Media Buying Briefing: How Sport Beach became a big Cannes Lions destination — and a business

Beth Sidhu, CEO of Sport Beach, and one of its earliest architects, recalled in an interview with Digiday that the idea of Sport Beach originated from a slide sent to her in the summer of 2022 by Evin Shutt, the Stagwell agency 72andSunny’s longtime CEO and partner, outlining a concept the agency’s founder Glenn Cole and chief growth officer Damaune Journey had worked up. 

“Regan [Considine, Stagwell’s vp of brand] and I then spent all of the fall of 2022 turning it from one slide into a real idea, and getting the buy-in from the CEOs at Stagwell, and getting support and buy-in from [holdco CEO] Mark Penn, and, of course getting our Lions friends on board as well.”

Convincing various other stakeholders wasn’t the easiest job, Sidhu acknowledged. “Many people had raised eyebrows about the idea of Sport Beach from the start … There was a lot of skepticism, and a lot of me running around promising people it wasn’t going to be Fyre Festival 2.0.”

But Monday morning June 19, 2023 at 7 am, Sport Beach opened, to held breath. “I think we knew we had a hit on our hands by 11 am,” said Sidhu, observing the lines to get in. 

“I remember looking across the beach and locking eyes with Beth and being like, so this worked — the unspoken ‘So this is a thing,’” recalled Considine. “It was very clear from hour four that we had built something.”

Sidhu credits Lauren Phillips, currently vp of athlete partnerships at Sport Beach the business, for bringing Olympic track-and-field star Allyson Felix to the Beach that first year, who was a standout even though some 30 athletes made appearances. 

“None of us had ever been to Cannes Lion before,” said Phillips, who accompanied Felix. “We did a sponsored run, and we were definitely surprised by the amount of people and energy and excitement … And then Allyson spoke on stage, and the whole entire beach was pretty packed.” 

In many ways it’s the athlete celebrities, from annual regular Carmelo Anthony (basketball hero and wine connoisseur) to Felix to tennis stars Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova to WNBA legend Sue Bird, and the NFL’s Kelce brothers that drew in the crowds year after year. “All of those people are still in the Sport Beach family in some way, shape, or form,” said Sidhu, who declined to mention which ones were more high maintenance. “Are there some athletes who are more delightful than others? Sure, as is the case for all things.”

And yet, according to Considine, it’s the athletes who see themselves as more than just that who end up having the positive experience from coming to Sport Beach. “That’s really where we find success, when we give them opportunities to come helmets off and be business people, and spokespeople, and creators, and storytellers, and all of those things,” she explained. “Those tend to be the athletes that have the best experience, like Allyson” who’s arguably not the same kind of household name as a Tom Brady or LeBron James.

In successive years, the Beach has added basketball and pickleball courts, played golf, hockey and added clubs for running and swimming. And all of this has been quite the draw for attendees, like last year when track and field star Noah Lyles (who Sidhu reminded is the fastest man on the planet) played hoops with Pepsi CMO Mark Kirkham — a favorite memory for Sport Beach’s organizers. This year’s feature: turf on the beach, in honor of the World Cup soccer tournament happening across North America at the moment.

The pickleball court even attracted renowned chef Jose Andres to spontaneously show up because he saw the court from his hotel room — according to Sidhu he’s no slouch on the court.

So has Sport Beach outgrown its Cannes Lions origins? Yes and no, explained Sidhu who took the helm as CEO of the business in January 2026. “Cannes is certainly our Super Bowl, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon,” she said. And yet, “Sport Beach really has moved past Cannes as a company. We do live events around the world and around the calendar. We do content and community on an ongoing basis. So we love being in Cannes, and it is an incredibly special place. But when we say Sport Beach, we mean the company.”

Report from Vivatech, the serious side of European industry events

These days, Publicis Groupe wants to be seen not just as an agency holding company, but as a tech services provider. That ambition isn’t just visible in its recent M&A strategy but in the way it presents itself to prospective clients – something clear to see at VivaTech, the tech conference founded a decade ago by the French holdco and chairman emeritus Maurice Lévy.

