Day 1 at Cannes Lions was a good representation of the changes happening in the ad industry. Retail Media is starting to dominate panels at Cannes – with CVS media making a big announcement of a partnership with Reddit, highlighting the importance of offsite retail media. The best part is that the partnership was not just about running ads against 1st party audiences but actually using identity to get full attribution for campaigns. Parbinder Dhariwal explained how this enables personalization in the consumer’s community on Reddit and provides the same measurement and attribution as onsite ads. This shows how important offsite retail media has become.
A few big new appearances at Cannes this year were DoorDash ads with their bright red storefront right on the Croisette that’s hard to miss as you walk by and PayPal ads – signaling the expansion of Retail media into Commerce Media
The number of large branded beaches seemed to have increased dwarfing the yachts lining up next to the Palais. Interestingly I felt the Yachts represented the fading era of advertising where a lot of the names we’ve known for some time almost were trying to scream out “we still matter” while the likes of Amazon (who had owned an entire port for a few years), YouTube/Google, Meta, Spotify, Yahoo, Salesforce and others took over entire beaches showing how these companies have muscled their way into advertising.
The great thing about Cannes Lions is how you can catch the “buzz” of the industry and where the industry is going by speaking with folks who are starting to play important roles in advertising but ones we don’t think of as being in the advertising world. Influencer marketing is clearly becoming very important especially to retail media – my chat with Joanna Colvin Callahan from Bazaarvoice was about how retailers have a great opportunity to blend in influencer content with commerce marketing to create new models for consumer engagement replicating TikTok’s success across the rest of advertising. The acquisition of Influential by Publicis for $500M is a great indicator of how important influencer marketing has become.
Similarly I had a great chat with Nicole B. Meissner of BCG – reflecting our work together while she was at WPP to automate and scale creative production and about why brands are still struggling with that as more and more content needs are emerging thanks to the various ad formats with new channels being added and retailers with their own bespoke formats and strict creative requirements. Generative AI is changing all of this as adoption of AI has become a boardroom topic and the message to creative agencies basically is adopt or die. At Jivox as Nicole reminded me, we were using AI way before it was cool with our Neuron AI engine launched with WPP in 2017 and more recently with IQ DaVinci which is entirely powered by AI.
Yes, AI and Commerce Media will completely change advertising as we know it.
