Ad holding bosses join search for people business missing in action

Is advertising still a people business? Or is it, increasingly, a matter of herding unruly algorithms into some kind of order you can make money from – albeit around the edges?

It’s that time of year when the bosses of the world’s biggest ad companies (some of whom are tech companies) gird their their loins for the Cannes Lions in the south of France. As is traditional, they tell Campaign why it’s still a people business, for all that tech.

On the primacy of people and creativity Omnicom boss John Wren says: “Competitive advantage today is not simply having an idea. It must be informed by data, accelerated by technology, executed at scale and capable of changing behaviour. That is where Omnicom is focused. Creativity now sits at the intersection of talent, intelligence and technology.”

Consider, if you will, a senior creative (or two of them as used to be the case) consigned to an office and told not to re-emerge until they have a knockout idea. What would they take into account: some stuff from a planner? A media consideration if it was a small client? They would not have seen themselves sitting at the intersection of talent, intelligence (aren’t they the same thing? Think he means research) and technology.

Wren’s comment is just PR speak; a line-up of things we all in theory approve of but which don’t mean very much in reality. If you view advertising or, in the broadest sense, communications like this you’ll just get bogged down in a load of detail you don’t need and certainly don’t understand. It won’t stimulate ideas, more suffocate them.

So what (in theory) can cope with all these things at once? Why an AI super computer of course. Think people and their ideas need a bit more help.