Published June 20, 2025 · By CampaignsLive · Industry
Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in 2025 was the third consecutive year in which AI dominated the festival’s conversational agenda. The 2023 edition had introduced AI as a major topic; the 2024 edition (with the Toys R Us Sora premiere and the Mango campaign discussion) had brought the conversation to a head; the 2025 edition shifted the conversation in a specific way that is worth recording.
The shift, in shorthand: AI in brand creative stopped being treated as an emerging technology that the industry was figuring out and started being treated as infrastructure that the industry was now operating on. The framing was different. The questions were different. The award patterns were different.
This is a working read from outside the festival.
What the festival’s framing actually was
Through 2023 and 2024, the AI sessions at Cannes had been organized around the question of whether AI was changing brand creative production, what changes it was producing, and how the industry should respond. The sessions featured tooling vendors, agency leaders, and brand-side speakers presenting their views on the trajectory.
The 2025 sessions had a different organizing question. They were organized around the assumption that AI was infrastructure, and that the practical questions were operational: how to use it well, how to handle its trade-offs, how to organize teams around it, how to maintain creative judgment in a generation-rich workflow. The sessions featured fewer evangelists and more practitioners.
The shift was visible at multiple levels. The keynote programming featured a smaller share of “AI is changing everything” presentations and a larger share of working case studies. The panels were organized around specific operational questions (“brand consistency at scale,” “rights and provenance documentation,” “agency-brand collaboration in AI-heavy production”) rather than around the broader category. The exhibitor floor featured a denser cluster of specialized AI-creative platforms and a smaller share of general-purpose tooling vendors. The aggregate effect was an industry that had moved past the “is this real?” phase into the “how do we actually run this?” phase.
What the awards reflected
The award patterns shifted in parallel. Three observations.
The work that won the highest awards used AI as one component of a larger creative system. The most-recognized work at the festival did not foreground its AI use. The AI was, in most cases, present in the production stack — used for variant generation, format extension, atmospheric work, pre-production visualization — but the creative idea was not “we used AI.” The categorization of AI as one tool among many, rather than as the defining characteristic of the work, was a marker of the maturity shift.
The work that won AI-specific categories was no longer experimental. The AI-related awards in 2023 had skewed toward experimental and demonstration work. In 2025, the work in the AI-related categories was operational — campaigns that had run, against commercial KPIs, using AI as part of the production. The criteria had effectively shifted from “interesting use of AI” to “AI deployed well in a real campaign.”
The work that was visibly AI-as-the-idea (Heinz-style) was a smaller share. The pattern that had defined the 2022-2023 wave of AI-in-brand work — where the AI was foregrounded as the creative concept — was not the dominant pattern in the 2025 recognized work. The honest AI-foregrounded work continued to appear but in smaller proportion than the AI-as-production-tool work.
The panel topics that defined the year
Several panel topics recurred across sessions and stages, and together they sketch where the industry conversation actually sat.
Brand consistency at scale. The most-discussed operational question of the year. How brand teams maintain visual register across high-volume generative output. The solutions discussed were the ones that had emerged through 2024 and into 2025: fine-tuning on brand archives, reference image conditioning, brand-asset locking. The conversation was less about whether the problem existed and more about which technical approaches actually worked at production volume.
Rights, provenance, and disclosure. The compliance side of brand-AI production. The EU AI Act’s implementation timeline had brought this into focus for most major brands. The conversation was operational: which platforms produce clean provenance documentation, how to update talent contracts, how to disclose AI use in different channel contexts.
Agency-brand collaboration models. The most consequential structural conversation of the year. Where the work that was moving in-house at brands had restructured the agency relationship. Where the work that remained with agencies had changed. What new collaboration models were emerging — particularly for brand-side internal AI tooling that needed external creative direction. The sessions on this topic featured more genuine disagreement than the technology-focused panels did, which made them more interesting.
Video, and what comes next. The video tooling discussion was more measured than it had been at the 2024 festival. Sora, Runway Gen-3 and successors, the FLUX-derived video tools — the conversation acknowledged the progress but was less prone to overclaiming about the imminent transformation. The realistic view by 2025 was that video tooling was approximately where image tooling had been in 2023: capable for specific use cases, not yet capable across the production stack.
What did not get discussed enough
Two things were notable for their relative absence.
The labor effects. The 2024 festival had had a substantive thread on labor effects of AI in brand creative — the contractions in production design, the changing role of mid-tier creatives, the broader industry employment implications. The 2025 thread on this was thinner, even though the operational reality was that the effects had compounded over the intervening year. The relative quiet was probably a function of the festival’s overall mood and the natural reluctance of an industry-celebrating event to dwell on the harder dimensions of its own transformation.
The training-corpus question. The 2025 festival had less prominent discussion of training-corpus provenance than the 2024 festival had, even though the question had become more rather than less consequential through the intervening year. Several major lawsuits had progressed; the EU AI Act had begun phasing in; the Christie’s Augmented Intelligence auction in February had triggered the most organized artist-community response in two years. The festival programming was lighter on these questions than the underlying reality justified.
What this implies for the next year
Two working positions emerged from the festival.
The first is that the industry is past the inflection point at which AI in brand creative was an open question. The remaining questions are operational, not directional. Brands and agencies are working through the implementation; the strategic posture is settled.
The second is that the maturity of the operational layer is now the differentiator. Tools, agencies, and brand teams that have built the workflow integration, the rights and compliance infrastructure, and the brand-consistency capability are doing meaningfully better than the ones that have continued to focus on raw model capability. The Cannes 2025 winners were almost universally in the first category.
For the trajectory that the festival’s framing reflected, see From Generation to Production-Ready: The Quiet 2025 Shift. For the operational question that dominated the year, see Brand Consistency Is the Hardest Problem in Generative Creative.