“What was the scene like in 2011?” Clara Malley of Side Projects asks, of Ben Dietz’s presence at Cannes Lions for more than a decade.
“Cannes, as people hopefully remember, started out as a festival of creativity, awarding the greatest advertising and marketing creative,” he explains.
“You’d never know it today,” Clara comments.
“You certainly wouldn’t,” Ben says. “It’s — at best — a marketing trade show and, at worst, a kind of gross display of of excess, from people who have to pay their way into interesting conversations. I just walked here by a pink Chrysler…What’s the name of these ridiculous, ridiculous cars? Cars that should never have been made, turned into a limousine?
“Making Science?” Eli Williams of Side Projects asks.
“An AI company called Making Science,” Ben confirms. “Guys at Making Science: don’t do that again. It was a bad use of your marketing money. In 2011, when I first came, it felt like a gathering of creative people with some salespeople and platform people. The agency groups were kind of like on the sidelines a little bit, but it felt very organic — and now it is the opposite of that. So much so that I think we’re — I was just having lunch about this — that I think we’re we’re moving back to a space where the thing to do is to show up by not showing up. It’s just to ride the wave that exists without having to put much into it because everybody else will allow you to find access, find a platform — ”
“Someone else will provide you lunch,” Clara says.
“Shout out, Bloomberg Media,” Ben says.
“This was Eli’s question, and I don’t mean to crib it,” Clara says, “but it kind of goes to that…If you didn’t know that Cannes was an advertising festival, what would you think it was a festival of? Just a celebration of money? A celebration of wealth?”
“Well,” Ben begins, “it’s much more stupid than that. That is a that is an interesting thing to ponder. It feels like a trade show or a convention, but for anybody who’s never been to a trade show or a convention of this magnitude, it just feels incomprehensible. I guess it feels like Times Square or something, like endless Time Square.”
“People walk really slow here too,” Eli adds.
“It’s why we’re really about IRL community and tactility and getting people together,” Eli says. “Friction and culture.”
“We were talking early in the week,” Ben says, “and my experience is that — over the course of the week — themes emerge. The tenor changes, realizations happen, conversation throughout, and that’s valuable. That’s why we’re all here. But last year I remember distinctly that on Sunday, when I got here, early into Monday, everybody felt really shook about AI. There was this sort of underlying feeling of ‘This is the end. This is the last time we’re coming to Cannes. The robots are gonna eat our lunch.’ By the end of the week, I think everybody had settled into the idea that: here we are in this idyllic place, we get to see all of our friends from the industry, it’s gonna be cool. This is all fine! We’ll we’ll be okay. What has happened in the year since is that we have seen the AI empire — or emperor — has maybe fewer clothes than we thought.”
“It’s interesting to see how the trend cycle starts,” he continues, “and then comes to fulfillment a year later at the same time, as we strike all of the words from our vocabulary, that we can’t use anymore after this week — because they have been burned to death by overuse.”
“Enjoying the visual of AI emperors-strip poker situation,” Clara says, “which happened over the course of last year.”
“People just realized,” Ben says, “that this ecosystem runs on relationship and it runs on in-person and, ultimately, we’re seeing that the technology is great at a lot of things — but it’s not great at rosé.”
Listen and watch the full episode above, where the Eli, Clara, and Ben discuss brands as mammals, drone performances, and the future of Mr. Beast.
Find more from HIP REPLACEMENT on YouTube, Spotify, and Instagram. Be sure to follow Ben Dietz over on SIC and Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick over on The Trend Report™ too.
