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The advertising industry has a new benchmark for AI: a prompt that asks a model to act as an experienced creative and write a 90-second TV commercial that would win at Cannes Lions. It's the industry's own imitation game, and the stakes are simple - if AI can produce award-winning scripts, agencies lose their claim to a uniquely human craft. The test has a data advantage. Around 1,500 Lions were awarded at this year's Cannes Lions festival, and the awards have been running for 72 years. That's a large archive of winning work for any LLM to study, from Grand Prix winners to the Bronze entries that still made the cut.

The data behind the test

The original Turing test was proposed in 1950. No computer passed it in Turing's lifetime; the first widely reported success came in 2014, when a program called Eugene Goostman, posing as a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy, convinced a third of judges it was human. The advertising version may not take 64 years. The choice of creativity as the benchmark is deliberate. Creativity is "the most human category, its ingredients being equal portions of vanity and irrationality," the essay argues. That makes it a fitting test - and a high bar. The prompt is a scriptwriting brief at heart, the kind of task that AI for Scriptwriters training is designed for.

Meta's automated ads are the cautionary tale

Meta's automated ad creation is, by the essay's assessment, very poor. Its AI tools have been reported to alter products, add or change parts, create strange product combinations, produce low-quality images, and generate nonsense headlines and garbled text. Zuckerberg's pitch for fully automated advertising is blunt: "You're a business, you come to us, you tell us what your objective is, you connect to your bank account, you don't need any creative, you don't need any targeting demographic, you don't need any measurement, except to be able to read the results that we spit out." That's fine, the essay notes, assuming Meta doesn't keep paying fines or admitting to massaging metrics in its own favor.

What happens if AI wins

Some ads already look suspect. The essay points to a Škoda ad running on TV and wonders whether AI-conceived commercials are already walking among us. But tech leaders would likely struggle to stay quiet if their algorithms were winning awards, the essay argues. If AI does pass the test, the consequences are stark. The essay's conclusion: "If AI could write award-winning ads, it would be curtains for Cannes Lions."

Why this matters for creatives

For working creatives, this test cuts to the core of the job. If an LLM can produce a 90-second script that wins at Cannes, it changes what agencies can charge for and what clients expect. The question isn't whether AI can write a script - it's whether the industry can tell the difference, and what happens when it can't. For those starting to work with these tools, AI for Creatives resources offer a practical entry point.