“It Wasn’t Me!” (AI Got Caught Cheating at Cannes)
Welcome to The Great DEI Derailment, futurists.
Over the past year, we’ve witnessed brand after brand—which once prioritized diversity, equity, and inclusion as major talking points—eliminate those programs from their existence on earnings calls, press releases, and websites.
Related teams, job functions, and executive leaders were dismissed. Buzz-building partnerships and sponsorship budgets were slashed.
While retailers like Target and Tractor Supply opted not to be the subject of activist investors and administrative scrutiny, other retailers, such as Costco, have reaffirmed their focus on creating inclusive corporate cultures.
We can expect to see more shifts, particularly as consumers continue to grapple with the role that values play in their purchasing decisions.
That’s why we created the DEI Barometer, a new digital hub designed to help you keep track of changing consumer dynamics, new macro pressures, and the measures your peers are taking in the world of DEI.
We will be updating the hub monthly with new data, insights, and updates, so be sure to bookmark it for future reference.
— Phillip
P.S. The Future Commerce offices will be closed for July 4, but stay tuned for some of our latest and greatest insights delivered right to your inbox in a fun little package.
A Billionaire Fairytale. The lavish wedding of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez was a spectacle of unabashed wealth, with the couple and attendees alike turning it into a branded backdrop for the billionaire class.
Members of the Hollywood elite pranced through Venice as if their mere presence was tied to sponsorship dollars. In some ways, they were.
A new report from Launchmetrics found that Dolce & Gabbana (the Italian fashion house behind Sánchez’s gown) generated $14.5 million in media impact value from the nuptials and saw even more exposure during the wedding than their own fashion show in March.
Our Take: The Venetian vows cost Bezos between $47 million and $56 million of his total net worth; and not to mention quite a few headaches. Hundreds of civilians took to the streets to protest the mere presence of the internet billionaire and his bride-to-be, noting that it was an “exploitation” of the city as everyday residents felt the aftershocks of overtourism, paparazzi chaos, and other issues. The couple was also on the receiving end of a media blitz connecting the celebration to the general public’s universal distaste for billionaire culture and the “triumph of tacky.”
Despite the negative commentary surrounding the affair, Dolce & Gabbana’s media value boost validates that in our doomscrolling culture, clicks lead to clout, and clout leads to cash. Even brands lauded primarily for their class and craftsmanship are jumping the shark in favor of virility. As a result, integration into major cultural moments, even ones that drive social media ire, are now at the top of the brand marketing wish list.
“It Was a Drive-By Glamming!” Sephora is one of several brands trying to divert attention away from Amazon’s Prime Day. The beauty retailer, whose lunch is already being eaten by the online giant, is offering Lyft ride credits of up to $20 to consumers in NYC, LA, San Francisco, and Chicago, so they can be “Delivered to Beauty” at Sephora stores. Running from July 7-10, the activation is part of Sephora’s broader “Get Beauty from People Who Get Beauty” campaign, which emphasizes the expertise and passion of Sephora associates. But shoppers won’t just get a free ride; they’ll also get $10 off any order over $50. Major retailers, including Walmart, Target, Best Buy, and Kohl’s, are running their own competing sales events in order to bring more customers to their eCom and brick-and-mortar storefronts.
Taste the Galaxy. Coca-Cola is extending its 70-plus-year partnership with Disney by going deeper into the Star Wars universe. “Refresh Your Galaxy” is a multi-touch campaign that includes product personalization, an AR-driven hologram experience, and an ad spot that is essentially a two-minute video love letter to the Star Wars fandom.
The campaign drops at a time when there’s renewed interest in Star Wars thanks to the success of “Andor” and other streaming extensions, as well as the typical travel spike that Disney and Galaxy’s Edge see during the summertime.
Inked in Queso. Have you ever loved a brand so much you’d be willing to tattoo their logo on your body? At least one Chipotle fan can claim to have won a recent lunch giveaway. The chain’s social chief, Kirby Ann Connell, shared that its “Tatted Like a Chipotle Bag” campaign, launched on Friday, June 13, drove its highest single-day volume in years, while also generating 102 million social impressions and approximately 9.2 billion “PR impressions.”
The campaign is a riff on a series of viral tweets that compared Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine’s tattooed body to a Chipotle bag. On Friday the 13th (a major holiday in tattoo culture, in case you didn’t know) guests lined up at one of 13 locations to flash their new and existing ink to qualify for a buy-one-get-one offer deal on entrees. If permanent ink wasn’t an option, Chipotle offered customers special temporary tats to commemorate their love for queso and guac in ink.
An A(I) for Creativity? Cannes Lions has withdrawn the award entries (and resulting wins) for several DM9 clients, including Creative Data Lions Grand Prix winner Consul. The move came after the awards judges found the agency used artificial intelligence-generated content to simulate real-world events and campaign results.
Cannes Lions has since established new measures, including an enhanced code of conduct and transparency standards, to better address AI’s evolving role in the creative lifecycle. Cannes Lions will also use AI-detection tools in future competitions and onboard a dedicated review committee that includes experts in AI, ethics, and “content integrity.”
The news comes as discussions around AI legislation intensify. The New York State Legislature has passed a new bill that will require any entity advertising a product or service to disclose whether they’re using “synthetic performers” (read: AI) to generate their content and creative. Governor Kathy Hochul has until the end of this month to sign or veto the bill, which will likely set a precedent for how AI is discussed and managed within local governments.
Bot Shop. Anthropic has revealed the results of “Project Vend,” an experiment to gauge whether Claude could run a small and profitable retail shop, and the results are basically what we would expect: while the shopkeeping AI agent called “Cladius” was good at the repetitive and mundane tasks of retail, it truly did not excel at the art and science of running a profitable brand.
There were a few things it did well, like finding suppliers and adapting to user needs, but it didn’t have the depth of knowledge or expertise required to be successful. For example, when there was high demand for a particular product, it reordered it but didn’t raise prices to boost revenue. It also was easily manipulated into offering discounts, which hurt margins.
Anthropic dug deep into what worked well and what went wrong, including one particularly odd hallucination. In summary, Claude’s “underlying training” as an assistant made it more agreeable and more likely to adapt to what the end user asked for. However, with more careful prompting and access to more robust business tools (a CRM, for instance) would arm the “shopkeeper” with the knowledge it needed to perform more nuanced tasks.
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