What happens when you take tens of thousands of people in marketing and put them in the spotlight of their own companies’ marketing budgets?
You get the festival of corporate hedonism, the Cannes Lions, where business deals are struck against a French Riviera backdrop that’s a cross of “White Lotus” and “Below Deck.”
AdExchanger managing editor Allison Schiff and I made our maiden voyage to Cannes this year. And while we took notes on our laptops on tables set with cappuccinos, macarons and bouquets of white peonies, we got a sense of what topics came up again and again (AI, retail media, sustainability) and what topics barely came up at all (privacy).
By speaking to people both close to programmatic and far removed from it, we better understood how the ecosystem works together, from the creative pitch (that would be “the work” in Cannes parlance) to how broken pitching and procurement processes encourage spending on made-for-advertising content.
Recorded as the festival was winding down on Thursday, we pack in all of the little tidbits we could in this episode, which we recorded on location in Cannes, France.
