In this exclusive op-ed, Bastion’s group strategy director Addison Gazal highlights his unexpected takes on the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, and why those in the creative industry must choose where they want to sit on the spectrum of creativity and efficiency. He asks whether the industry is happy to optimise themselves into irrellevance, or if they should focus more on creativity itself
Before I got here I was quite unsure what I wanted to write about.
I’ve never been here and I truly didn’t know what to expect.
Images of what the festival would be like were forged from stories told by mentors, photos viewed through socials and the imagination of a planner who had a nostalgic yearning for a time I hadn’t even experienced.
These visions were contradicted almost immediately somewhere between the PayPal Patisserie and the DoordashAds terrace (these are two real things that were on the croisette). The tech giants seemed to have buy out the locations I imagined names like DDB, JWT, and BBDO once held.
Don’t get me wrong, the activations and scale of it all was amazing, it just didn’t scream ‘festival of creativity’, it screamed Silicon Valley meets Deloitte. This felt like a metaphor for something I’m sure a lot of people in this industry feel right now.
Is creativity secondary to what we do? Are things such as efficiency, logistics and data, driving our industry now? If so is that what we want? Surely that isn’t why any of us got into this industry.
I was thinking about this sitting at a pop up for TradeDesk ironically, – they were the first to open and had an Aussie barista and some breakfast charcuterie – when a tech analyst from London sat next to me and we started chatting. After a few minutes of listening to salespeople from around the world pitch SAAS, and agentic solutions to each other she asked if I wanted to join her at an AWS event. AI’s promise still has a physical footprint: servers, energy, water, land, cooling systems and that morning I saw a viral Bezos article about AI and water doing the rounds. Whether the most inflammatory quote was accurate or not, the question underneath it felt impossible to ignore: what resource problems are we actually solving? Wages? Workers?
If tech/AI generates insights, then strategies, then concepts that are then tested via synthetic research and finally turn into generated campaigns – whats’ left for everyone else? Is our job at that point to simply consume.
That’s when I challenged myself to go into this with a positive view of tech, to park my jaded perspective and just lean into it. This is unfortunately what I chose to write about.
Is tech antithetical to creativity?
Creativity is inherently inefficient. It looks like nothing. Until it’s everything. It’s making mistakes, watching clips you remember from 10 years ago that are relevant to the brief, it’s going for a walk or having a shower until it hits you.
Technology (when I use this term I am using it in the sense of creative output etc. I understand algorithms etc. I’m talking about this renaissance of AI over the past 3-4 years. LLM’s, generative etc.) is efficient, it prioritises an output because to AI having something is the end goal, but to quote (alike many others this week) the great John Abbot, ‘Shit that arrives at the speed of light is still shit’.
Can these two things live together in our industry without consequence?
I’ll be honest, it was hard to be unbiased. As I wrote notes, listening to an amazing talk by the VP of Pantone; talking about trends shifting towards more real, human, flawed designs – I couldn’t help but notice a journalist next to me typing points from the talk directly into Claude, asking it to ‘make it better’, ‘go with whatever you think will be more effective’.
The irony of getting AI to create an article you hope people read, that you couldn’t be bothered to write.
As the week progressed, I continued to notice a pattern, when I was in the Palais it was conversations about creativity, ideas, insight and emotion. Of course, tech was mentioned, but not as the core, but as means to an end, not the end.
The Palais soon became the antidote to the transactional noise of the ‘cold LinkedIn DM’ energy of these tech giants that littered the town. Inside it was creative people, saying interesting things, about real human problems. Showcasing work that was made from discovering, feeling, living – work such as Vehicle of Hope, Recipe for Change, and Camera Roll. I spent hours watching case studies, listening to jury’s and one thing kept jumping out. The best ideas continued to be unexpected and disruptive. AI is inherently derivative, therefore it can’t truly be creative, because it doesn’t subvert where we’ve been. You don’t cut through doing things that have been done.
“But Addison, tech isn’t all bad.” And it really isn’t. It is logical, tactical, and efficient. All things humans inherently aren’t, and that’s the point. I want to read what people actually think: their mistakes, their discoveries, their messy leaps from one thought to another. Because AI is logical, and as my CSO Angela Morris – and a few people this week – have reminded me – people are not.
I’m excited about where AI will go, because its gaps will highlight what makes us human.
Sir John Hegarty spoke about how we have become an industry that is incredible at stalking, we know everything about the audience, we serve them the right message, at the right time, but we continue to forget the first thing about our job – we need to entertain. People actively try to avoid ads, so why do we continue to interrupt their lives to serve them ‘shit’.
We know entertainment, humour, emotion cuts through. There are countless studies from the likes of IPA and System 1, that show the measurable, tangible benefit of creativity. It exponentially increases all key brand metrics; it’s a key part of a company’s success. Yet we choose safe and boring – because we can point to the data (thanks tech) and show that we did what the data says. We sidestep accountability and step directly into dull – safe yes, but dull.
In a perfect world, tech expedites context. It helps us find the pattern faster, compress the admin, remove the dead time and get closer to the problem. But humans still have to decide what matters. Humans still have to make the leap. Humans still have to turn the information into something others can feel.
While the true cost of recent tech, particularly AI, is still unfolding, we can already see the direction of travel. What started as free became subscription based and what was subscription based is now tokenised. At some point, the cost of efficiency will outweigh the value it creates. The question is whether, by then, we will be too far in — too transformed, too dependent, too depleted — to turn back. Will we become another Concorde fallacy, pouring more time, money and belief into something simply because we have already come this far? Or will we be brave enough to admit the bus is very, very late, stop convincing ourselves and call an Uber?
This week, I have never felt more inspired – and more intrigued – by the future of our industry.
While dozens of brands ending in ‘ly’ sell you tools that can help you reply to DM’s in ‘your tone of voice’, I spoke to creative minds from around the world in their tone of voice. The tech giants may have bought up space on the croisette, but in the palais, in the halls, the bars, the cafes there are thousands of people that are still here for creative work that makes you feel something.
So my conclusion?
We must choose. Do we give a shit enough to not take the path of least resistance, like an actor who must choose between having work done or still wanting to be good at dramatic roles?
Where do we want to sit on the spectrum of creativity and efficiency? Are we happy to optimise ourselves into irrelevance, or do we go back to the reason we all got into this industry and create?
