The Roaring Lions from Cannes

Shedding some light on the 64th International Festival of Creativity in Cannes.

On June 17, 2017, the 64th International Festival of Creativity in Cannes kicked off, garnering attention from everyone in communications, marketing, entertainment, design, and tech to meet and celebrate industry insights and forecasts. A hand-picked and leading-edge creative work is awarded every year by world-recognized Lions – a shining and industry-shaping symbol of creativity and technology.

SO WHAT GIVES?

Knowing all this, I just couldn’t pass on the chance to descend onto the French Rivera and get a glimpse of what is currently shaking and trending in the advertising and marketing industry. So after a few hectic days in Cannes, it’s time to summarize the details of one of the most prominent festivals of the year.

As a special representative of Yieldbird, the ad management company, I went all the way down to Cannes to meet buyers, publishers, and tech vendors. I also away came with a few inevitable conclusions, such as the imminent and growing takeover of global revenue by the two biggest players in the market – Facebook, and Google. Believe it or not, but a third player might have also revealed themselves – a content provider, a company such as Verizon-owned Oath or Comcast-owned NBCUniversal.  

IN LIKE A LION, OUT LIKE A LAMB

You might be asking who was attending this year. Apart from the biggest adtech players of course, such as Google or Facebook, Snapchat’s a giant Ferris wheel, and 100 rented yachts along the riviera, all while rose wine flooded from dusk till dawn. So what was all the fuss about when it comes to the sizzling topics this year at Cannes?

Surprising as it may be, there was little to nothing on the adblocking debate, GDPR (the General Data Protection Regulation),  or the upcoming Chrome & Safari changes and features. The rumored changes or the EU regulations are possible to take place in 2018 and we don’t yet have the chance to jump to the right conclusions. As stakes are high, we’ll keep an eye on the industry’s ups and downs and keep you posted.

I’LL BE BACK

In fact, the red line was crossed by all speeches about AI / Machine Learning. These days, it’s hard to do without the ever-present AI/ML, such as Siri, Google Maps, Tesla Autopilot, or Google Translate. And it’s not going anywhere.

AI’s been widely adopted as it’s crept into our daily lives. At a seminar hosted by Teads.tv, Tim Urban spoke about how the finance industry has been heavily investing in AI. By and large, eight out of ten hedge funds nowadays have AI as one of their core components. By the same token, the investment bank, JP Morgan, is now applying AI to all their business projects to cut down on staff and decrease credit losses.

By all means, AI is taking the floor, and not only in Cannes. So is it all about machines nowadays? Machine learning works well in the adtech industry since there are so much data and huge volumes of traffic. The bottom line is that tech vendors who don’t apply machine learning soon will have to play catch up in the coming years.

KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN

And perk up your ears. Later this summer our CTO will be doing a presentation on how Yieldbird is now running our header bidder wrapper with machine learning, applied in beta. He’ll get into all the benefits, which can also help you gain more out of programmatic buying. Stay tuned.

That’s all from Cannes,

Fredrik Strauss