The 6 Trends Dominating My Conversations at Cannes

This story was originally published in On Background with Mark Stenberg, a free, weekly newsletter that explores the key themes shaping the media industry. You can sign up for it here. In trying to describe the fundamental paradox of Cannes, a source earlier this week invoked the famous Bill Gates aphorism: Most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in a decade. Change is hard to chart on a year-by-year basis, but unmistakable when considered over a decade. The amount of lip service paid to transformation on the Croissette vastly outstrips the actual amount of transformation that seems to occur, and yet it is the conversations happening here that offer the clearest view of the long-term shifts playing out in the advertising and media industries. While the festival has just reached its halfway point, these are the trends that have continually resurfaced across my interviews, panels, and friendly conversations. 1. The creator economy hits puberty While creators have been rising in prominence for years, the past six months have marked an inflection point. The largest creators, like Jimmy Donaldson and Dhar Mann, have surpassed the scale of most digital media companies, but more importantly: the space as a whole has matured to a point that has finally begun to draw investment, as evidenced most obviously by the $250 million fund CAA and TPG announced earlier this month. Now comes the hard part. As a number of sources have noted, these creators do not often come equipped with commercial expertise, and many of them have a bumpy transition ahead of them when it comes to turning their passion projects into LLCs. These growing pains are evident in the recent CEO replacement at Audiochuck, as well as in implosions like the kind that brought down Hartbeat. What’s more, investors want businesses, not individuals. Every M&A expert I speak with warns of the key-man risk inherent in creators, which is why so many founders are looking to funnel their audience into more durable businesses, like retail products and software. Expect a lot more fallout as the creator economy transitions from wunderkind into institution. 2. Media imagines its post-text future In conversations with creators, the question of writing continues to come up with increasing frequency. More specifically, they ask: Are you still doing it? Two of my favorite Substack writers, Casey Lewis and Ben Dietz, both told me they are reformatting their newsletters to be lighter, less text-heavy. Malcolm Gladwell, a noted practitioner of the literary arts, told me he is most optimistic about the future of audiobooks. With video coming to dominate social media, and even text-forward platforms like Substack and Beehiiv encouraging production of the moving image, it can feel like the written word has its best days behind it. Casey, who writes the youth-trend bible After School, worried about what a lack of literacy among younger generations means for the future: Are they pulling up the literary ladder behind them? Like all things, this is likely an overcorrection in some capacity, but it will nonetheless have dramatic implications for the future of media. 3. Format is secondary to IP Related to the point above, the convergence of formats has made medium-specific practitioners a relic of the past. This is most apparent in podcasting, which is quickly shedding its reputation as an audio-centric medium, much to the chagrin of its early adopters. The focus now is less the format of a particular concept and more the concept itself. Entire production companies can now trace their origin to a single viral video. This is a boon for audiences, as great material is no longer limited to a specific kind of delivery vehicle, but it too will have profound implications on the kind of creator or company that succeeds in this new space. With technology dramatically reducing the barrier to entry for content creation, originality of idea is now the primary indicator of success. 4. FOBO dominates AI Last year at Cannes, the concern surrounding AI was that it might upend ad creative. This year, that anxiety has broadened to encompass a wider scope, prompting agencies and media companies to fret for what their purpose will be in a world where AI can perform nearly every task they get paid for. In a conversation with one AI executive, she described this as a fear of being obsolete, or FOBO, a phrase that has sunk itself indelibly into my memory. It also sounds better when said with a French accent. The remark is indicative of the broader tension present in every panel and conversation across the Croissette: Will this technology replace me? That being said, another executive told me privately that backroom conversations regarding AI increasingly focus on its costs and dubious ROI. Maybe by this time next year there will be more clarity on the matter, but right now the thinking is split. The technology appears either poised to replace a broad swath of jobs, or be finally unmasked as vaporware and scaled back to a more reasonable degree. 