Cannes Report: The noisy fight for a share of the trillion dollar global marketing universe.
Octopus hot dogs and $24,000 hotel rooms. Is it worth it? Who would say no?
If there is a recession, then no-one has told the industrial marketing complex.
On the closing night of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, staff at the Qatari-owned Carlton Hotel waited patiently for the beach party to wind down so they could open Jeroboams of Cote de Provence to cool off thirsty executives.
The party wasn’t quite over then. On Saturday, a group of ad executives took over the Hotel Belle Rives, famed for its association with F. Scott Fitzgerald. The author found his inspiration there for, “The Great Gatsby.” A DJ on the terrace pumped out music so loud it was impossible to talk - though one attendee was loud enough to let staff know he’d waited too long for his octopus hotdog bun and fries. After lunch, executives danced in the Mediterranean, wine in hand, and waited for the next paddle boat.
There are many faces of Cannes Lions. Plenty of people come and work 18 hour days trying to boost their slice of the multi-trillion dollar global marketing universe. The advertising portion of that is $875 billion this year, according to Group M which has a series of charts on who’s up and down.
Chris Childs, managing director, UK of European ad tech firm, Hawk, told me that despite the hypocrisy of the excess coupled with sessions on how to achieve sustainability, Cannes Lions has purpose. “It celebrates success in advertising,” he said. (The event attracts almost 27,000 award submissions.) Attendees come, “to discuss what’s important, what’s next and drive innovation. It brings people together from all markets.”
So what’s new this year?
George Manas, is the CEO of OMD Worldwide which spends some $19 billion around the globe, He observed that Cannes is usually an event where media, tech and creative advertising exist side by side, but “this year it feels more cohesive and collaborative,” he said.
AI of course is eating everything in its path. Huge teams of media planners once sifted through consumer data points to figure out the best places to put advertising, AI is now doing what took weeks in twenty seconds, said Manas. Though one struggle as AI percolates through the ad agency world is that everyone will see the same benefits. One holding company executive drew the analogy of Google’s Waze app showing everyone where the traffic is and sending drivers to the same alternative route.
At the other end of the scale, marketers are turning to something which sounds pretty wooly. They’re tapping twentysomething online creators to help them develop new brands. Influencer Emma Chamberlain talked to Spotify about how she built her following and a new coffee line.
Elsewhere video measurement is a huge issue with lots of different yardsticks and currencies proliferating, a friction point for deal-making. Even so, rumor is that Comcast is negotiating a new very long term deal with Nielsen.
This year big marketers expressed an intent to avoid being too flashy given the weak economy but Cannes Lions can be excessively expensive. A senior ad executive arranging last minute plans told me he was quoted $23,000 for a round trip flight on Delta One from JFK, while he said The Martinez Hotel suggested $24,000 for the week. (It is possible to attend for a lot less with a bit of planning.)
One person familiar with Cannes costs estimates that Daniel Ek’s music streaming service Spotify spent more money than anyone else. The company won a slew of awards for its marketing and hosted Florence + The Machine, Foo Fighters and A$AP Rocky to name just a few. It could have spent as much as $5 million, according to one rough estimate. Spotify also had a party at a villa in the hills. It has high hopes for its ad business. Last year, it laid out plans to get to $100 billion in revenue by 2030. The Stockholm-based company has plans to use AI voices for ads instead of podcast hosts.
The annual Medialink/iHeart party at the Hotel du Cap, may have been a close runner-up. Respective chiefs Michael Kassan and Bob Pittman hired Lizzo to perform hits including “Juice,” moving even the stiffest of executives to lighten up. (More from Kassan on The Media Mix podcast.)
Corporate schmoozing is a critical aspect of sales and marketing but it’s all a world away from high inflation, soaring interest rates and Corporate America’s procurement officers squeezing agency partners for every last penny back home in the States. But you can’t put a price on creativity.
The data might say one thing, but show business still has a powerful effect. Former CBS boss Mel Karmazin once admonished Google for “Fucking with the Magic.” That magic he was referring to is salesmanship and it can get pretty loud when a group of executives whose genius is cutting through the noise, all convene in the same week.
And everybody wants to sell ads these days. Retail media, where companies like Uber and Walmart are also using their platforms to sell ads, is only adding to the flood of thousands of ad messages an individual might see in one day.
The organizers of the first Cannes Lions, created to honor film posters back in the fifties, could barely have imagined the huge data collection operation that advertising has become and it is only intensifying.
Apple executives were quietly holed up at the Carlton Hotel figuring out their assault on Madison Avenue, while Netflix's new Microsoft-powered ad operation perched itself at the JW Marriott along with a giant red “N.” Amazon was spread out next to the port while Jeff Bezos’ yacht was reportedly stationed out to sea. (Twitter’s usual beachfront space was taken over by influencer marketing firm, Influential, though new Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino made her presence felt in a string of text messages to the main ad partners. Surprisingly, she was not at the event.) Google and META, the grandfathers of digital ad selling, were also a big presence, though not as front and center as in previous years.
Times change fast on the internet. Back in 2006, AOL hired its first chief privacy officer to quell a backlash over how it had shared customer search queries. The debate seems so quaint today when every corporation is collecting what’s known as “first party” consumer information and handing it over for free to platforms such as TikTok to match it with potential buyers. After that, who knows what happens to it: no-one seems to care. One senior ad executive told me the industry has lost control, another said, “We’ll look back on this period of time and ask ‘what were we thinking?’”