Cannes 2023: Marketing Complexity and the Need for Clarity

The most crowded year we've seen at Cannes? What does that tells you about the state of marketing?

The TAU team on the ground in Cannes this week will tell you the same thing: they've never seen it this busy. Every conversation, every beach bar, every corridor between sessions is packed with vendors, platforms and tools all competing for the same thirty seconds of attention. The problem isn’t just trying to move around in Cannes, but it’s what this reflects.

The Cannes media landscape is, in miniature, exactly what marketers go home to face every day. More signals, more platforms, more layers of complexity.

Consider what sits inside a typical marketing stack. Meta reports accurately on Meta. Google reports accurately on Google. Each channel measures its own contribution through its own lens, in its own terms, against its own objectives. None of them are wrong, but the picture they produce together flatters every platform simultaneously. AI has the potential to resolve this, but simply layering on AI as another layer can just lead to greater opacity.

The complexity problem isn't just a question volume. It's more about dissonance and the absence of a single coherent view above all those lenses. It's like an orchestra where every section is playing its own tune, but nobody is conducting.

The problem is that building that unifying layer requires understanding, from the inside, how each of those platforms works: what each one measures, what it optimises for and what falls outside its field of view, what’s the undocumented reality. That’s the knowledge accumulated through years of working inside those systems (and even building some of them).

That's what TAU's team brings to these conversations. So if you're in Cannes and the noise is starting to feel like the problem itself, come and find Robert Webster, Zuzanna Gierlinska, Jayesh Rajdev and Paul Cooper. They’re here all week and will happily bring a little harmony to the noise.