A Fantastic Travesty

A glorious hot mess.

Two things can be true at once. Cannes is a glorious hot mess. It is sales pitches on the beaches, panels on the yachts, and honest conversations in the back streets. It is monstrous, useful, absurd, revealing, overblown and, somehow, still necessary. This year, the enterprise technology businesses took the beach and invited the advertisers in to join them. That was the brochure version. The real heart of the week was elsewhere: in the drift away from the beachfront, into the old town, where people sat in restaurants and bars and finally said what they actually thought. The beach was the show. The back streets were the truth.

It was the hottest Cannes I can remember and busier than it has any right to be. The biggest crowd I have ever seen at Cannes, with more enterprise advertisers than I have ever seen there, which tells you something on its own. They did not come for the rosé. They came because they can feel the ground moving under the industry, and they wanted to see who else had worked out where to stand. The answer, mostly, was nobody. Change is coming in waves. It has been since the pandemic pushed media forward ten years in two. It is faster now, and more confusing, because it is not one wave. It is a whole sea of them: creative, measurement, planning, infrastructure, coding, workflow. Each has its own swell. Each has currents underneath that you do not see until you are already in them.

You cannot stop any of it. You can try to surf it. A few may even learn to harness it. What you cannot do is fight it, and a lot of the week was spent watching people try, crashing into the surf instead of using it to move forward. Nobody wants to be Kodak. Nobody wants to be analogue in a digital age. And yet plenty of people are still behaving as if the tide can be negotiated with. That pressure brings out bad behaviour, and Cannes was awash with it: hidden margins, principal-based trading, creative work nobody can quite explain, and measurement that flatters the quarter while quietly blinding the business.

The thread running through all of it is opacity. In a time of change, transparency is not a moral luxury. It is survival. When the buyer cannot see what the inventory is worth, the agency knows, the mega-platforms know, and the advertiser is left taking a spoon to a drone fight. Marketing measurement is not a scoreboard. It is how the company sees. Bend those numbers to flatter a quarter and you do not get healthier. You go blind while the dashboard tells you your eyesight is perfect. A company that cannot see its own audience has lost the one instrument it needs to fight back. Some will go under that way, not because they were robbed, though some may have been, but because they agreed not to look until it was too late.

The strange part is that none of this is down to stupidity. These are some of the sharpest people in the business. That is part of the problem. Everyone has a boss at Cannes and those bosses want answers and growth, not excuses about the threat of AI. So rather than change the business model to adapt to the new world sticking plasters are strapped on. Volume trading deals should be a relic of a bygone age. No advertiser should not be able to see a detailed plan and not have access to all their delivery data. Who is producing the creative and how should not be hidden. Folk talked about the end of charing by the hour and that is a factor but far more important is for firms to consider how they add and measure value.

You could see it on stage. A new WPP chief executive explained, as a matter of principle, that the company had stopped using LiveRamp because a rival is buying it. The line was about trust and not running on infrastructure owned by a competitor. It sounded clean. Yet how do you actually remove Liveramp when it is so closely embedded into their clients own systems and is a key part of CTV and Retail Media Infrastructure? Answers on a postcard!

That is why the back streets mattered. Truth does not disappear when it gets priced off the beach. It moves. It goes to the small tables, the side streets, the late drinks, the places with no stage, no boss in earshot, and no dashboard to defend. That is where I spent my best hours. And for all the mess, Cannes still mattered because the tribes came together. Marketers, agencies, platforms, publishers, technologists, founders, cynics, believers, sellers, buyers, operators and chancers all turned up in the same overheated place and tried to work out what was happening. I cannot see the future. But I would wager the beach looks nothing like this by 2028. And I do not think it will be redrawn by the people who hid from the tide. It will be redrawn by the people who went down the back streets and listened.

Cannes is all about the people and they came together this year to celebrate a glorious mess. No one knows what the future will be but in talking together we can all hope to surf the waves that bit better!

See you next year.