What African creativity already knows about the age of AI
Every June, the advertising world orients itself around the resort city Cannes in France. The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is the industry’s most visible benchmark: tens of thousands of entries from nearly a hundred countries, a week of juries, stages and side conversations on the Croisette, and awards that still function as a shared language for what counts as excellent work in the world of advertising.
For South Africa, the festival has always been both a measuring stick and a platform, and the conversations that follow Cannes often shape and influence how the industry at home thinks about craft. For The Up&Up Group, Africa’s largest group of independent creative companies, the question is about how African creativity can and should show up at the festival and in the conversations that follow around the world.
Jacques Burger and Neo Mashigo delivered a presentation at the Cannes Lions festival this year called Lessons in Creativity. What Africa Can Teach the World. The presentation was built around a reality familiar across the continent. African creative industries have had to work through constraints and constant change, often across markets where cultural fluency is a basic requirement. The session drew on diversity of thought in finding solutions that fit the people they are meant to serve.
What became interesting over the week was how often the wider Cannes conversation pointed back to the same instincts. As expected, AI was everywhere. But many of the strongest arguments about growth and brand building came back to a more basic question. Once technology makes it easier to produce marketing at scale, what makes the work worth noticing?
For Jacques Burger, group CEO at The Up&Up Group, this creates an opportunity for African agencies. “Much of the African creative industry has been built in environments where efficiency was never optional. You learn quickly that doing more with less only works when the idea is strong enough to move people and the business. AI can help us get there faster, but we still have to know where we are going,” says Burger.
Growth needs more than efficiency
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Anyone working with African marketing budgets will recognise the pressure. There is often very little room for spend that cannot show its value quickly, which makes the measurable stuff easier to defend. The danger is that brands end up putting too much weight behind what can be counted now and not enough behind being remembered later.
That is partly why AB InBev stood out at Cannes. It was named Creative Marketer of the Year for an unprecedented third time and also won the inaugural Creative Brand Grand Prix. You do not get there through one good campaign. It reflects years of backing creativity across the business and giving brands the time to build.
Performance activity still has a role. It simply has more to work with when people already recognise the brand and have a reason to consider it. Optimisation can only take a business so far if the brand itself struggles to get noticed.
Distinctiveness cannot be automated into a brand
AI is making competent marketing faster and cheaper to produce. Volume, on its own, becomes a weaker advantage.
Westpac’s 'Double You' platform provided a good example of this at Cannes. The bank took its familiar W and found another way to build around an asset it already owned, turning its pronunciation into an expression of partnership and support. What makes the idea useful is that it belongs to Westpac. Another bank could imitate the execution, but it could not own the thing at the centre of it.
One of the realities of working across African markets is that the same idea will not always travel well. Something that works in one place can miss in another, even when the audiences look similar on paper. That forces you to pay close attention to the people you are trying to reach.
Neo Mashigo, group chief creative officer at The Up&Up Group, believes that discipline becomes more valuable as AI enters more of the creative process. “There is a difference between having access to information and understanding what people mean. African creativity is often strongest when it gets close enough to culture to notice the things that are easy to miss. AI can help us move faster, but we still have to know what we are looking for and why it will connect,” says Mashigo.
If technology creates more capacity, agencies also need to decide what to do with it. AXA’s 'Three Words', winner of the 2026 Creative Effectiveness Grand Prix, is useful here. AXA changed its home insurance offering to support people experiencing domestic violence, including emergency relocation assistance. The creative decision changed what the business did for customers before communications amplified it.
You see the same thing in African markets all the time. People do not always move through brands the way a journey map suggests they will. Sometimes you only see the better idea once you look at what people are actually doing.
Africa does not need to copy the AI playbook
African agencies should adopt AI where it improves the work. Protecting an inefficient process because it is familiar serves nobody.
We should also recognise what our markets have taught us. African creativity has developed in conditions that reward resourcefulness and close attention to context. Working through change is part of the job. Those capabilities are increasingly useful in a global industry where execution is becoming more accessible to everyone.
Cannes gave the industry plenty to think about AI. If polished work can be produced quickly by more brands, the advantage sits increasingly with those that know people well enough to find the idea others miss and have built enough distinctiveness for that idea to feel unmistakably theirs. African creativity has been practising that for a long time.
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