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Keeping up with the latest industry trends, breakthrough technology and outstanding creative approaches is key to gaining a competitive advantage when it comes to performance marketing.
And in June, leaders from across advertising, marketing and tech assembled in Cannes to celebrate industry excellence, incredible creativity and the Cannes Lions Awards – the world’s most prestigious advertising ceremony renowned for pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.
If you missed Cannes, its headline announcements and what KINESSO got up to on the Croisette, we’ve pulled together a handy overview of the essential news and activities taking centre stage at this year’s 71st edition of the festival.
Cannes Call Outs
To the surprise of nobody, most of the announcements made at Cannes focused on AI and Commerce – two of the driving forces in AdTech currently. With our performance partners unveiling their latest developments, here are our top three call outs:
Google’s AI video generator: Google introduced Veo, its text to video generation model with an advanced understanding of natural language. Google demonstrated Veo’s potential through its ‘Best Phones Forever’ miniseries, where AI was used to tailor the next step in the story to real time user comments.
What this means: Tools like Veo unlock the ability to create a large universe of AV assets at speed, tailoring creative for customer segments, product categories, platforms and placements, while facilitating rapid A/B testing. The techniques used in the ‘Best Phones Forever’ series could enable enhanced storytelling and sequential messaging – from social to programmatic to CTV - tailored to overcome friction points in customers' shopping journeys.
Meta’s AI messaging for commerce: Meta unveiled a suite of new AI features including a Gen AI messaging tool that can be integrated into their messaging apps. This new solution helps shoppers find answers about products quickly, while allowing brands to offer more personalised customer support.
This activity can be followed up with ads that promote offers related to their original query or remind audiences they left items in their bag.
What this means: Conversational AI could enable brands to offer high levels of customer support online. This feature would pair well with any advertiser with a highly specialised product or service portfolio where customers may seek additional information. It could also enhance the gift giving experience around key gifting moments like Christmas and Mothers’ Day.
Amazon cookieless ad-targeting: Amazon is using AI to deliver precision targeting in a cookieless future with their latest tool – Ad Relevance. It analyses billions of browsing, buying and streaming signals in conjunction with real-time information about the content being viewed, to understand where customers are in their shopping journeys. It then serves relevant ads across devices, channels and content types, improving addressability, CPMs and CPCs with 100% budget delivery.
What this means: Given the wealth and power of their retail data combined with the reach of their full-funnel inventory, use of Amazon DSP has already grown amongst both endemic and non-endemic brands. With further improvements to their targeting and uncertainty surrounding the future of cookieless, their DSP promises to further accelerate performance.
On the Cannes Speaker Circuit
As the UK’s leading and award-winning tech-driven performance marketing agency, KINESSO UK&I's leadership team was invited to speak at high-profile events across Cannes.
At the ‘Art & Science – How Brands and Agencies are Leveraging the Versatility of Addressable TV’ panel, UK&I CEO and President EMEA, Chloe Hawking, discussed how brands and agencies are leveraging the versatility of addressable TV: “Addressable TV opens up a huge opportunity for creativity; allowing us to experiment with targeting and creative like never before. The potential for applying retail data presents huge unlocks in TV advertising”.
Meanwhile our Chief Digital Officer, Lauren Ogundeko, spoke on LinkedIn Live’s Female Quotient panel about how AI is enabling us to deliver performance at scale, and at Seedtag’s panel to share how we’re connecting with audiences in a privacy first world using contextual AI technologies: ”The power of generative AI means we can analyse large amounts of data quickly. What took hours now takes minutes”.
Our Managing Director for Media, Seun Odeneye, joined Captify’s panel to deep dive into the innovative evolution around audience planning, and later spoke with Snap and VideoAmp about how first party data will continue shaping the future of advertising. Seun also revealed KINESSO's ethos of always putting the client first: "Traditional agencies are siloed when it comes to search, social etc. KINESSO is only single minded in what’s best for our clients," Seun shared.
Finally, IPG Mediabrands’ annual Villa Content Sessions continued to deliver the latest insights in collaborative creativity and transformative tech. Sessions ranged from a conversation with CNN about truth in journalism, to how we can better optimise the convergence of Brand, Adtech and Martech to drive better performance.
Cannes Lions – pushing innovation to the limit
The Cannes Lions Awards are the world’s most respected benchmark for creative excellence and 2024’s submissions followed that trend. Across 32 specialist awards, the Lions recognised everything from commerce and innovation, to social and programmatic.
Along with the other deserving winners announced across the week, IPG Mediabrands also took home 8 highly-prized awards, including five Silver and eight Bronze Cannes Lions, plus 53 shortlists.
Our friends at KINESSO Netherlands took home a Bronze Lion for their crime solving app for the Dutch National Police, Special Investigative Media (SIM). Working with Initiative Netherlands, SIM harnessed the power of precision marketing to activate the most effective witness network in Dutch history – solving crime in real time. Within a minute of an offence, SIM built and deployed hundreds of assets in programmatic, search and social in a geotargeted campaign calling for witnesses. Watch the innovative campaign here.
And that’s a wrap on another incredible year celebrating the industry’s creativity and innovations: from new leaps in AI, to the creation of campaigns having a direct societal impact, Cannes never disappoints.
Au revoir, les amis!