At Cannes Lions, everyone is trying to sell your attention
CANNES, France — The doubling of global ad revenue to $1 trillion over the past decade has ushered in a new wave of companies eager to sell consumer attention.
Why it matters: This week's Cannes Lions demonstrated that the annual festival for creativity and advertising has quickly become one of the most important global convening spaces not just for brands and agencies, but for celebrities, athletes, influencers and creatives looking to tap into that growth.
State of play: Dozens of Hollywood stars and athletes made appearances, such as Jason and Travis Kelce, Ryan Reynolds, Reese Witherspoon, Dwyane Wade, Gabrielle Union, Ilona Maher, Sue Bird, Megan Rapinoe, Carmelo Anthony, Serena Williams and Jordan Chiles. So did influencers and podcasters popular among Gen Z, such as Jake Shane, Alix Earle, Alex Cooper and Anna Sitar.
Big tech firms and agencies looking to curry business with major advertisers mostly covered travel and accommodations in exchange for stars showing up at their venues.
Zoom in: Big Tech's dominance was on full display at Cannes Lions this year, where the only firms that could afford the expensive, high-profile beach spaces were companies like Meta, Spotify, Google/YouTube, Pinterest and Yahoo, alongside global ad agencies such as WPP, Omnicom and Stagwell.
Traditional publishers, such as Warner Bros. Discovery, the New York Times, Hearst and Axios, were mostly relegated to smaller boats that dock in the nearby port, and cheaper hotel suites and restaurants across the street.
Zoom out: The millions of dollars spent by companies to build out extravagant programming stages and host concerts and parties on the beach or nearby locations has made Cannes Lions an even bigger spectacle than the annual Cannes Film Festival, which takes place in the same location a few weeks before.
"It's more expansive in terms of who it interacts with," United Talent Agency CEO David Kramer told Axios in a stage interview Monday.
"I mean, Cannes Film Festival obviously is a very special, special place, but it's very specific to movies. That's it ... I do think Cannes Lions is a more expansive place. ... It's pretty different than it probably was a decade ago for sure."
How we got here: The massive growth in advertising over the past 10 years can mostly be attributed to the launch of the smartphone, which allowed social media and search companies to start selling a lot more inventory across their mobile apps.
Over the past few years, other types of companies with scaled audiences, such as grocers, retailers and travel firms, have similarly built out advertising businesses as a way to make more money and upsell their existing customers.
That trend has transformed the ad industry, shifting sales power from traditional publishers to technology firms.
Case in point: In 2011, the top five advertisers globally were mostly U.S. publishers: Google, Viacom and CBS, News Corp and Fox, Comcast, and Disney, per WPP Media.
Today, the top five advertisers globally are all tech firms and two are Chinese: Google, Meta, ByteDance, Amazon and Alibaba.
Between the lines: Brands that have traditionally attended the festival to explore places to spend their ad dollars are now becoming ad platforms themselves.
United Airlines, for example, handed out drinks to customers boarding its flights from Newark to Nice last weekend, celebrating the one-year anniversary of its new ad network, Kinective Media, at Cannes.
"You've got to have scale," United MileagePlus CEO Richard Nunn told Axios in an interview. "We flew 174 million people in 2024, so we've certainly got scale. The quality of audience is obviously there. By definition, they're not bots. They're real people."
Nunn also noted that the plethora of screens that a customer interacts with throughout their flying journey — from the app on their mobile device to the screens in the lounge, at the gate and on the plane — provides the company with a "multi-channel" digital platform to reach people with marketing and advertising.
By the numbers: Despite the fact that the Cannes Film Festival is so prominently referenced in pop culture, it has a similar number of delegates (15,000 in 2024) as Cannes Lions (13,000 in 2024).
What to watch: While the festival this year felt livelier and more celebratory compared to the few years following the pandemic, uncertainty around how AI will shape the industry's future loomed large, especially for publishers already struggling to compete with Big Tech.
"The future of the web is going to be more and more like AI, and that means that people are going to be reading the summaries of your content, not the original content," Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told Axios in an interview.
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