Inside Cannes Lions 2024
Infillion’s Chief Revenue Officer and CMO, Laurel Rossi, Weighs In On Cannes Conversations With Key Takeaways From the Festival
It’s rare that everyone in our industry is talking about the same thing at the same time, but whether you were there last week in the South of France or followed along from home, there’s much talk about the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, where many of the world’s top marketers, advertisers, technologists, strategists, and media minds converged to celebrate groundbreaking work and discuss where we are as an industry and where we are heading.
The Continuum asked some of the industry’s top thought leaders to share their biggest takeaways, and we are starting with key trends observed by Laurel Rossi and her team at Infillion, an organization that creates technology solutions for advertising, marketing, commerce, and operations. Laurel, who serves as Infillion’s Chief Revenue Officer and CMO, is a strategic, creative, and operational leader with global experience in developing new economy businesses, building brands, energizing teams, and harnessing insights and relationships to generate revenue.
From Infillion’s point of view, these were some of the biggest trends at Cannes Lions, besides generative AI, which has become so ubiquitous that it permeates almost every conversation.
1. Everyone wants a media network. The buzz about retail media networks has expanded to include financial media networks, travel media networks, and more. That's evidenced by how physically prominent these entities were along the Croisette, from Target's Roundel to United Airlines’ newly announced Kinetic. The challenge? While media networks have been seen as a hot source of customer data amid cookie deprecation, they're labor-intensive to create and manage, and there are now so many of them that marketers find themselves overwhelmed. Cannes 2025 will be interesting.
2. Sports marketing hype hits it out of the park. It was impossible to avoid the sports world at Cannes this year. Quite literally, considering that the Olympic torch relay closed downtown traffic as it traveled from the port of Nice through Cannes on its way to next month's host city of Paris. Sports have always been coveted content for advertisers. But with their long-awaited move to streaming, the mainstreaming of formerly niche sports, the emergence of new audiences, and top athletes’ burgeoning social media presences—not to mention the relative lack of concerns about brand safety—marketers want in more than ever.
3. Creators, meet mainstream digital advertising. Working with YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram-native creators is now a standard part of a brand's toolkit. But historically, brand work with influencers and creators was handled with its own set of tools and processes, from agency partnerships to success measurement. That's changing. With Cannes launching a new Creator Pass offering and some megastars like Mr. Beast evolving into full-on media moguls, the creator economy's place in the festival was fully solidified. And with major creators underscoring the need for independence from big social media platforms, they want access to the same tools that brands enjoy.
4. DEl faces a crossroads. Cannes Lions has come a long way since diverse representation became a priority for the famously white and male gathering. But in 2024, DEl advocates in the ad industry are encountering headwinds. Tough market conditions meant DEl initiatives and teams saw cutbacks and even elimination while high-profile backlashes peppered industry news. Still, DEl advocates at Cannes underscored the lucrative reality that people want to see themselves represented authentically in advertising and urged brands and agencies to think of diverse representation as a core value rather than a PR initiative.
5. Marketers ask more from programmatic ad tech. It's been a few years since there were mass complaints about ad tech companies "invading" Cannes with branded yachts. But new developments in Al—and not just generative AI—are bringing even more automation to advertising (and the dashboards, metrics, and confusing acronyms that come along with it). Marketers want more clarity. Celebrating creativity is the entire ethos of Cannes, and programmatic ad tech companies can help ensure they aren't at odds with it by emphasizing how their technology can foster creativity rather than threaten it.
We will continue to share key insights on Cannes. In the meantime, you can check out all of Infillion's Cannes content on its blog.
June 27, 2024
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