Though there’s less glamour than South By Southwest – instead of the indie filmmakers, it’s got the European Commission – the Paris event aims to provide a similar fulcrum for the European tech and business scene. This year, speakers featured Jeff Bezos – talking about rockets, trajectory and lunar bases, rather than Amazon’s adtech ambitions – sharing a set list with Tim Berners-Lee and former Meta comms chief and British deputy prime minister Nick Clegg.

Some marketing execs use the event as a warm-up before Cannes Lions, but it’s a very different milieu. Alongside dozens of startups and scaleup companies from across the Continent, Publicis was the only marketing services group with an exhibit, set up near similar conference camps brought by Adobe and Microsoft. The execs on the floor were, inevitably, using it as a stage to tout the Groupe’s AI expertise to an audience keen to find corporate talismans on this side of the Atlantic.

Europe is short on tech talismans for a reason, however, even as its governments move to diverge from U.S. dominance (France’s domestic intelligence service ditched Palantir for a French company and the U.K. is preparing to ban access to social media apps for under-16s). Lévy asked Clegg whether European companies might ever catchup with American market leaders. “Europe is not going to close the gap. We don’t have the capital, we don’t have the scale,” he said. Reinvention is possible, as Bezos’ second life in the space industry proves. But if Publicis wants to benefit from tech’s aura, it’ll have to find ways to escape the European gravity well.

Might that escape velocity be provided by Possible Europe, whose 2027 premiere in Lisbon on Oct. 12-14 will be enabled by Cannes Lions veteran Gabrielle Perez — she was named vp of Possible Europe last week. Let the competition begin. — Sam Bradley

Color by numbers

There’s a reason sports is leading the way in this year’s upfront negotiations — ratings for major events have been through the proverbial roof of late. Look no further than the NBA Finals, which saw the New York Knicks claim their first title in 53 years, and attracted an average of more than 20 million viewers over the five-game series. Last time that was accomplished was 1998 when Michael Jordan was still playing. The series also generated a record 15 billion views (and still growing) on social media, the most ever for an NBA Finals and nearly triple the previous record set in 2025. (Oh, and the parade along New York City’s Canyon of Heroes attracted more than 2 million fans on June 18, according to the NYPD.)

Likewise, the World Cup is beating both English-language and Spanish-language ratings records, with team USA drawing a combined 27.5 million viewers across Fox, Telemundo and Tubi in its first group stage match against Paraguay on June 12. 

Takeoff & landing

• Mediaplus Group, which operates both across Europe and the U.S., landed several client wins, including retailer Westwing for Germany and the U.K., as well as Simplyhealth Group, a healthcare provider for the U.K. And in the U.S., the agency launched Plus.AI, what it’s calling a steering system/copilot, connecting first-party data, media workflows, behavioral insights, and institutional knowledge into a single intelligence layer. 
• Other Account moves: Tinuiti was named digital AOR for Serta Simmons Bedding  … Exverus by Brainlabs won Right Guard deodorant’s media AOR business, handling omnichannel media planning, buying, and measurement.
• Personnel moves: Nick Manning was named chairman of advertising production consultancy MurphyCobb … WPP Production named John Paulson its managing director in New York. 

Direct quote

“Over time we’re going to make changes on what the role of governance is based on what we see performing better at what point in the workflow. That’s a really important part of the testing as well — who’s the better decision maker on this. In some instances it’ll probably be the humans, especially at the starting point.”

—Lauren Wetzel, global president of data and technology solutions at WPP, talking about the launch of the holdco’s new Buyer Agent for Video solution as covered by Seb Joseph. 

Speed reading

• I wrote about Stagwell’s new AI-powered operating system for media, The Media Machine, whose launch is being overseen by Slavi Samardzija, an exec who helped to build Omnicom’s Omni platform. 
• Speaking of Omnicom, I wrote about that holdco’s new research showing how marketers need to and now can think differently about advertising in CTV and streaming programming. The research underpins Omnicom’s series of announcements this week at Cannes Lions.
• Sam Bradley detailed L’Oréal’s plans to beef up its product discovery efforts using ChatGPT, as explained by the beauty firm’s CMO Asmita Dubey at the Vivatech conference (see above for a separate story on Vivatech).  
• If you’re not in Cannes for this week’s Lions festival, you can live vicariously through the mistakes past attendees have made, as well as the behind-the-scenes efforts that make it work and how creators are making their presence felt.