CMOs say AI platforms’ low profile at Cannes won’t happen again

And when it does, there’s still only one revenue stream big enough to make a dent: advertising. 

Which is why Cannes, with its proximity to brand wallets and holdco power brokers, is becoming more than backdrop. It’s the warm-up act for AI’s inevitable move into the ad business. 

“I would not be surprised if that was the play,” said Bose’s cmo and president of luxury audio Jim Mollica, who spoke to Digiday at the festival. 

Turns out, it already is. Perplexity quietly sent ad execs to the south of France, including Taz Patel, its head of advertising and shopping, who spent the week meeting with agency and brand leads to show where the company’s ad business stands — and where it wants to go. 

Anthropic was there too. As reported by The Information, the company quietly sent a team of ad execs to Cannes for the first time, including Lexie Barnhom, its head of influencer marketing. 

“People are moving from the single most monetized space across the web to a space that, at least in theory, would be much harder to monetize,” said Matthew Dacey, CMO at TripAdvisor. “If they don’t figure out how to get ads in there then they’re going to have big problems.”

That tension came up repeatedly in conversations with CMOs in the south of France: they worry that in a rush to juice revenue, these platforms could end up compromising the utility, speed and trust that made them so useful to so many people in the first place. Because making ads work in environments like ChatGPT or Perplexity isn’t just about inventory. It’s about fitting into a space that was never built for ads to begin with. 

“Whatever happens I think context becomes more significant because what they [AI platforms] know about the user allows them to surface ads in a far more relevant way than what happens today,” said Dacey. “They [the platforms] will figure it out, I just hope it takes on a different kind of advertising.”

So far, it’s still unclear. But the groundwork is being laid. Quietly.

“What always seems to happen in these moments is before they start taking ad dollars, they start having conversations to get information from people,” said Mollica, who recalled similar moves from Meta, Google and Twitter during his time at Disney in the late aughts. 

Back then, Cannes was their coming out party. Now, it looks like AI platforms are following the same script. Client councils, holdco partnerships and brand advisory groups are likely next.

But showing up is just the beginning. Generative  AI comes with a different set of constraints. Infrastructure costs are crushing. Ad inventory doesn’t scale yet. And more user queries are still exploratory not commercial, making near-term ad performance a tough sell. Buyers want measurability, targeting and brad safety. The platforms aren’t there yet.  

Cannes may have marked AI’s soft entry into the ad world but turning curiosity into spend will require more than just showing up. As one ad exec, who asked not to be named because they had a colleague who met with Perplexity, put it: “As more of these solutions from those companies come out, we’re going to see more of them here.”