The Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity turned 70 this year but showed no sign of its age. In fact, if most septuagenarians seem to move just a bit slower than they did in their youth, Cannes Lions bucked the trend and seemed to be moving just a bit faster as we are experiencing a convergence of convergences, as tech, data, innovation and broadening definitions all reshape marketing at a dizzying speed.

Someone said that the pace of change we are experiencing today is the slowest pace of change we will experience in the rest of our lifetimes and, frankly, it’s a little bit exhilarating.

There were several themes that emerged throughout the week—here are my big takeaways from the fastest-moving Cannes yet:

AI is here, but let’s ditch the buzzwords.

One that absolutely annoyed me by the end of the day Thursday was the incessant debate around whether generative AI was a force for good or a force for evil. This is very binary thinking and lacks any connectivity to the reality we live in. Some form of machine learning has been with us in the advertising industry for nearly two decades. To be sure, the introduction of the word “generative” signals new dimensions to the capability, but its application is not a choice; it’s here and the genie isn’t going back in the bottle even if someone truly wanted it to. The only real question is if marketers can learn from the recent past and change our collective approach.

The technology adoption cycle starts with “low hanging fruit” or use cases that are relatively innocuous and simplistic. Expressions like “create our own momentum” or “crawl / walk / run” are bandied about so much that everyone has them on their buzzword bingo card at the start of every development cycle. Unfortunately, this approach often puts off the real work of reviewing and updating policies and establishing the right governance controls until later, when more substantive use cases are contemplated and there’s pressure from “the business” to scale the application of the new tech with all possible speed. That’s kind of like laying the track after the train has already passed through; bad outcomes ahead.

My rule of thumb — which no one has validated to date — is that for every hour you invest in harnessing generative AI to build more creative assets, iterate and ideate, define and find more refined audiences, measure outcomes and engineer relevance into every prospect and customer interaction, you put an hour into building a governance solution that you can deploy before the train goes through. It will be hard to put effective governance in place to work at the unimaginable speed and scale with which generative AI can potentially address and indeed solve some of the biggest challenges facing marketers today — but not impossible. One conversation that I was in suggested that the only way to govern the massive number of permutations that generative AI can generate is with… generative AI. In the old days (five minutes ago), we built challenger models to challenge our regression and attribution models to root out autocorrelation and ensure that our findings were valid. In that context, it doesn’t seem to be that much of a leap to create a specialized type of AI that ensures compliance and adherence to policies and standards. Probably a billion-dollar business in the making.

Three hard truths about programmatic advertising.

The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) released a first look at their much-anticipated Programmatic Transparency Study on Monday and the results were simultaneously shocking and expected, if that’s even possible. The headline is that there may be as much as $20BB in efficiency gains to be had – off of an $88BB total global programmatic marketplace, if issues identified are prioritized by marketers and effectively addressed. There are many take-aways and I highly recommend that you read the findings, three that stood out for me.

1. The average participant in the study saw their ads appear on 44,000 domains, in spite of the fact that the average participant who had an inclusion list in place had far less than 10,000 domains on that list. Clearly, we need to start asking the right questions about why our inclusion lists are not being respected and take steps to disincentivize the marketplace from driving our ads to sites beyond those we’ve performed our due diligence on. Perhaps one way to achieve this could be to update your insertion orders to indicate that you will only pay for ads that appeared on a publisher’s website that was on your inclusion lists and all others would be treated as discrepant and not worthy of remuneration.
2. Made for Advertising “sites” (MFA’s) accounted for 23% of the total programmatic media impressions delivered to study participants, on average, a bit higher for video ad impressions. These sites, while technically safe according to the MRC, typically deliver unhygienic user experiences, with dizzying ad to edit ratios, listicles designed to bait an untoward number of page loads to reveal the content (“No. 17 will blow your mind”) and potential privacy and compliance risks that would stun even the most grizzled industry veteran (he wrote while looking in the mirror). If I were still running a media capability for a top marketer, I would work to define what constitutes an MFA (you could argue that the most reputable sites are, technically, made for advertising) based on the quality of the user experience and the ad to edit ratio and then ban 100% of those that fall into your definition, taking care not to inadvertently cut off local news platforms in the process.
3. It’s clear that the holy grail in this study is access to log level data (LLD) across all of the hops in the digital ecosystem, including DSP to SSP and SSP to Publisher, at a minimum, is required to expose, solve and monitor the number of domains marketers’ ads are running on and monitor ongoing performance. Today there are (largely bogus) reasons as to why LLD cannot always be shared with advertisers, even though it’s their investment that generates the activity that populates the log. Marketers need to begin to demand that they receive all of their LLD and if their vendors claim to be transparent but then claim that they are unable to share your LLD with you, you should claim that they are your former vendors and bid them adieu.

News is having a moment.