5. Agents are coming for your group chat In perhaps my favorite conversation at Cannes so far, one executive laid out for me a vision of the ways in which AI will upend consumer behaviors, as more people become accustomed to finding answers to any question in ChatGPT or Claude. He went further, showing me a demo for a new product that brought agents directly into your group chat. These agents can stand in for brands, publishers, or perhaps even creators, trained on a relevant corpus of data and providing responses in a brand-appropriate format, similar to the way a company has a visual identity that persists anywhere someone encounters it. Consider an application where a consumer has a personalized run-down of the most relevant news of the day in a one-on-one conversation, or where a group chat discussing a certain topic prompts an agent to share relevant recent reporting on the subject. As social media increasingly becomes parasocial media, “dark social” channels like group texts are becoming more influential than ever. By introducing agents into the mix, consumers could find themselves engaging with news brands and media in a more direct way than ever before. 6. The value of news content is rising At this point, the LLMs have effectively trained on all the data available on the web. As such, the primary differentiator between the products is their access to new, quality information, a reality that premium publishers are celebrating. In conversations with executives at multiple media firms, the mood was unusually sanguine. As it becomes clearer than ever that outputs are no more than the sum of their inputs, publishers are finding their negotiating power with AI firms more robust than they had imagined a year ago. Naturally, this optimism does not necessarily extend to the long tail of content creators, but at least for a handful of the most influential media outlets in the ecosystem, their product appears poised to finally be valued at its proper price. Talking Heds Penske Nabs Vox: On Thursday, just as I predicted would happen a month ago, Penske Media acquired the remainder of the Vox Media portfolio. The company had been split in two after James Murdoch paid $300 million for New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and Vox. The deal left a handful of marquee brands, including The Verge, Eater, and SB Nation, as well as a smattering of secondary assets like The Dodo and Thrillist, in an ownership limbo. In bringing the left-behind brands into Penske Media, the media company is expanding its coverage beyond its traditional remit of music and entertainment trades, in a marriage that still feels a bit ungainly. To house all of its editorial assets, Penske Media created a new sub-brand, called PMX, which will be led by former Vox Media president Ryan Pauley. In the span of just two months, the decades-long saga of Vox Media has come to an abrupt conclusion, its assets parceled out and reconstituted once again, proving that media companies never truly die—they only ever change hands. Walmart Television: On Tuesday, in a deal that had much of Cannes buzzing, Walmart snapped up the CTV advertising platform Vibe.co in a 10-figure deal. The move, which my colleague Kathryn Lundstrom explores in greater detail here, is the latest in a series of acquisitions by the retailer aimed at bulking up its streaming offering. The move puts the company in closer competition with Amazon, the only other retailer of commensurate size, which has built a robust streaming stack centered around Prime Video but made tantalizing by dint of its commerce data. Walmart, which acquired the CTV manufacturer Vizio just two years ago, appears intent to follow in its footsteps. Instagram Television: If you have ever found yourself dual-screening, flipping through Instagram while watching Netflix, I have great news: On Monday, the Meta app announced a host of new product features, forthcoming creator partnerships, and distributor deals for Instagram for TV, its play for the biggest screen in the house. On one hand, something in me grows cold at the thought of using your living room television to scroll through vertical video. On the other hand, short-form content dominates mobile usage, so why not television too? Consider me skeptical, especially given the Meta penchant for experimentation but the circularity of the space has never been more apparent. The streamers want to be YouTube, YouTube wants to be social media, and social media companies want to be streamers. Piers Television: On Tuesday, the former broadcast phenom Piers Morgan, who orchestrated a career renaissance on YouTube, raised $27 million to grow the budding operation into the beginnings of a proper media empire. In a fun twist, one of his financial backers is Elisabeth Murdoch, daughter of Rupert and sister to James and Lachlan, arguably cementing the Murdoch clan as the first family of the global media ecosystem. The