Early last Wednesday evening, I found myself in a closed courtyard off the Croisette in Cannes at an exclusive event co-hosted by a publisher and a tech company.
Who am I and why was I there? I’m just a dude with a passion for interesting tech accompanying my girlfriend as she navigates her industry’s largest event.
I stood close to her, like a deer in headlights, waiting for Ethan, a guy in his early twenties, to finish preparing my fancy strawberry and chili chocolate Thai rolled ice cream. Without anyone else to talk to, I made conversation with Ethan as he masterfully smooshed together my smattering of flavors. I asked if he was training to be a chef. The answer was no; he’d come to Cannes from South Africa looking for summer work on a yacht. He was recruited to roll ice cream for the week just a few days before Lions began.
The longer I spent as a plus one at lavish parties like this one and at exclusive concerts throughout the week, the more I realized that there are a lot of Ethans in the online advertising industry.
Folks who look like experts on the outside but are really just winging it. Or, perhaps less kindly, folks out there knowingly (and cynically) peddling BS.
Having spent the lion’s share of two years globetrotting from industry event to industry event in the Web3 (crypto) space, I thought I’d seen it all, heard it all and was sick of it all. But then this unique opportunity presented itself – to traipse throughout the French Riviera with my girlfriend, an industry journalist, as she attended the largest and seemingly most extravagant ad tech and creative conference in the world – and so I went, of course.
One would think that an industry that as of 2024 was inching toward three-quarters of a trillion dollars globally in digital ad spend would have shed its youthful, exuberant exterior. It has not.
From ritzy yacht parties to intimate villa concerts in the hills of the French Riviera, Cannes Lions puts Token2049 and EthCC conferences to shame. My condolences go out to any family that unwittingly planned a beachfront excursion to Cannes only to find the entirety of the coastline along the Croisette privatized by the likes of Reddit, Yahoo, YouTube and Spotify.
Mostly driven by boredom but also partly by curiosity, I found myself starting ad hoc conversations with industry insiders, from consultants, CEOs and solutions architects to business development, product and comms leads. I was trying to understand what they were all so excited about.
My highly technical and wholly uninvested opinion: Nothing, and I think they know it.
My go-to question of the week was this: What are you most excited about building in the medium term? The response, overwhelmingly: AI.
You might expect that with the budgets these teams are working with, they’d consider allocating a fraction to actually building technology that could disrupt their industry, but no. When pressed about leveraging on-device model training, zero-knowledge proofs and fully homomorphic encryption, I was met with glossy eyes and platitudes.
In this moment, falling back on their DNA as marketers and advertisers seems good enough for them. Their ultimate goal appears to involve repackaging stuff they’ve already got so they can slap an LLM integration on it in time for Cannes Lions 2026.
The ad tech crowd is acting more “ad” than “tech.”
Whether it’s the comms team, leadership team or Ethan with his spicy Thai ice cream, it seems like most everyone is trying to be something, or someone, they’re not.
But, hey, this is just one man’s view, and I’m happy to be shown the other side. This is an open call to the industry: Show me what you’re building in the space. Inquiring minds are inquiring. There have got to be a few diamonds in the rough.
Reach Franklin Mongiove at [email protected] or follow him on X. Follow AdExchanger on LinkedIn.
