AI & Creativity: Key B2B Marketing Insights From The 2023 Cannes Creative B2B Lions

Kingdom of Content for B2B Marketing in 2023 Presentation

As more B2B marketers than ever gathered recently for the Cannes Creative B2B Lions at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, it’s natural to wonder — just what are the key insights that emerged, and how can B2B marketers best put them to use?

Although the event celebrated its 70th anniversary in 2023, it was only the second year where B2B marketers had their own special section of the festivities in the form of the Creative B2B Lions, including an array of B2B-specific marketing award categories.

Let’s jump right in and examine some of the key themes and trends from this year’s second-annual Cannes Creative B2B Lions.

AI Top of Mind & Poised To Touch Every Aspect of Marketing

Generative AI continued its run as 2023’s centerpiece topic at Cannes just as it has in nearly all segments of society, as marketers in B2C and B2B have continued grappling with how to best use the technology while maintaining — and growing — brand authenticity and trust.

“AI has the potential to revolutionize every single part of marketing,” Marie Gulin-Merle, global vice president of ads marketing at Google, suggested after presenting curing Cannes.

Because of the AI innovations 2023 has seen, Guilin-Merle called this an exciting time for marketers. “Marketing is about connecting brands and products to people,” she noted. “The ‘what’ remains the same. The ‘how’ is changing again. Marketers, we can finally get back to marketing,” she observed, while offering up a list of some of the AI tools that Google’s own marketing teams are working with, including:

Bard experimental conversational AI service
Imagen and Phenaki text-to-image and text-to-video tools
PaLM API for generating social media copy
Gmail and Google Docs “Help me write” feature

“AI has the potential to revolutionize every single part of marketing. The ‘what’ remains the same. The ‘how’ is changing again. Marketers, we can finally get back to marketing.” — Marie Gulin-Merle @MarieGulin
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Our own CEO Lee Odden recently delivered a keynote about AI’s impact on B2B marketing, presenting “Human vs Machine: The Future of B2B Content Marketing” during the BtoB Summit Paris 2023 conference.

Lee began his presentation explaining how generative AI essentially “makes you more of what you already are,” with poor content simply being turned into even more sub-par content if that’s what a marketer brings to the AI table, while those who instead present creativity and imagination to AI tools will be rewarded with even more quality B2B marketing content that is creative and imaginative.

As the team at Think With Google recently looked at as its weekly “big topic,” it’s more a matter of AI plus creativity, and not AI versus creativity.

As a hot topic at Cannes, AI and how it can best be used by B2B marketers is an issue we’ve spent considerable time effort to explore here on the TopRank Marketing blog, including the following pieces: