What We Brought Home From Cannes: CTV Media at the Festival of Creativity
CTV Media just got back from the biggest stage in advertising. Here's what stuck, and what it means for your CTV budget.
Every June the advertising world packs up and heads to the south of France. For five days, the Palais des Festivals et des Congres in Cannes turns into the meeting place for the industry, with over 15,000 marketers, creatives, and media leaders showing up from more than 90 countries. CTV Media had the privilege of attending this year.
“Cannes was the best meeting place ever. So much information and so much excitement, on a beach in southern France.”
Kathy Dixon, President, CTV Media
That's really what Cannes Lions is. Part networking, part beach vacation, part crash course in where the industry is actually headed. It started back in 1954 as a small advertising film festival and has grown into the biggest stage in the business. This year the conversations kept landing on the same few topics no matter which panel you sat in: the creator economy, AI, and trust.
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Kathy Dixon on the Cannes stage
CTV Media didn't just attend this year, we had a seat at the table. Kathy Dixon joined a panel hosted by Digiday and Blockboard on AI accountability in advertising, alongside Jeff Giacchetti of Alchemee, Caroline Proto of EssilorLuxottica, and Blockboard founder and CEO Matt Wasserlauf. They talked through what it actually takes to hold AI to a real standard as it takes on a bigger role in media buying and creative production.
Honestly, it's a conversation we've been having internally for a while. Long before "AI accountability" was a panel topic, transparency in media buying has been a priority and driving force within CTV Media for decades.
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What everyone was talking about
A few themes showed up over and over at Cannes this year, in panels, in hallway conversations, in the brand activations lining the Croisette.
The creator economy is no longer a side channel. Over 20 activations this year were built around influencer marketing and creator-led commerce, and it's clear that budget line is only growing.
AI was everywhere, but the tone was different than it was a year or two ago. Less excitement about the opportunities AI can provide, but more honest conversation about what can and can't be trusted and best practices for utilizing AI within your business.
Brands also put real money into physical, walk-in experiences. Spotify, Canva, Meta, and Pinterest all built out interactive spaces along the Croisette. Even in a business that lives online, the brands that stood out this year invested in something people could walk into.
Underneath all of it were two words that kept coming up no matter the topic: trust and transparency. Whether the panel was about AI, media buying, or measurement, it always circled back to the same question. How does the industry prove it deserves the budget and the attention it's asking for?
Trust and transparency are the themes that matter most to us, and they tie directly into what we took away from this year's festival.
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Key takeaways
Fraud and high commissions in streaming are rampant. This isn't a small problem anymore. As CTV and streaming budgets have grown, so has the number of middlemen sitting between advertisers and the actual audience, each one taking a cut and adding risk along the way.
AI is enhancing operations, not replacing human strategy and experience. The panels that got real attention this year weren't the ones promising AI would run the whole show. They were the ones being straight about what it's actually good for: speeding up analysis and automating the repetitive parts of the job. The deployments that work all have one thing in common, human governance. AI is a tool, not a replacement for people who understand the strategy.
AI produced creative lacks imagination on its own. Ask a model to generate creative concepts at scale and you'll get something competent and forgettable. The spark that makes people actually feel something still comes from a person. The brands doing this well aren't picking AI or human creativity, they're using AI to move faster while still leaning on human ingenuity to find the right idea.
Full funnel branding works best. There was real pushback at Cannes against the idea that performance marketing alone can carry a brand. Awareness and trust built at the top of the funnel are what make the bottom of the funnel convert. Treating branding and performance as two separate budgets leaves results on the table. Looking at the big picture and how each affects one another provides the most effective results.
Advanced data is key, but modeled data isn't the answer. This one matters most for anyone buying CTV or streaming media right now. Modeled AI data can approximate what happened, but an approximation isn't attribution. Real results need real measurement tied to real outcomes, not a statistical guess dressed up as an insight.
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The bottom line
Bottom Line
Most advertisers assume the way to improve CTV performance is by adding more. More partners, more platforms, another layer of technology stacked on top of everything already there. The truth: it's the opposite.
Advertisers should look through their current connections and ask the hard questions. How many middlemen are between your budget and the actual audience? How much of your spend is going to commissions instead of media? How many of those impressions are even reaching a real person? Optimization of current affiliates creates more effective campaigns.
The industry is already shifting toward this way of thinking, and the advertisers who take the time now to dig into their digital partnerships are going to be ahead of it. The ones who don't will keep quietly losing budget to fraud and unnecessary cost without ever seeing it show up on a report.
This is the exact problem CTV Media was built to solve. We go directly to the source, cutting out the layers of cost and non-human impressions that eat into so many streaming budgets. On average, CTV Media saves clients about 50% of the budget currently being wasted on greed and fraud, not by spending less, but by making sure every dollar reaches a real person.
Where we go from here
Cannes confirmed something we already believed. The industry is at a turning point. AI is going to keep playing a bigger role in advertising, but brands won't be effective by only chasing new technology. The most successful advertisers will be pairing technology with effective human judgment, quality measurement, and transparency.
That's the standard Kathy Dixon spoke to on stage in Cannes, and it's the same standard we hold ourselves to every day, festival season or not.
Ready to fix what's already broken?
Let's talk through what a fraud-free, direct-source approach to CTV advertising could mean for your budget.
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