Cannes Lions marketers focus on influencing what AI chatbots recommend

In short: Marketers at Cannes Lions are treating AI chatbots as a new place where brand choices get made, and they want to influence what these systems say and recommend.

What's going on

People are increasingly asking AI assistants for advice, like what phone to buy or which hotel to book. That is changing how brands get discovered. At Cannes Lions, marketers discussed how to make sure their products show up in those answers, not just in regular ads.

A key idea is “marketing to machines.” This means campaigns now have two audiences: humans and the software that reads, summarizes, and recommends information. Some speakers compared it to writing a label that both shoppers and a scanner can understand (clear product details for people, and structured data that computers can reliably parse).

Companies are also building more ways to sell and advertise inside chat experiences. Meta highlighted business chat tools on Messenger, including AI that can answer customer questions and help with purchases. NVIDIA pointed to partners building chat and “answer engines” (tools that respond like a Q and A) that can be supported by advertising.

What to watch

The next fight is likely to be about rules and trust. Brands want “brand safety,” meaning the chatbot should not put them next to harmful content or make unsafe claims. They also want transparency, like knowing why a chatbot recommended one brand over another, and whether money or data partnerships influenced the answer.

Source: NYTimes