‘Human creativity is under fire’ says WPP

At Cannes Lions, creativity is now seen as a key driver of growth, but leaders are struggling to protect it as idea production becomes cheaper and more automated

For all the star-studded splendor of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, its origins were remarkably modest. To find them, you must leave the French Riviera entirely and return to a warm September afternoon in 1954, in St. Mark’s Square in Venice.  

Europe was still rebuilding after the war, commercial television had yet to spread across the continent, and cinema remained the only mass audiovisual medium available to advertisers outside America. A group of cinema-advertising executives, inspired by the glitz and glamour of the Cannes Film Festival, decided that advertising deserved the same artistic legitimacy as film itself.  

And just like that, the first International Advertising Film Festival was born. It drew just a few hundred attendees and there was only a single competition category. The inaugural Grand Prix went to an Italian commercial for toothpaste. Those in attendance could scarcely have imagined what the festival would eventually become.  

This June, over seventy years on, tens of thousands will descend on Cannes. These days, the crowds lining the Croisette extend far beyond advertisers and filmmakers. Chief executives, venture capitalists, technology founders, and finance leaders are among the throngs flocking to the festival, all drawn by a growing conviction that creativity now sits at the centre of business strategy. 

Yet as creativity’s influence has expanded, so too have the pressures upon it.  

Many in the industry fear that the conditions that allow great ideas to flourish are becoming harder to sustain.  

Among the familiar faces raising the alarm is Rob Reilly, WPP’s global chief creative officer, who oversees creative strategy across one of the world’s largest advertising companies.  

“Human creativity is under fire,” he tells Fortune. “Without it, society will lose far more than its capacity to innovate. Everything that brings joy, peace, or inspiration—music, art, sports, and even simple hobbies like baking—is a product of creativity.”   

Much of this pressure stems from the rise of AI in advertising. The future cracked open by this technology is full of both awful and awesome possibilities. That duality is a challenge for organizations investing heavily in these tools, Reilly says.  

“For a company like WPP which is deep into technology and deep into AI…the tension is: where does human creativity fit in?” he notes. The danger is that organizations, captivated by technological possibility, begin to mistake capability for value. “It’s easy to get distracted by technology,” he says. “AI in the hands of a skilled, visionary, creative person could be incredibly inspiring,” he says. “But in the hands of hacks, it’s only going to create more and more drivel.”  

Even as creative work has become a prized corporate asset, many of the people responsible for producing it believe its value remains poorly understood, and poorly rewarded.  

Marketing budgets have come under pressure as brands grapple with inflation, economic uncertainty, and demands for short-term efficiency. According to Gartner’s 2026 CMO Survey, marketing budgets have fallen to 9.6% of total company budgets, down from 11.4% a year earlier. 

“I worry that creativity continues to be undervalued by the businesses that rely on it, how it’s paid for…all those things” Reily says. In his view, the problem is partly structural. “Our business has not done itself a lot of favors when it comes to figuring out a really smart commercial model,” he argues, adding that “the advertising industry is struggling a bit and, you know…will continue to struggle.” 

Protecting great ideas  

A pressing question is whether organizations that depend on human creativity still know how to cultivate it. 

For Eric Monnet, chief of staff and global director of creative excellence at WPP, the answer begins with leadership. “The most consistent thing I have heard from senior CMOs over the past year is that creative ambition is a quality of the leaders inside brands who intentionally decide to champion it, defend it, and build the conditions for it to survive,” he says. 

Contrary to popular belief, creative excellence is rarely the result of a single breakthrough campaign. More often, it emerges from leadership teams willing to invest in ideas consistently and shield those who came up with them from the pressures of quarterly thinking.  

Evidence of this can be found in some of the industry’s most enduring success stories. Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign began more than two decades ago with a simple cultural insight and has since evolved into a brand platform worth an estimated $7.5 billion. Similarly, Volvo’s “EVA Initiative”, which was built on the company’s longstanding commitment to safety, releasing decades of proprietary crash-test data so that women could be safer in every vehicle, not just a Volvo. 

Today, Monnet argues that large organizations are often structured in ways that make great creativity harder, not easier, to produce.  

“It’s almost unnatural for a large organization to be able to create great work,” he says. “There are a lot of forces that go against creativity, and none of them are villains.” CFOs, he says, are focused on efficiency, procurement departments on cost control, legal teams on risk management, and operations leaders on consistency. Each is performing a necessary function.  

The challenge is that creativity often requires organizations to tolerate uncertainty, embrace risk and make long-term investments whose value cannot always be measured immediately. “There must be a shared value for creativity across the organization,” Monnet insists. “When a brand views creativity as a force multiplier for growth rather than just an expense, it becomes easier to navigate the internal pressures.”  

New chapter, same values  

This may be the defining tension hanging over Cannes Lions this year. The festival was founded on the belief that advertising deserved recognition as a discipline worthy of artistic respect. Seventy years later, creative work has arguably never been more important to business. Yet many of the people responsible for it feel undervalued, whether by financial models that fail to reward it properly or by technological narratives that threaten to reduce it to a process. 

“Cannes Lions has a thousand doors,” Reilly says. “Perhaps only a hundred of them lead directly into traditional creative work. The other nine hundred open into fields that would have seemed peripheral to advertising a generation ago—data science, venture capital, platform economics, creator ecosystems, and emerging technologies.” 

For Reilly, however, none of this represents a departure from the festival’s original mission. He rejects the notion that creative ambition and commercial performance exist in opposition to one another. While Cannes continues to celebrate originality and craft, it increasingly rewards work that delivers measurable impact in the real world. “We don’t celebrate anything that doesn’t have good business results,” he says. 

That belief underpins his optimism about the industry’s future. While acknowledging that there are “things we need to fix,” Reilly argues that the pace of change should excite rather than discourage creative professionals. 

“If people aren’t psyched to be part of the industry now, they’re out of their minds,” he says. “The industry is changing so fast. If you’re not on the train, you’re going to be left behind.” 

It is a lesson Cannes has reinforced for seven decades. The industry has weathered the arrival of television, the internet, social media, and every technological revolution in between. Each transformed how ideas were created and distributed, but none diminished the value of the idea itself.  

There is hope—beneath the spectacle, the branded cabanas, AI demos and rosé-fuelled networking—that the original premise of that Venetian gathering still lingers. The belief that creativity, properly understood, is not an indulgence of business, but one of its most powerful engines.  

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com