Advertisers Are Good at Getting Human Attention. Can They Stand Out to A.I.?

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.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

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