The International Festival of Creativity, Cannes Lions 2024, just wrapped in the French Riviera. It was action-packed as the advertising and communications industry convened for a week of world-class networking, learning, and extraordinary creativity.
The Seedtag team was thrilled to be a part of the festival, meeting partners, clients, and colleagues to explore The Power of Context, Uniting Innovation, Connection, and Creativity.
Our HQ was an uber cool penthouse suite where we welcomed people from all over the world to our exclusive Seedtag brunches, apéros and more. We also partnered with AdAge for an insightful panel discussion on the advantage of contextual AI hosted on the swanky VaynerX yacht. For a record third time, our podcast AdTech Heroes was live-streamed from Cannes, this time with a special crossover episode with The Pub Way podcast!
What are the key takeaways from the sessions at the Riviera? Mike Villalobos, VP of Strategy and Planning at Seedtag, shares all the details.
Top 3 takeaways from Cannes Lions 2024
- Contextual Advertising Strides Ahead
Contextual is all the buzz and having a pivotal resurgence given all of the legislation around privacy and user tracking limitations. While contextual has been around for a while, Seedtag’s ability to process and organize big data while leveraging custom LLMs positions the new approach to contextual as a key piece in conversations around a multitude of audience interests and first-party data. It is all about the consumer – not an assumption of who they are but their passions . But how can we transparently collect this information? Giving consumers the power to control how their data is being used beneficially and respectfully.
The world is tired of the constant conversational chaos around cookies and other identifiers going away, but the deprecation is imminent. We can’t continue to rely on third party cookies or device identifiers for much longer; those who do will most definitely be on the backfoot trying to sort through planning, targeting and attribution as they will not be ready for the future of advertising. Today, the focus lies on building a future-proof advertising strategy that pinpoints relevance – right place, right time, right audience. Advertisers are choosing the contextual route and enriching their strategies by augmenting efforts with their first-party data to display ads that truly resonate with consumers. With contextual, advertisers have a privacy-first alternative to intrusive, stereotypical, and oftentimes stale advertising practices that don’t fit the bill anymore.
- Contextual TV is the place to be
As CTV continues to disrupt the traditional TV ad market, new strengths and challenges emerge. Both buyers and sellers alike are navigating the changing landscape with telcos/OEMs now monetizing data to help buyers achieve better yields. The CTV advertising playbook is undergoing an overhaul, and the focus shifts to evoking watchers’ emotions and leverage what they might feel. While ads on linear TV do that well, they haven’t always translated to CTV ads just yet.
There was a spotlight on the key investment drivers and challenges buyers face, how sellers are aligning to meet that demand, and the difficulties around data and measurement. With increased competition and tighter ad budgets, price cuts might be among the few levers CTV players can pull to boost demand. Also, many TV manufacturers are eager to become advertising players in their own right thus fueling intense competition and uneasy collaboration, given their carriage agreements.
- It’s the Generative AI revolution
GenAI was the most discussed topic of the week at Cannes, captured in almost every booth and presentation. Beyond general topics, the emphasis was on real-world applications, their evolution, and use cases. GenAI's disruption in the creative space and impact on media production was truly the talk of the town.
The influence of GenAI on ad technology and its possible effect on agency productivity, as well as the scale of ad technology vendors and publishers, were also discussed. Other areas of interest in the GenAI space revolved around how it can be leveraged to access cleaner data and direct touchpoints with consumers to create more personalized marketing, how this data is a new form of research for brands to gain consumer insights, and the progress with use cases, approaches, and new applications like GenAI for image technology.
Curious to know more about how you can partner with us and leverage contextual advertising, CTV, or GenAI capabilities to catapult your advertising strategy? Let’s talk!
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