Hot List Originals: How Retailers Rocked Cannes

An animated image of Paul Rudd's Anchorman character Brian Fantana pouring a cup of coffee. The image has the words "I am hung overrr" appearing.

“It's funny how all of us treated Cannes as if it were training to be a Navy Seal or hiking death valley. C'mon people-- chatting about media and marketing while on yachts and plying each other with pink wine, free tote bags and finger foods does not exactly equal the Trail of Tears.” - Ross Siegel, MediaLink


Somewhere along the way, Cannes Lions went from a festival of creativity for the people who make ads into a Vegas-like conference for those that sell, distribute, measure and programmatically arbitrage them.

Almost all of those companies push out a piece of news the week before or during Cannes, each emanating a sound heard within respective echo-chambers. All of it is slathered in performance jargon and captures a fraction of mindshare.

Then, there is big news everyone hears and most need time to comprehend and decipher how much it will impact the market. This year, perhaps fittingly, the biggest news in advertising came from the companies that sell the most products: Amazon and Walmart.

Most people heard about Amazon ads deals with Roku and Disney that tie up inventory and big, rich, authenticated data. But how integrated and what it actually changes is TBD.

Roku, especially needed that lifeline because of the other big (if unsurprising) news, from Walmart, that its Onn TV brands, AKA, the biggest source of Roku’s OS reach, will soon be all powered by VIZIO’s OS.

What this exactly means for shoppable media, for networks driving tune in, for customers that want more from the biggest screen in the house is also, TBD. In case you’re wondering, below is the TV device market in North America.

Meantime, stay tuned this summer as we roll out many of the conversations we recorded in Cannes.


TVREV ORIGINALS


Jason Damata

Jason is the founder and CEO of Fabric Media, a media incubator and talent consortium. The company serves leading-edge TV disruptors- from data and analytics platforms to TV networks to emotional measurement companies. Damata has traveled the country for C-SPAN, where he worked with MSOs, produced educational political programming. He has served as CMO of Bebo when it was the world's 3rd largest social network, led marketing for Trendrr until it was acquired by Twitter and helped build the world's largest LIVE broadcast offering at explore.org where he built up a global syndication network. He is an analyst for companies on the edge of TV innovation such as iSpot, Inscape, Canvs, TNT and more.

http://linkedin.com/in/jasondamata
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At Cannes, “Fragmentation” Is The New Normal