Week In Review: Special Cannes Edition

The best description of Cannes I’ve heard is that the Festival has several different universes and we are all NPCs (non-player characters) in those other universes. 

It takes the concept that the media industry truly lives in its own little series of bubbles and turns it up to 11.

But to truly understand how we got here and why the US ad industry chose Cannes of all places as its summer gathering spot, a little history lesson would be in order.

Some of you may already know this, but I spent the first part of my career as an ad agency copywriter/creative director, working at big agencies like JWT and Ogilvy and boutique shops like Anderson Lembke. 

Back then, the Lions were a well-known international ad festival that the industry’s Cool Kids all looked down on. 

That was because the Lions were an international festival and so the snarky ads for small clients that dominated Cool Kid shows like D&AD and The One Show did not do very well at Cannes, international judges preferring big budget packaged goods commercials that did not require a knowledge of colloquial English. 

It parallels, in many ways, the dilemma the TV industry is currently facing where everyone wants to make “snobby shows no one watches” rather than mass market hits, a sentiment neatly summed up in this now infamous quote from That New York Magazine Article that’s been making the rounds “[P]eople seem to really like Two and a Half Men, and none of my writers want to write that. They all want to write Barry. And you know who watches Barry? Nobody.”

But back to advertising.

At some point I remember being vaguely aware that large American agencies were making a big deal over bringing their clients to the Palace to see “examples of creativity” as if somehow, what the big agencies themselves were putting out could not ever hope to meet that standard.

That was followed by stories about how Google and Facebook and other bastions of decidedly non-creative advertising were setting up shop in Cannes in order to attract attention from advertisers, which seemed both vaguely masochistic and overly thirsty given the disdain with which traditional advertising agencies held digital advertising at the time.

And then somehow all hell broke loose and Cannes became what it is today, a series of non-overlapping bubbles all centered around the greater advertising ecosystem with an emphasis on ad tech and digital.

Which is why it was more than a little ironic that “AI” was the buzzword of the moment. 

Especially given that so many of the people using it had a limited idea of what they were actually talking about.

Why It Matters

Now partly that’s because no one really understands what generative AI is actually capable of, but mostly because many people in this industry are used to pontificating about things they know almost nothing about, a version of Silicon Valley’s “fake it till you make it.”

And we all know how that turned out. 

To illustrate what I am talking about, take the concept of “personalization,” another overused word on the Croisette this week.

I had discussed what that meant in the limited universe of program recommendations last week, but that’s a decidedly narrower application than ad personalization, which many Croiseteers seemed to think meant TV commercials on the order of “Hey Alan! Find out why so many New Jersey-based media analysts are getting their teeth whiter with MegaBrite!” 

It is an easy enough mistake to make, given that that sort of creepiness is exactly what “personalization” means in digital advertising.

But when it comes to using some form of generative AI for personalization, it mostly refers to using contextual clues to determine the appropriate ad for the appropriate moment.

Meaning that if you are the Puerto Rico Tourism Board you can have your agency instruct its ad buying platform to prioritize running ads in areas where the temperature has stayed below freezing for three days in a row, because that is the number of days the generative AI-fueled system has learned is the optimal number of sub-zero days necessary in order to get people thinking about tropical vacations. A number it can optimize on a continual basis having learned where, when and how the ads have seen results.

Similarly, it can mean identifying a scene in a sitcom where the characters are debating what to have for dinner and placing a premium on pricing for quick serve restaurant chains and food delivery services.

At a creepier level, it could mean that there’s an even higher price put on your head during that food-ordering scene if you’ve been identified as a loyal customer of one of those quick serve restaurants. Both for companies seeking to retain your loyalty and for those seeking to convert you.

So there’s all that being spewed out at (largely ill-attended) panels during the day and then at night there’s a series of increasingly over the top parties and dinners featuring celebrities or quasi celebrities (Paris Hilton seemed to be DJing at half the parties in town this week) all in the hopes that a targeted group of consumers (ad buyers) will either think good thoughts about the party’s hosts (image advertising), actually agree to seal a deal (DTC advertising) or some variation thereof, resulting in significant ROI on what is sure to have been a very significant investment. 

It’s all so very meta.

What You Need To Do About It

If you’re the industry, think about the optics. It is one thing for a company like Madhive, which toiled in relative obscurity for years before securing a nine-figure round of funding from Goldman Sachs to throw a sizable party to celebrate.

It is quite another for many of the companies that are looking at negative cash flow, layoffs and possible takeovers to be throwing Entourage-worthy ragers.

There’s the whole Cannes thing too, since, given the proximity of Lions to the even more over-the-top Film Festival, the two seem to get blurred in the minds of many non-industry types. (It was, after all, the antics of the various studios during the Film Festival that inspired all of the antics during the Lions.)

But there’s also something really positive about it too. About people actually unplugging for a couple of days, going somewhere that’s far from home and far from Zoom and having actual social interactions where they can talk face to face (or shout face to face depending on how loud the DJ is) and actually get some business done.

Which is something AI is unlikely to ever replicate.

SIDE NOTES: I suspect I am speaking on behalf of (at minimum) several hundred people when I thank Michael Kassan and the Medialink team for providing what I have come to think of as the Medialink Oasis, a place where you can cool down, grab some water, use a clean bathroom, and connect with some friends. It is a most valuable service and thank you for not making us jump through multiple hoops to get in. 

There are rumors that the yachts will not be there next year because the city of Cannes is redoing the marina. Which would suck, because the optics of the word “yacht” aside, the boats were a great way to get everyone in one place and getting from meeting to meeting considerably easier. Plus they were far more picturesque, fun and relaxed than suites at the Aria during CES.

Stagwell, a company that Semafor’s Ben Smith confirmed few people seemed to have ever heard of, certainly made a splash with their sports-themed Stagwell Beach, featuring everything from pickleball courts to Maria Sharapova. I still have no real idea what they actually do, but I suspect that’s the next round—now that you know their name and think of them as a sizable company, come learn what they do. Or at least I hope it is given the amount of money they seemed to have spent.

Finally, the biggest missed opportunity was Bolt. Bolt is an Estonian company that is Europe’s answer to Lyft, the Pepsi to Uber’s Coke if you will. Most Americans I spoke with had never heard of them, and Bolt missed a shot at signing up hundreds of new users from among the world’s leading media companies. Given Uber’s growing media business (they run ads on the app while you are waiting for your driver to show up) that’s a real miss for Bolt.