The paunchy middle managers of Cannes

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Cannes is another reminder that capitalism is the one religion free of taboos. It is garish, soaked in ego-driven excess, filled with those preening for applause, and in the words of my disapproving taxi driver “just money, money, money.” Puck’s Matt Belloni’s acid indictment of Cannes: a "soulless corporate boondoggle,” filled by a who’s who of who cares of “paunchy middle managers and YouTubers.”

This kind of anti-Cannes cant, while inaccurate in totality, is familiar. In all my years coming here, I’ve noticed a severe allergy to Cannes among many not here, while those who come tend to be believers. There’s truth to both camps.

Cannes represents a tangible reminder of the reordering of the media landscape that has largely swallowed media. YouTube is far more powerful than any Hollywood studio or broadcaster. 

Tech platforms and a rotating cast of intermediaries are the ones with yachts and beach compounds. Publishers and agencies are relegated mostly to rented suites. Creators are a new constituency. I briefly visited a creator compound in a sprawling seaside villa filled with young creators. They’d hosted marketers there and used the grounds for content capture. This new group of creators are more entrepreneurial and less precious than the influencer era. They’re building businesses and being grownups about it. And horrifyingly, that means building relationships with the people who pay the bills. Imagine. 

And of course, the brands are the stars of the show. One publishing CEO told me just putting yachts in the subject line of an invitation guarantees a response. It makes the ROI on a boat to St Tropez plausible. One brand exec told me she’d done 40 meetings one year. Some of this busyiness is performative but much of it reflects the reality of how business gets done, even if its odd to have corporate execs on a beach party in the small hours listening to the DJ Tiesto on Yahoo beach. 

Belloni’s reaction to Cannes is grounded in an old-fashioned Hollywood snobbery that the ad-driven media ecosystem is the JV team. There’s a social hierarchy in creative arts and gatekeepers everywhere are losing their power, unless they control an interface.

Cannes is grubby because it is all about money. Everyone is selling in Cannes. That makes some like Belloni squeamish. I spoke to a newsletter operator looking to “turn on advertising.” He told me he wouldn’t do anything like talk to advertisers himself. I suspect he will find that there’s a reason politicians are always shaking hands, kissing babies and petting dogs. Sales requires showing up. There’s no revenue spigot, unless you are a tech platform in control of a chokepoint. Ads are sold, not bought, for the rest.

Cannes is a PR vehicle. Belloni correctly noted it is a place for mostly meaningly brand partnerships announcements. There are worse crimes in the world. Companies use it to launch new products or roll out new messaging. It isn’t a news event exactly. The entire point of these events is matching a buy and sell side. Media would do well to take notes. Better to know your assignment.

I’ve made peace with the goofy parts of Cannes: the inscrutable odes to data and creativity, the absurd prices, the arms full of wristbands and the lanyards worn 24/7. Perhaps it’s age, but I can’t muster too much moral outrage.  One publishing executive joked that he would want to revisit the deal terms with mobile ad network Kargo after seeing its genuinely impressive nightly drone show. The drones would spell out a marketing message. This is normal.

Cannes itself has proven remarkably resilient. It has shape shifted as the world has changed. The old Cannes that honored commercial art probably still wouldn’t clear Belloni’s bar but would have a far smaller impact. The world has moved on. There can be a bread and circuses feel to Cannes as tech overlords provide the peasants with amusements to distract them from their grinding lot in life downstream from the true power centers. At least they get good DJs.

Like any self-respecting Cannes attendee, I was busy in Cannes. Very busy.

On Monday, the TRB Morning Salon En Mer debated why AI ignites so much opposition. Thanks to CivicScenice for hosting us.

Later on Monday. I hosted a conversation with Procter & Gamble, Albertson’s retail media arm and production shop Minivela for the debut and backstory of “Rico’s Tacos,” a micro sitcom that’s a rare example of shopping data used for creative executions. It’s also a testament to how a supermarket chain is now a media company. See Walmart’s $1.4 billion acquisition of CTV ad tech company Vibe.co.

Tuesday morning, I visited Bloomberg Studios next door to Bloomberg’s cafe takeover. Bloomberg Media chief commercial officer Christine Cook and HSBC CMO for corporate and institutional Nicole German joined me for a discussion of how AI is and isn’t changing marketing. My big takeaway: do not believe the job displacement predictions. Marketing is not coding, and automating in tech companies is different than the typical large organization. I’ll publish the conversation on The Rebooting Show and on TRB’s fledgling YouTube channel. Thanks to Bloomberg Media for hosting us.

Afterwards I dropped by the PayPal Ads Cafe, which has great air conditioning and a well appointed podcast studio. I recorded a conversation with Supertab CEO Cosmin Ene, who is building the rails for an agentic micropayments system that will tax the bots. I’ll have that discussion on The Rebooting Show and on YouTube. Thanks to PayPal Ads for hosting us.

On Tuesday evening, we brought our signature Mixer series to the Croisette. We have now done Mixers in NYC, London and Cannes, so I’m calling it global. We had nearly 100 people come by, including Business Insider interim CEO Christian Baesler, New York Post CEO Brad Elders, Morning Brew CEO Robert Dippell, The Guardian CRO Imogen Fox, Axios CRO Jacquelyn Cameron, Atlas Obscura CEO Louise Story, Semafor CRO 1440 CEO Tim Huelskamp, Rachel Oppenheim, Dow Jones chief growth officer Scott Havens, After School’s Casey Lewis, Yahoo News gm Kat Downs Mulder, Caper founder Max Tcheyan, The Atlantic CRO Alice McKown, and many more. 

Thanks to our partners: Beehiiv, Omeda, Tracksuit, Airops, DanAds and Conscious Minds.

Yesterday I shot a series of video podcasts with executives from The Wall Street Journal, NBC Universal, Spotify, USA Today, People Inc, Yahoo and EX.CO at TRB Studios at Zuma. We will publish those conversations in the coming weeks on the TRB Show feed and YouTube. 

Afterwards, we hosted our annual Media Leaders Dinner at Zuma with top execs from The New York Post, The Independent, Fortune, Forbes, Telly, The Washington Post and more. Zuma is just clubstaurant enough while still being able to hear others — also a killer view.

Thanks to EX.CO for its partnership in the video series and dinner.

To wrap up the week, we held our annual state of media live podcast conversation with People Inc CEO Neil Vogel and Axios chief media correspondent Sara Fischer, who probably beat me for number of conversations led this week. Neil gave a pragmatic but largely optimistic view of the way forward for publishers in an AI era. We’ll have this on the podcast feed and YouTube. Thanks to People Inc for hosting us.

The Cannes Lions are the official name of the awards show that theoretically sits at the heart of this sprawling gathering. But it has long become simply Cannes, the Star Wars bar of the Information Space, where giant tech platforms, ad tech vendors, agencies, consultants and even supermarket chains vie for the attention of marketers. It’s at once baffling, hideous and inspiring in weird ways. After a generation of talk about automating much of the marketing industry, it still requires ever more humans to brave the scorching temperatures to collect an armful of wristbands. In Cannes, everyone is busy, but not much gets done. Some thoughts on the week:

Cannes has lost the creative plot. My first Cannes in 2007 was marked by discomfort that Microsoft had become the premier sponsor. Creatives were suspicious, and rightly so. Cannes became less about creative and. Ire about data the way you go bankrupt: slowly, then all at once. Cannes now is a carnival of capitalism that is almost a victim of its own success in expanding its TAM. Gone are the days of creative directors as the Main Characters of Cannes, drunkenly swaggering down the Croisette gripping Lions statues. Like much else, Cannes often has a PE feel. That’s a shame — and an opening for an alternative Cannes that is truly about modern human creativity, not data mongers. 

AI optimism? Maybe it’s the rosé, but I’ve heard more optimism that AI is developing in a way that could benefit news publishers. There was talk of a large AI company rolling out a news aggregator, but I heard several cases that LLMs are commoditizing and they often frustrate users by being out of date. In an upcoming podcast, Supertab CEO Cosmin Ene makes a persuasive case that an agentic era will finally lead to micropayments. 

Cannes ROI: math + magic. The approximately 4,000 salespersons I’ve asked over the year about the ROI of all this assures me it pencils out. One vendor CEO on TRB Backchannel said they spent $50k and realized $500k in sales. Would that have happened without the rosé? Sometimes you just have faith and mumble, “It’s still a relationship business.”

Retail media is a much bigger deal. Intentionally or not, there is a stretch of the Croisette filled with Chase Media Solutions, PayPal Ads, Uber Advertising and more. This leads to some funny Cannes juxtapositions.

The Gutter Bar is enclosed. Cannes was once described to me by an Adweek colleague as “spring break with business cards.” The Gutter Bar, aka 72 Croisette, played a central role as a sprawling, chaotic mess of a late night fixture. Its nickname came from the crowds spilling into the street. Capitalism favors enclosures as a form of control, and despite a continued blasé approach to safety for pedestrians, the authorities have fenced it in.

The Carlton is financializing. The Carlton Terrace has long been a locus of power in Cannes. It’s gone into extreme monetization mode. It demands €100 per person per hour for tables.

Kargo wins activation award for its drone swarm. I looked in the sky to find hundreds vid drones creating ad messages from a mobile ad network. In Cannes, this is normal.

Smaller gatherings are winning. I see more emphasis on private dinners and smaller cocktail parties than big beach concerts. TRB hosted a roundtable on the CivicScience yacht yesterday and tonight we have Le Mixer for 75. On Monday, I cohosted a 20-person dinner with 1440 and Adfontes. What hear all the time is people want to connect with interesting people, which puts a premium on smaller, more curated rooms. We had 25 executives at our Media Leaders Dinner in collaboration with EX.CO. Smaller tends to be better.

Creators are the new belles of the ball. Creators are a growing presence in Cannes. I swung by the end of a Yahoo Cannes kickoff dinner, filled with creators, put on with FeedMe’s Emily Sundberg.

Agentic AI is everywhere and nowhere. There are dozens of billboards and signage promoting agentic AI advertising capabilities. Amazon, Adobe and untold others are trumpeting agentic advertising. Privately most agree this is a classic fake-it-till-you-make-it situation. Agentic advertising has a ways to go. AI isn’t replacing marketing jobs. I spoke to a CMO of a 1,000-person marketing organization. I read breathless threads about how Anthropic has a one-person marketing team with a guy running hundreds of agents. This is fantasy land. As someone who has been on 15-person panel prep calls, I can attest that the humans are still very much in the loop in these organizations.

Cafes are the new villas. More vendors and others are buying out cafes for the week. I recorded a podcast with Bloomberg Media chief commercial officer Christine Cook and HSBC CMO for commercial and institutional banking Nicole German at a Bloomberg Studios setup next door to Bloomberg’s takeover of the Bobo Cafe. This is a step up from the suites many rent for meetings but not as remote as the villa route..

Ojus Jain, the founder of Esses, joined me on The Rebooting Show to discuss why he started the F1 culture brand with a print magazine, activations as the main business driver, and the ad opportunity in aggregating high net worth people. Listen

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