Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity will be commencing on June 22 with a focus on the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) in advertising and media. This festival, not to be confused with the Cannes Film festival, is a yearly event that brings together leaders and innovators to discuss emerging trends in advertising and media.
OpenAI’s Chief Revenue Officer Dennis Dreiser is set to speak at the event. The ChatGPT-maker has projected its advertising revenue to skyrocket from $2.4 billion this year to $102 billion by 2030, which would account for 36% of its total revenue. This would put the company in competition with giants like Meta and Google, which have already reported substantial increases in ad revenue. Meta’s first-quarter revenue up 33% and Google’s search ad revenue rising 19%.
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WPP, the largest advertising group, forecasts that global advertising revenue driven by AI will only reach $101 billion by 2030. It also predicts that AI-related advertising revenue will hit $5.1 billion this year, while traditional search advertising is expected to grow by 8.4% to $267 billion. Because of the lack of historical data, WPP has cautioned against overestimating OpenAI’s optimistic revenue expectations, adding uncertainty to the projections.
“It feels like a tectonic change in the digital landscape,” said Rob Wilk, the chief revenue officer of Yahoo, about the rise of OpenAI in the advertising landscape. “A new player coming out of nowhere and three years later becoming or predicting themselves to be, let’s say, a top five publisher in terms of revenue is a very, very large change.” Wilk is reportedly banking on Yahoo’s own answer to ChatGPT, Yahoo Scout, which it is set to roll out this year.
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“AI is a topic we all love to hate and hate to love,” said Mark Wagman, managing director of MediaLink. “I think that the pendulum has swung a little bit back in a good way towards looking at AI as not ‘replacement’ for people, but more as an enhancement, as a tool to allow them to do cooler, better, bigger things.” He added that it would be harder for marketers to break into the world of culture, which includes music, TV, film and sports.
“Any help I think marketers can get from those types of tools to help better understand the right points in culture to try to exploit or take advantage of, I think is interesting,” Wagman said.