Publicis riffs on AI BS at Cannes, while also touting the tech’s potential

Publicis Groupe is launching a tongue-in-cheek app intended to cut through the BS jargon in AI-related conversation or writing during the upcoming Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. The BSbot detector will be distributed to the holding company’s clients. Using an app, attendees can record audio or upload images and text from keynote speeches, meetings, presentations, articles and press releases about AI. The BSbot will then sarcastically break down the wording into something more digestible and suggest follow up questions to ask related to what was uploaded. A demo video from Publicis shows some of the potential responses from the bot. Publicis also created an AI sing-along video that mashes up AI comments from executives including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Omnicom Group CEO John Wren, WPP’s CEO Mark Read and Global Chief Creative Officer Rob Reilly, along with Publicis’ Chairman-CEO Arthur Sadoun, Chairman Emeritus Maurice Lévy and Chief Strategy Officer Carla Serrano. Serrano said the idea for the bot started after Publicis saw how prominent the AI conversation was at the 2024 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland earlier this year. “It felt like an AI trade show,” she said. Recent AI ad industry news from Ad Age While Serrano credited AI for being valuable for Publicis’ own business and moving the industry forward, she said that some of the AI conversation is taking up too much space. Examples of this include the constant announcements of different holding companies working with AI partners, which Serrano called a “weird tech partners arms race,” the focus on generative AI content over other aspects of AI and the idea that AI will become a “catch-all” solution for everything. “We wanted to draw a line in the sand and give ourselves as an industry, including ourselves as a company, a bit of a reality check and say its time to cut the BS that’s out there,” Serrano said. Publicis is trying to push the AI conversation closer toward data rather than the flashier creative content generation aspect. “Everyone’s playing in the same tiny image-generation sandbox and we seem to have forgotten the meaningful foundational element of AI,” said Serrano. “It’s about the data.” Serrano said that the BSbot is intended to entertain, and that Publicis’ real AI education will be done privately at Cannes. Throughout the festival Publicis will host more than 30 closed-door meetings with clients to present its new AI product tools and offerings that either haven’t been used yet or are currently being used by just a few clients. Publicis has assembled teams that have built out AI applications this year based on verticals such as consumer packaged goods, pharma, automotive, financial services and luxury. From those teams, Publicis will present 15 applications, three from each vertical, during its closed-door sessions, Chief Solutions Architect Scott Hagedorn said. Examples of applications include a CPG solution that combines consumer identity data with data around products that are available in local stores as well as digitally. “You can see identity and inventory within the same data and for a packaged goods company that has been beholden to Amazon, optimizing around them or moving fast … all of a sudden, they can start making decisions on if a competitor is out of stock on the shelf, ‘How do I know who’s buying [within] the category?’ ‘When’s the last time they bought?’ ‘Who’s a loyal [customer]?’ ‘Who’s not?’” he said. Last year’s festival was filled with conversations around AI, and while this year will likely be more of the same, Hagedorn said there are AI topics that aren’t getting as much coverage that he will be looking out for during the week. “There are a lot of seismic things that are happening behind the scenes that people aren’t really even paying attention to, like Google changing its search model now to where its basically scraping pages and using Gen AI to create new content,” Hagedorn said. “There are a lot of publishers that are really concerned on what the downstream effect of that will be in terms of their ads business. A lot of clients should be thinking about ‘What does this mean if I [as a client] have a technical website—do I need to rethink my strategies there?’” Recent news: How Google’s AI will help brands in ads and search Publicis has been touting its AI capabilities in recent years, including at Cannes. During last year’s festival, it launched a campaign recalling that the holding company was once mocked for its investment in building its AI-powered talent management tool Marcel. At the beginning of this year, Publicis sent 100,000 personalized thank you videos made using AI to its employees, and soon after announced its plans to invest $326 million in AI over the next three years.

Publicis riffs on AI BS at Cannes, while also touting the tech’s potential

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