Cannes has always been a fascinating contradiction. It’s the advertising industry at its most concentrated, optimistic, and sometimes most performative. For one week, everyone is there. Brands, agencies, platforms, publishers, ad tech companies, investors, creators, consultants. The entire ecosystem compressed into a few square miles on the French Riviera.
I’ve been to Cannes enough times to know that the most important conversations rarely happen on stage.
The panels are polished and the messaging is rehearsed, but the real signals tend to show up later, over dinner, in side conversations, or in the moments where people stop speaking like representatives of their companies and start speaking honestly about where the industry is headed.
That’s what I’ll be paying attention to this year.
I’m Watching the Brand Side
Not the keynote speeches. Not the talking points about innovation or consumer connection. I’m interested in what CMOs and media buyers are asking privately.
Are the questions around media economics getting sharper? Are advertisers becoming more active about understanding where their dollars actually go? Or are most still accepting opaque systems because that’s how the industry has always operated?
To me, that’s one of the biggest tells in advertising right now.
For years, transparency has been treated as an abstract industry value, something everyone publicly supports but few push hard enough to operationalize. What matters now is whether brands are moving from passive concern to active scrutiny – because once buyers start asking harder questions consistently, the industry changes very quickly.
I’m Watching What Happens When AI Comes Up
There are really two AI conversations happening at Cannes this year. The first is the one that will dominate the main stage and is about creative — generation, personalization, efficiency.
All of that matters. But the more consequential conversation is happening underneath it all, around the advertising supply chain itself.
What happens when automation removes layers of manual execution from media buying? What becomes visible when AI starts exposing inefficiencies that were previously hidden inside complexity?
In my view, that’s where things get interesting. AI doesn’t just accelerate workflows, it also forces clarity, and in advertising, clarity can make people uncomfortable. I’ll be watching closely to see which version of the AI conversation gets the most airtime and which version quietly gets avoided.
I’m Watching the Holding Companies
The tension between holding companies, DSPs, and the broader programmatic ecosystem has become harder to ignore over the past year.
I’m not interested in piling onto the drama. Every major shift in media creates friction between incumbents, platforms, and buyers. That’s normal. What I’m interested in is whether those fault lines show up honestly in conversations at Cannes or whether they get temporarily covered over with industry optimism.
Because even when public messaging stays polished, private sentiment has a way of surfacing. Usually, you can feel it in the hesitation behind certain answers, in the conversations people lower their voices for, and in what gets discussed enthusiastically versus what gets redirected.
The gap between what’s being said publicly and what’s being felt privately is often where the real story is.
I’m Watching for the Person Willing to Say It Plainly
Every Cannes, there’s at least one conversation that cuts through all the positioning. Usually it’s not on a stage. It’s the moment where someone says the quiet part out loud about where the money actually goes, what the system really costs, or what transparency would truly require if the industry committed to it fully.
Those conversations matter because they’re usually closer to reality than anything written into a presentation deck. That’s the conversation I’m looking for this year and is the conversation I’m planning to have.
That’s exactly why we’re hosting the Digiday panel, Where Did the Money Go?: AI, Transparency, and Advertising’s Reckoning. The title isn’t rhetorical. It’s the question more advertisers are starting to ask, and one the industry needs to answer more directly.
If you’ll be in Cannes and want to join the discussion, we’d love to have you there. https://digiday.com/events/cannes-panel-cocktail-reception/
Matt Wasserlauf is a digital advertising pioneer and Founder & CEO of BLOCKBOARD, a blockchain-powered CTV/OTT platform delivering transparency and verified performance. A TV industry disruptor, he previously founded Broadband Enterprises and Torrential, helping lead advertisers from traditional TV to digital video.
