Advertisers Are Good at Getting Human Attention. Can They Stand Out to A.I.?
At Cannes Lions, marketers grappled with how to influence A.I. chatbots.
For a quarter-century, the economic engine of the digital world relied on a predictable transaction: Users searched, links appeared and traffic flowed.
That foundational contract was declared effectively dead this week at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in France.
As the global advertising elite gathered aboard superyachts and inside beachfront villas, the conversation shifted from how to win human attention to a much more urgent, existential question: How do you influence an A.I. model?
The concern carries major financial and systemic implications far beyond Madison Avenue: Fortune 500 corporations facing sudden commercial invisibility as chatbot answers bypass multibillion-dollar digital marketing funnels; publishers and creators watching A.I. models starve them of referral traffic; and political strategists being left blind about their donors.
“These are tectonic shifts,” said Shiv Singh, a former C.M.O. and marketing leader for brands like Pepsi, Expedia and LendingTree who runs the industry organization AI Trailblazers. “The way discoverability is changing is like an earthquake nobody expected.”
Google now serves up A.I.-generated summaries before search results. And many consumers are getting their information directly from chatbots. But compared with traditional search, the way large language models source and summarize content is far less predictable or consistent. That has some marketers feeling less in control and more worried about how the models explain, ignore or incorrectly characterize them.
One answer is to buy ads directly from A.I. platforms. OpenAI used the week in Cannes to pitch advertisers on placing ads within ChatGPT, through which the company reportedly expected to earn $100 million annually by 2030. (The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied the suit’s claims.)
Another approach is to try to show up in A.I. content organically. What can brands do to make sure ChatGPT and Claude, Anthropic’s chatbot, tell users good things about them? Or to show up in lists of recommendations?
Brands have experimented with making the information easier for A.I. agents to read, including by adding more details about products and F.A.Q.s to their websites.
Established tech brands and start-ups alike are creating other solutions. At Cannes, Google showcased the ads in its A.I. summaries of search results. And Adobe, which paid $1.9 billion this year to buy the S.E.O. company Semrush, promoted a product powered by its technology for making brands more visible to A.I. models. At a “Semrush Villa,” Cannes attendees could see a “visibility report” on how a brand appeared to the models, how they compared with rivals and strategies for noticing and addressing content gaps.
A growing class of A.I. start-ups that aims to help marketers with A.I. visibility set up along the beach and in rented yachts during the festival. IV.AI, docked on “Yacht Row,” monitors external A.I. search outputs and suggests language that may improve citations. Jasper, which had one of the many smaller tents along the beach, helps brands generate content optimized for A.I. systems.
And Profound, which tracks the volume of mentions to show how A.I.-generated answers describe and cite brands across ChatGPT, Claude and Google’s Gemini, made its Cannes debut after reaching unicorn status this year when it raised a $96 million round of funding that valued the 2-year-old start-up at $1 billion.
James Cadwallader, a co-founder and the C.E.O. of Profound, said his team had already had nearly 300 meetings by Thursday morning. “It’s been a wild, wild week,” he said.
Many marketers said they were still experimenting with different approaches and solutions.
“It’s not like best practices exist right now,” said Kim Storin, the C.M.O. of Zoom, who is part of a group of C.M.O.s who meet monthly to talk about A.I.-related issues. “We’re creating the best practice ourselves.”
Some brands have concluded they need two versions of some content — one for the machines, one for the humans — said Anda Gansca, a co-founder and the C.E.O. of Knotch, a content marketing start-up.
She was in Cannes to promote her company’s new “agentic content engine,” which helped brands like Zillow and Ally Financial develop a second version of their existing content meant to be more visible and readable to machines.
The idea came after Knotch noticed some sites that were optimizing for A.I. readability were hurting their appeal to humans.
“We have to understand that the more LLMs change us as humans, and the more work they do for us, the more we’re going to want a different experience than agent-first content,” she said, referring to large language models. “We’re looking for an experience that’s multimodal and visual and relevant and personalized.”