A third theme that’s close to home, and one that I am very happy to report, is that interest in advertising in news seems to be on the rise, based on a very unscientific “survey” that we took after speaking with all sides of the ecosystem in individual meetings to promote advertising in news.

For context, we’ve seen an 80% decline in advertising investments in news in a 15-year period ending at the beginning of the pandemic which led to a 50% decline in newsroom employment in roughly the same period according to the US Bureau of Labor. Not a great way for journalists to march into battle in the war to defend the truth. The good news now is that the protracted advertising drought has precipitated a tremendous opportunity for advertisers to tap into the unduplicated reach that news advertising now represents. If you’ve run a media capability, you know the endorphin releasing magic of the words unduplicated reach. Moreover, in a study released here in Cannes earlier this week by Ad Fontes Media (disclaimer, I am employed by Ad Fontes Media as their Chief Strategy Officer), in partnership with CivicScience, the composition of high-quality news audiences, when compared to lower quality news audiences is overwhelmingly attractive when you look at virtually every indicator of the potential buying power. For example, they are 37% more likely to hold a graduate degree, 25% likelier to describe themselves as ‘happier’ and a staggering 51% more likely to be an EV intender.

When you take the potential of the unduplicated reach and the unassailable economic opportunity that advertising in news unlocks into the immediate future where we anticipate unprecedented demand for news in the run-up to the next election cycle. (I refuse to accept that it’s here already) A major tactic on your 2024 learning agenda or growth plan may be to return to advertising in highly reliable and low bias news. How do you do that? Well, one way is to take a look at the Ad Fontes Interactive Media Bias chart, available for free at AdFontesMedia.com and, if you think it can help you unleash the power of news advertising, let us know and we’ll show you how you can set up a governance framework and set benchmarks for future planning.

It’s time to build for privacy.

One session that I attended focused on privacy and compliance was memorable for one thing that was said. The quote was something to the effect that we need to rewire the entire digital ecosystem for privacy and compliance. It’s the right sentiment, to be sure. Between the regulatory environment, consumers’ rising privacy expectations, the need for greater transparency and auditability, we can’t have disparate systems in different channels that represent some aspect of legacy capabilities and policies that increasingly constrain marketers’ ability to use their data as the strategic asset that it needs to be to best compete with their competitors. There needs to be a single enterprise data strategy with a clear vision of what value a comprehensive approach to data will yield that readily justifies the expense to rebuild the tech stack with a privacy and compliance first mindset. Ideally it would be ubiquitous across all consumer touch points – to the extent that extant regulations allow – and enable near real-time solutioning to ensure the best experiences for consumers.

The creator economy is alive and well.

Lastly, I want to return to one of the themes of Cannes Lions 2022, with emphasis. The creator economy is alive and well and becoming ever more mainstream. Creators are no longer a separate work-stream off to the side of the “big campaign”; they are becoming an “unlock” for the campaign itself that are integral to its success. The creator economy is a big business, largely comprised of small entrepreneurs who are dedicated to making sure that whatever they produce is relevant to their audience and not merely a paid commercial pitch. These influencers deftly thread the needle between a client brief and an audience expectation for relevance and curation. Agencies have embraced creators, and from the sessions I attended and conversations I participated in up and down the croisette, it is very clear to me that unlike the passing fad of NFTs and the egregious over-hype of the metaverse (other than for gaming), creators will be with us for a long time and the creator economy is a sure-fire business driver that delivers attention and drives demand.

So, in closing, it was once again a privilege to be here in Cannes with the crème de la crème of the marketing industry which is very much thriving from what I witnessed in-spite of the ever-looming threat of the alleged recession. Ideas were flowing in greater abundance than the ubiquitous rosé. The silos between what is creative, what is media, what is tech and what is data are melting away like sandcastles on the beach, replaced with a can-do spirit of innovation and discovery that is both infectious and inspiring. I leave reassured of the unique superpowers of our industry and energized to take what we learned and the relationships we forged back into the fight to earn the attention of potential customers and tell stories that are clever and compelling.

Lou Paskalis

Lou Paskalis is Chief Strategy Officer of Ad Fontes Media a Public Benefit company that is dedicated to restoring advertisers’ investments in reaching audiences in quality news journalism with a unique technology that allows them to measure, mitigate and monitor bias and reliability in a manner consistent with their values and principles. Previously, he was President and COO of MMA Global, a trade association focused on architecting the future of marketing. In that role, he was responsible for driving innovation and change across a broad portfolio of functional areas, initiatives and forward-looking activities centered on shaping the future of marketing. He has three decades of client-side leadership experience, having led Global Communications Planning, Media Investment, Marketing Data Strategy and Brand Safety and Suitability at Bank of America; Media, Content and Mobile Marketing at American Express and many related roles at E. & J. Gallo prior to that. He is well- known as an outspoken champion for marketing innovation, governance and the advancement of the art and science of marketing as well as a strong advocate for journalism and marketers’ unique responsibility to support news organizations in their valiant efforts to defend truth.