Leo Burnett Worldwide

Susan Credle: AI, Sameness and Creative Craft

Susan Credle, newly announced as the recipient of Cannes Lions’ Lion of St Mark, discusses AI’s role in advertising, arguing it can speed early work but cannot replace human craft. With a 41-year career across agencies such as BBDO, Leo Burnett and FCB, she says AI often returns expected, similar ideas and is best used as a qualifier to rule out predictable options. Credle warns of 'sameness' driven by large models, stresses the importance of brand purpose as creative guardrails, and cautions that agencies must find business models to be paid for strategic brand thinking. She favors mass-brand building over fragmented, cheap reach and uses the metaphor that 'the forest has to burn' for generational change in the industry.

Publicis Switzerland Rebrands to Leo, Adopts 'HI x AI'

Publicis Lausanne and Publicis Zürich have rebranded as Leo Switzerland and repositioned their working model around "HI x AI" (Human Insight x Artificial Intelligence). Leadership says the change is more than a name swap: it integrates creativity, strategy, data and technology to deliver faster, more personalized and scalable solutions. Leo Switzerland counts over 50 employees, represents 25 nationalities and 21 languages locally, and is part of the global Leo Constellation (about 15,000 employees) and Publicis Groupe Switzerland (over 350 employees). The agency emphasizes upskilling rather than layoffs despite greater AI use — estimating 60–80% AI usage in the conceptual visual phase — and highlights access to Marcel, Publicis’s internal AI/collaboration platform (noted as connecting 108,000 employees worldwide). Samuel Wicki has joined the Swiss operation; Robert van den Heuvel remains a senior creative leader involved in the transition.

Prompt Injection Bypasses Regex Blocklist in OSSBot

A technical walkthrough demonstrates five prompt-injection techniques that bypass a minimal regex-based input filter in OopsSec Store's AI support assistant (OSSBot) to extract a secret embedded in the system prompt. The author shows the application setup (including Mistral API usage), reveals the four blocked regex patterns in the server code, and demonstrates bypasses such as synonym substitution, roleplay injection, completion attacks, and indirect reference extraction. The article analyzes root causes—secrets stored in the system prompt, an insufficient regex blocklist, lack of output sanitization, and missing structural isolation—and offers mitigations like removing secrets from prompts, output filtering, wrapping user input in delimiters, and monitoring extraction attempts. The published example flag is OSS{pr0mpt_1nj3ct10n_41_4ss1st4nt}.