As part of its coverage for Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Campaign published perspectives from holding company CEOs on making the business case for creativity investment in the wondrous age of AI.
The series reads like essays drafted by the holding companies’ respective PR departments—although it would have been more appropriate to generate the corporate content via AI.
Regardless, Publicis Groupe Chairman and CEO Arthur Sadoun leveraged the opportunity to create shameless self-promotion for his White holding company, unveiling a “BS detector bot”—while opening and closing by declaring, “Imagine what we could achieve if we all took the BS out of AI.”
For starters, if the BS detector bot were to directly engage with Publicis Groupe, it would explode from being overloaded by the endless bullshit that the White holding company excretes.
To make a sloppy segue, Sadoun’s declaration—Imagine what we could achieve if we all took the BS out of AI—must be explored through the lens of AI standing for Artificial Inclusivity.
Imagine if Adland—or even just Publicis Groupe—took the BS out of DEIBA+ commitments. Envision the elimination of performative PR, heat shields, Human Heat Shields, underfunded diversity budgets, crumbs, delegating diversity, diversity committees, embryo recruitment, ERGs, broken promises, faux dedication, outright lies, and more.
Indeed, it’s impossible to consider such a scenario, as the foundation of AI is BS.
Hell, Publicis Groupe absolutely prioritizes Artificial Intelligence well ahead of diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, allyship, justice, etc. Technology trumps responsibility, accountability, and respect.
Systemic racism is the ultimate achievement.
Imagine what we could achieve if we took the BS out of AI
By Arthur Sadoun
“In reality, it is not creativity that evolves: it stays the same. It is everything else that grows around it.”
Those words are as true today as they were in 1958 when Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet, the founder of Publicis, first said them.
Creativity, its power and its importance at our group has never changed. And neither has the case we make for investing in it: creativity is the added value that we bring, which has the ability to transform the future of our clients’ businesses.
It is how a small hotshop, created in Montmartre almost 100 years ago, became the market leader on every front today.
What does change, as our founder said, is how we anticipate and adapt to everything “that evolves around” creativity. It won’t come as a surprise when I say that, right now, this means artificial intelligence.
It’s everywhere in our industry. We’re all caught up in announcing the same “exclusive” partnerships, everyone is obsessed by generative AI content, and each prediction and promise around AI seems more overblown than the last.
The AI revolution has created some hype, a bit of fear, and – excuse my French – a lot of BS. And you don’t just have to take my word for it, you can click here to see what I mean.
On one side you have the Sam Altmans of the world, who are prophesying that AI will kill off our entire industry. That’s BS.
Anyone who thinks AI will take our jobs or replace human creativity is lacking in imagination, foresight or both.
At Publicis, we have been putting AI at the heart of our operations and into the hands of our people since 2017.
In that time, we’ve gone from a 70,000-strong organisation to 100,000, with several thousand more people set to join us this year.
Then you have those in our industry who position AI as the great saviour of all their business challenges and organisational woes.
Let’s be honest, AI is not the solution to siloed legacy structures and a lack of capabilities. So that’s BS, too.
The truth is AI can only be fully leveraged if you have unique proprietary data, a single infrastructure and tech innovation expertise.
At Publicis, when others were buying back shares, we were buying technology and data, investing more than €9bn in the acquisitions of Sapient and Epsilon.
We also did the hard work of simplifying our organization, putting into place the Power of One.
And we can’t forget how we radically changed our culture, implementing AI for all of our people with our Marcel platform, long before AI was de rigeur.
Today, seven years after we launched Marcel in Cannes, we’re back on the Croisette to take the BS out of AI.
To hold ourselves accountable, we have created a BS detector bot that will translate the AI hype and jargon clients encounter into straight-up refreshing talk, while also prompting critical questions to ask themselves and their partners – starting with us.
We are also holding 30 closed-door sessions for clients to share real AI apps, customised to their specific industries, driving to real business outcomes, not cute gen AI output.
Everyone talks about investing in creativity. In Cannes, we all dedicate a lot of time, money, and carbon emissions to celebrate it. But, so far, we haven’t been having the right conversations about what it takes to get the best out of AI for creativity that drives business.
So let’s check ourselves, get off the AI hype loop and imagine what we could achieve if we all took the BS out of AI.
Arthur Sadoun is the chairman and chief executive of Publicis Groupe
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