represented something profound: an industry built on the currency of human ideas declaring its role and ambition for the AI age.
I started the week fully prepared for an onslaught of AI evangelism. I’m not anti-AI by any means, but was perhaps expecting a stronger corporate meme narrative about how it’s going to change everything. There are definitely people doing some epically cool AI-powered shit and being recognised accordingly at the Palais. I applaud them. But if I’ve taken one thing from this year’s festival, it’s that adaptability and possibility of human imagination gives brands an edge.
This red thread was clear from day one in a healthy tension between AI and human creativity, with the former turbo-charging the latter. As Apple’s Tor Myhren proclaimed in his festival-opening Creative Marketer of the Year keynote: “You drive. AI rides shotgun.” It’s a telling instruction from the world’s third largest company, a tech brand with some serious AI credentials. But that cred has never been the engine behind the brand’s incredible body of creative work. Yes they’re marketing tech products. The executions might even involve AI. But in the world of Apple marketing we’re always in our messy, human present. They make us laugh, they make us cry. They delight us with a dancing Pedro Pascal. They get it.
Heroing humanity from the what to the how
A huge percentage of the campaigns that cut through in this year’s awards eschewed the shiny novelty of generative AI for hand-crafted simplicity, emotional precision, and insights rooted in deep human truth.
Take the Health & Wellness category, where Eric Weisberg, jury president for the Lions Health Grand Prix for Good, emphasised the need for work that helps consumers tap emotion to reclaim their humanity in the face of harsh systems: “Joy turns us into humans when the medical system turns us into patients.” CALM and ITV’s silver-winning “Missed Birthdays” (content warning: suicide) exemplified this perfectly, juxtaposing joy alongside its counterpart of grief. The work featured an articulate installation of thousands of birthday balloons, each representing a birthday of a young person ‘missed’ due to suicide. It’s exquisite. Moving. Devastating. Subversive. And not an algorithm in sight.
Harnessing technological leaps to tell better stories is something filmmaking has always done well, with the tech always in a support role; never the story, nor the creator. Hearing Academy Award-winning director Peter Jackson proclaim on stage that “I’m a complete idiot when it comes to anything computer-y…I can do emails and that’s about it” was hilarious and refreshing. This from one of the world’s most technologically innovative filmmakers. What Jackson has is vision, and the audacity to ask big questions of technology like ‘can we make archival WWII film look like modern day Imax footage?’ or ‘can we create a program that makes thousands of little computer orcs and elves battle each other with a sense of individual agency?’ and then a skilled technical team to help answer those questions. But they’re nothing without his creative provocation.
Accenture Song’s Nick Law emphasised this practice as a critical creative skill – asserting that in future generative AI will handle heaps of the ‘how’ of our industry, so what we need to bring to the table is the ‘what’ and the ‘why’. These are questions that centre on developing ambition and taste. Law wrapped his excellent talk with a call to arms, arguing we should all seek to partner with “aliens and heretics”. When working with models based on ‘reasoning’ the opportunity for creative genius is in being “unreasonably, perversely human”. In another panel, Wicked and SNL star Bowen Yang summed it up beautifully: “heart is the engine that storytelling runs on”. And machines rarely nail that.
The Strategic Imperative
For marketing and communications leaders, Cannes 2025’s message is clear: the brands winning hearts and wallets aren’t just AI-powered: they’re human-obsessed. They use technology to amplify emotional truth, not replace it. The future belongs to organisations that master this balance, leveraging AI’s efficiency of the ‘how’ while doubling down on distinctly human insights, empathy, and creativity in the ‘what’ and the ‘why’. In an increasingly automated world, authentic human connection becomes an ultimate competitive advantage.
As we navigate the AI revolution, this year Cannes reminded us that technology’s highest purpose is amplifying what makes us most human. And that’s not naive optimism. It’s a strategic necessity.
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