Humanity Was the Theme. The Layoffs Were the Strategy

SAFFRON

July 13, 2026

I went to Cannes Lions 2026. I loved it. I drank the rosé, I walked the beaches, I had the best marketing week of my life. So this blog is not a takedown from someone standing outside the party. I was very much inside it and I respect the work put in by my fellow peers to amplify the efforts of the creator and ad economy. But all this is probably also why I couldn't stop noticing this one major thing this year.

Humanmaxxing (verb):

...when a brand maxes out how human it looks in public, the craft, the community, the "real stories from real people," while quietly minimizing how many actual humans it keeps on payroll. See also: greenwashing, but for people.

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The festival practically handed me the punchline. The theme everyone kept circling all week was proof of humanity: human craft, human creativity, the irreplaceable human touch.

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But the "proof" I kept thinking about was that the same names selling "human craft" from a beach cabana have spent the last few years cutting humans by the tens of thousands. Amazon: a reported 27,000 roles in 2023 alone. Meta: a reported cumulative 33,000 or so since 2022. Microsoft and Google: tens of thousands more. Much of it wearing the same press-release outfit, "restructuring for AI efficiency."

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Meanwhile, per Ad Age, a branded presence at Cannes ran anywhere from $108,000 for a brunch to $4 million for a single headline concert (as of 2024).

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I kept putting those two things next to each other all week, because nobody on a stage was doing so. That gap is the whole word: an industry with unlimited budget to look human, treating people as the line it cuts first, then spending millions to simulate the warmth of them, three months later, on a beach.

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Humanity isn't a campaign theme. It's a payroll decision. But to be fair, here's my rebuttal: "brand budget and payroll are different line items." Agreed. They are. But a budget is still a company saying out loud what it values, and when the two columns diverge this hard, people notice. Not only marketers, but the audiences these campaigns are for. You can't run a "proof of humanity" keynote and a "people are a cost center" spreadsheet at the same time and expect anyone to believe the first one.

And if you hire agencies or buy creative, this is the tell worth watching.

There is a quieter shift underneath all the PR, and it's the part that matters most for creators and marketers: the industry is swapping human creativity for automated infrastructure. AI does more of the making. The humans who used to make it become the margin. The beach is the show. The layoffs are the strategy. "Human craft" becomes the wrapping paper on a content mill.

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The same players humanmaxxing on the Croisette will happily hand your brand to that automated pipeline: priced like craft, produced like a mill, sold with a story about humanity. So when you're buying, ask what a human actually made and what a tool produced. The ones who can't answer cleanly are the ones telling you a story.

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Where do I get off saying all this? I'm not an ad-industry expert by any means. I'm a marketer with a studio, and I use AI every single day. The difference I'm claiming isn't purity. It's honesty. I'll always tell you what a human made and what a tool accelerated. Humanity as a practice, not a theme we rent for a week.

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I'm not anti-AI. I'm anti-pretending.

Case in point: I didn't write this blog by hand, I talked it out with Wispr Flow, then finessed every point myself. A tool caught the words. A human made the argument. That's my line. And yes it begs the question of how much water was used in the creation of this thought piece. That's a story for another blog.

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If any of this hit a nerve with you, good or bad, I want to hear it. Send me a DM on Instagram or Threads and I'd love to have a conversation.

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