Rosé, deals, repeat: How to survive Cannes Lions

The festival is as much about stamina as it is about lavish award ceremonies and late nights at the Gutter Bar. Between panels, late-night cocktails and endless networking, Cannes can get overwhelming. 

On this episode of the Digiday Podcast, Cannes Lions veterans Jim Cooper, editor-in-chief, and Seb Joseph, executive editor of news, join Tim Peterson, Digiday’s executive editor of video and audio, and senior marketing reporter Kimeko McCoy, to share best tips to navigate the chaos. From where to recharge along La Croisette to what topics are expected to dominate conversations, the Digiday staff decodes everything to know about this year’s festival for first-timers and veterans alike. 

Also on this episode: A look into Warner Bros. Discovery plans to split into two companies, following Comcast’s move with Versant, WPP enters the agency AI arms race and why the ad spend outlook may not be so dim after all. 

Here are a few highlights from the conversation with Cooper and Joseph, which have been edited for length and clarity.

Cannes evolution

Cooper: We’ve seen a really interesting evolution of the festival in that tech — ad tech, specifically — and big media take up the first half of the week. They’ve marched into what has traditionally been a creative festival, and so they dominate Sunday to Wednesday, and it’s even creeping into Thursday. But what happens then is an inflection point, and they all leave. They all go back to New York or [Los Angeles] or London, and the creatives descend. They are the people that hang out at the Palais, look at the work. This is a festival of creativity. It’s really not a tech and media festival in its originals, but those people were there. The back half of the week, people were in the Palais and lining up to watch the creative awards being handed out over the weekend.

Peterson: That does draw a lot of parallels with [Consumer Electronics Show], because CES started out as a consumer electronics conference, and then the tech, media and advertising folks invaded and basically have their own conference within CES.

Surviving ad tech yachts

Peterson: Why do the ad tech folks insist on meeting on yachts?

Joseph: It’s about flexing. Also, they were never the most welcomed groups within the festival. The harbor, marina was the place for them to me for a decade of so when they first started to surface at Cannes. There was all of the money pouring into and that was the way they could show up, grab attention and bag the best meetings, clients and that sort of thing. You can probably judge the state of the ad tech market by the size of the yachts and number of them that are in the marina. That’s always a good bellwether for the state of the industry.

Cooper: Another thing is they can get you on the yacht, and sometimes it’s hard to get off the yacht. They ply you with excellent food and rosé. God forbid you actually leave the marina. Then you’re stuck and you’re on the water and you can never get back.

Joseph: That happened to be one time to be fair.

Topics to cover

McCoy: My expectations are [retail media networks] are going to be a bigger presence than they have been in the past — same point about some of the AI platforms. Last year, they showed up, they were pitching their offerings. This year, I expect activations and things like that to really make a pitch for ad dollars, more so than they have historically.

Cooper: I’m going to try to really focus on this CMO role. Marketers are there en masse and there are a lot of CMOs. I’ll have a lot of conversations about what their intentions are in the second half of the year regarding the economy, how AI is going to reshape how they approach their ad tech partners, but also their media agencies. And again, get a sense of how worried they are about the second half of the year just because Cannes ends right at the start of the third quarter and we’re expecting the third quarter to be a little bumpy.