Happy Friday! After a busy week at Programmatic AI in Las Vegas, AdExchanger is taking a much-needed respite for Memorial Day. But fear not – we’ll be back on Tuesday with the latest news.
Nothing Gold Cannes Stay
The Cannes Film Festival and Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity have always been cultural shapeshifters.
In the 1950s, what would become Cannes Lions was created by cinema screen advertising contractors who wanted to highlight the high production values and artistic ambition of advertising, and specifically ads seen in theaters (fun trivia to trot out next month).
The creative festival that once drafted off the Cannes Film Festival was, in turn, co‑opted by Madison Avenue ad agencies focused on TV, outdoor campaigns and other media. In recent decades, the show has been steamrolled by ad tech, from Big Tech platforms (like Google, Amazon and Meta), to the ad tech row docked at the port. And over the past few years, retail media businesses like Uber, Albertsons, Walmart and Target have piled on, as well.
That evolution gives some color to a painful question hanging over the Film Festival, which has been running since mid-May and ends on Saturday: Where are all the Hollywood studios and stars?
It’s been a tough week for paparazzi, according to The New York Times, with notably fewer parties, celebrities and super-rich media type yachts to stake out.
There are worries about a growing Franco‑American rift and broader shifts in entertainment. Netflix, for example, has a reputation as a persona non grata at the film festival because it eschews exclusive theatrical film runs (except to make its content eligible for Oscars). Meanwhile, Disney, Universal, Amazon MGM, Sony and the new Paramount-Warner Bros were no-shows at the film fest this year.
On the other hand, guess who’s flooded Cannes this year to fill the celebrity vacuum?
Social influencers in evening wear are taking up all the sidewalk space.
Lost In Space
SpaceX has filed S-1 documents as a precursor to its IPO. Most of the attention has zeroed in on its $1.75 trillion valuation target and Elon Musk’s majority ownership.
But Brian Wieser, founder of equity advisory and consultancy Madison and Wall, notes in his writeup that the filing also includes long-missing disclosures regarding X’s ad revenue ever since it unTwittered in 2023 and was folded into SpaceX in February.
At the time Twitter was taken private by Musk and a consortium of backers, it had earned $4.7 billion from advertising in the year prior and was growing at 21%.
There were reports in 2023 and 2024 of X’s advertising rebound, Wieser writes, presumably via insider sources. But the S-1 shows that X’s ad revenue dropped from $2.3 billion in 2023 to $1.7 billion in 2024, ticking up to $1.8 billion last year.
Ad revenue has actually declined year over year as of early 2026, though X blames the stumble on an overhaul of its ad platform. Per Wieser’s reckoning, X now accounts for 1% of social ad spending, down from Twitter’s 10%.
None of this matters much to SpaceX, though, whose valuation has nothing to do with ad revenue.
Pageview Publisher Purge
The era of digital publishers prioritizing scale and pageviews is winding down, writes Brian Morrissey at The Rebooting.
Publishers like Business Insider, BuzzFeed and Vox Media are in upheaval and facing leadership changes because they were “at the mercy of distribution chokepoints controlled by Big Tech cabals that time and again proved themselves unreliable,” Morrissey says.
Business Insider CEO Barbara Peng is departing the company after two and a half years of pivots that never panned out. BuzzFeed’s failure to find a successful growth model after going public in 2021 led to it being acquired by media mogul Byron Allen earlier this month. And James Murdoch just bought half of Vox’s business, cherry-picking its podcast network, flagship New York magazine and the Vox brand – and not its open web portfolio, which formed a new company called RemainCo.
These companies, like all publishers, are now building for a new era of AI-driven content discovery while trying to keep their existing businesses running (on fumes). It’s less like building an airplane while flying it, Morrissey writes, and more like “constructing a new platform as the one you’re standing on is engulfed in flames.”
Meanwhile, he says, publishers like People Inc. that were prescient enough to see the “Google Zero” problem coming are preparing for the future by focusing on strong brands, products and licensing deals.
But Wait! There’s More!
OpenAI’s ads pilot branches out to include a small group of financial services brands. [Marketing Brew]
It’s not just the ad content that’s evolving. ChatGPT ads are also getting a visual upgrade. [Digiday]
Meta settles the first landmark suit brought by school districts against social platforms, averting a trial over allegations that these platforms caused vast resources to be spent on a mental health crisis. Meta joins Google, TikTok and Snap, which have already reached their own settlements. [Bloomberg]
How do holding companies decide which agency brands to sunset? [Marketing Brew]
Anthropic and OpenAI are pulling further ahead, now accounting for 89% of AI startup revenue – up nearly five percentage points in six months. [The Information]
You’re Hired!
Following Magnite’s acquisition of Streamr, the startup’s CEO and Co-Founder Jonathan Moffie has been named head of agentic. [LinkedIn]
Peter Elkins-Williams will step into the role of acting global head of advertising sales at The Washington Post, replacing departing ad sales leader Gemma Floyd.
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