move is yet another sign that, as I have written frequently, the future of media is increasingly being built on YouTube. Kitchn Print (EXCLUSIVE): The food and recipe-focused brand The Kitchn, part of the broader Apartment Therapy Media portfolio, on Tuesday launched a paid membership product whose perks include a quarterly print magazine. The digitally native brand is introducing a print product for the first time in its history to capitalize on what president Riva Syrop characterizes as a rising interest in the analog, as well as a means of brand-building and giving the most engaged fans of the outlet another touch point for engagement. As traffic continues its rapid decline across the open web, look for more media brands to launch products intended to double down on their most ardent followers. The Kitchn is not alone in championing a print resurgence—Bustle, The Onion, Saveur, and Spin have all launched or re-launched physical magazines recently—but I am not so sure. A savvy marketing move? Sure. But no amount of nostalgia will reverse our collective digital addiction. Quote/Unquote On Tuesday, Kara Swisher moderated the annual Business of News panel at ADWEEK House at Cannes, a conversation that featured Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green, General Motors’ CMO Shenan Reed, Bank of America CMO Michele Barlow, Bloomberg Media CCO Christine Cook, TIME COO Mark Howard, Horizon Media president Bob Lord, Ad Fontes Media CEO Vanessa Otero, and me! The crux of the session was discussing brands’ reluctance to advertise alongside news content and what publishers are doing to assuage those concerns. Below are a few of my favorite insights from the conversation, and yes one of them is from me. This interview has been edited. Kara Swisher: Give me an example of brand safety going wrong. Mark Howard (TIME): Taylor Swift was Time Person of the Year in 2023. If I had shopped that to advertisers, I'd have had a waiting list of people paying a premium to be on that page, but because the feature contained words like “feminism” and “war,” it was flagged as not brand safe by both verification vendors. I ended up in hours of conversations with advertisers about why we were not going to give them make-goods for being on an article they would have begged to be on. Kara: What do you think is performing this year? Christine Cook (Bloomberg Media): Thought leadership. Clients who come to our studio to produce it renew at a 60% to 80% rate. Last year we even did a study on thought leadership itself, dissecting whether a video should be short or long, whether it's a main stage event or a white paper, depending on industry and region. It's ultimately creative with a narrative, which is the opposite of where a lot of the conversation has been. Kara: What do you think AI will actually change about the problem? Bob Lord (Horizon Media): What AI is doing right now is bringing back a world of media placement—matching the right creative message to the right media placement in real time. A media plan is only a minute old now. It's a constant, ongoing optimization. Six months ago that wasn’t happening. And that means I can actually tell my client the dollar they spent is having an impact. Kara: What do you think is performing this year? Vanessa Otero (Ad Fontes Media): Because of AI, the proliferation of garbage is infinite, but there's a finite universe of what's human-created. Traffic to the open internet is declining, but least so at news sites, especially human-created news. The places that have always been reliable are still writing with humans almost 100% of the time. Kara: What will we be talking about this time next year? Mark Stenberg (ADWEEK): At the risk of being pessimistic, I think we're fighting the last war talking about brand safety on the internet, when the web is increasingly beside the point. We should be thinking about how people are going to consume news through answer engines, through hyper-personalized media, through agents in group chats. Brand suitability conversations will happen there too, but they'll look radically different. Pulled Quotes "When I was first going to Cannes, if you saw Martin Sorrell walking down the street, that was the big-name celebrity. Now? Alix Earle."UTA's Margot Hauer-King, on the rise of creators at CannesREAD MORE "These companies that make the LLMs have taken our work. They've used it without our permission."NYT CEO Meredith Kopit-Levien, on The Times’ legal action against OpenAIREAD MORE “These shows are rivaling, if not bigger than, what we have historically called TV shows.”Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff, on Ina Garten launching a podcastREAD MORE “In light of today's deal, the Roku sale seems more defensive than offensive. Roku could compete with LG and Samsung's OEM strategy, but maybe not with what Walmart is building.”Marketecture cofounder Ari Paparo, on consolidation in the streaming ecosystemREAD MORE

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