AI is the end of brands as we know them

“Whenever the word AI was mentioned in a case study, the jury cringed.”

One juror told me about his experience inside the jury room at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity on the French Riviera last week. This year, to no one’s surprise, AI was the talk of the town. 

Back in 2013, right after Cannes Lions, I wrote an op-ed piece for Fast Company called “The End of Advertising As We Know It,” based on what I was observing then. I described a paradigm shift in marketing that I thought would occur because of technological, societal, and behavioral changes.

These changes didn’t kill advertising. Instead, they forced it to mutate over time.

Ten years on, advertising isn’t advertising anymore. This year, much of the award-winning work at Cannes Lions wasn’t what one would consider ads in the traditional sense. They were cloaked in or disguised as something other than ads. “Knock Knock” for Korean National Police Agency, “The First Digital Nation” for Tuvalu, or “Runner 321” for Adidas were grand prix winners of various categories—but to call them ads or campaigns would be a misnomer. “Advertising needs a new name,” Scott Galloway told a packed auditorium at the Festival. 

The landscape has shifted so much that an individual can now have more sway than an institutional brand. A brand can also be lifted up to new heights or brought to its knees by an individual. 

It may be the end of brands as we know them. 

Based on what I have observed at the Festival and elsewhere, here are a few principles that can guide the next paradigm shift.

From Organizational Scale to Functional Speed

Galloway writes in his blog post that “[American football] Hall of Fame player Jerry Rice wasn’t that fast, but he had ‘functional speed,’ the instincts to accelerate or decelerate when it mattered most.”

Take Adobe, for example. In just a few months, it introduced Firefly, a prompt-based generative AI tool incorporated within Photoshop. Adobe, an old and possibly stale software giant, accelerated when it mattered, demonstrating its relevance as a brand.

It is important to note, however, that functional speed doesn’t belong just to tech giants like Adobe. 

When I asked my friend Pum Lefebure, cofounder and chief creative officer of Design Army, about her recent AI-generated campaign, “Adventures in A-Eye” for Georgetown Optician, what struck me most was the speed.

For this, instead of briefing her team to come up with it, Pum used Midjourney to produce the concept by herself. In a week or so, she presented nearly finished work. A few weeks later, the campaign launched. Typically, the process to develop something of this caliber would take several months. AI allowed her to collapse the process from four months to four weeks. 

Moving forward, AI will enable companies of all sizes and individuals to scale and speed themselves in ways that weren’t possible before, rendering organizational scale less praiseworthy than previously.

From Transaction to Conversation

One of the key touch points between brands and people online is e-commerce. The entire process—from product selection to payment—is transactional. However, when asked what people value most in their customer experience and will pay more for, “friendly service” and “knowledgeable service” score as high as “efficiency” and “easy payment.” Conversations are highly suited for delivering friendly and knowledgeable services. 

It’s already possible for us to have fairly natural conversations with AI on just about anything. In the next few years, it will be entirely possible for machines to provide friendly and knowledgeable services that are as good as, if not better than, those provided by humans in the form of conversations.

Aim for effectiveness, not just efficiency, in every transaction with your customer.

From USP to POV

Not too long ago, Ayako Tanaka, a Japanese fashion Instagrammer with a modest following of 168,000 followers, sold close to $1 million worth of products she curated during a two-day pop-up event. That’s the kind of revenue that a major global brand would sell in a day or two at its flagship store.

Major brands may have superior products with better unique selling propositions (USP). However, it’s Tanaka’s POV that followers are attracted to and buying into, resulting in this kind of sales figure.  

Many brands try to express their point of view. Patagonia proclaiming that Earth is its only stakeholder is one excellent example, while Mastercard Europe helping Ukrainian refugees with “Where to Settle”—another piece of work winning big at Cannes—is another instance of a company putting money where its mouth is.

On the contrary, when a brand doesn’t stick to its POV, it can be far more damaging than it would have been a decade ago, as we saw in the case of a transgender influencer and a brand that relied on her but didn’t support her. 

The mistake wasn’t not having a POV. Rather, it was not sticking to it. 

From Generative AI to Human Touch

While AI was by far the dominant topic in Cannes, there was little evidence that it has materially made the work better. When AI was mentioned in the context of creative endeavors, people were quick to mention efficiency, not quality or originality. That’s an Achilles’ heel for creativity. 

“McEnroe vs. McEnroe” for AB InBev’s Michelob Ultra is one example of the use of AI that wasn’t possible five years ago. It takes past data in order to regenerate the moves of tennis player John McEnroe from the past and lets the real McEnroe play against himself. Humans, not AI, came up with a seemingly impossible idea and used AI to make it possible.

PJ Pereira, an old colleague of mine and AI optimist like me, says, “The last turn [in the creative process] needs to be yours,” referring to what takes work from good enough to great. 

In 2016, AlphaGo beat Lee Se-dol, the South Korean Go champion, 4 to 1. In Game 2, the AI program surprised Lee—and the world—with its so-called move 37, which humans thought was a mistake at first but turned out to be a decisive move in beating Lee. “This move was really creative and beautiful,” Lee would later say.

In the one game where Lee beat AlphaGo, it was his “hand of God” play, the 78th move, which perplexed the AI program. In a sense, the machine gave Lee “a new way of seeing the game,” as depicted in one scene of the documentary, AlphaGo.

In sum, AI might not kill brands—or creativity for that matter—just yet. However, it’ll force brands to mutate over time, and us to adjust our ways of thinking and working. 

Not only has AI collapsed the space between your idea and execution, but so has the influence between institutions and individuals. Building a brand has now become accessible to anyone and everyone. That is why it also has gotten that much more competitive. Fiercely so.

When we don’t hear the mention of AI anymore, that’s when we know technology has diffused itself throughout our industry, whatever that may be.

Rei Inamoto is the founding partner of I&CO, a global innovation firm that works with forward-thinking leaders to accelerate growth and shape the future of their business.