Cannes this year was dominated by big bets on retail media and the continued evolution of CTV, with platforms like Amazon, Walmart, Roku, and Netflix carving out ever-larger footprints along the Croisette. Much of the buzz centered on commerce integration, new ad formats, and AI-fueled personalization at scale. There’s also no shortage of Cannes recaps in the trades and on LinkedIn diving deeper into those things. But for those of us focused on brand safety and responsible media, several additional undercurrents stood out from the week — less flashy perhaps, but no less urgent.
Media Responsibility: From Moral Case to Business Case
If I could pinpoint the starkest tone shift this year, it was in how we talked about media responsibility and its many components (sustainability, brand safety & suitability, supporting the news, and more) compared to last year. It’s hard to believe that just a year ago, the industry celebrated the launch of a framework for media sustainability from a certain prominent WFA initiative whose acronym many shudder to put in writing these days. What a year it’s been since then.
But despite the geopolitical shifts, the lawsuits (and alleged threats thereof), and the general chill cast over these topics, marketing’s social conscience isn’t gone — it’s just been recast. Whether the topic du jour was brand safety, sustainability, data privacy, or investment in quality journalism, it’s not like these things suddenly stopped mattering. But rather than arguing that they matter because they’re the right things to do, the message this year was that they matter because they work.
Take news, which was a topic of multiple jours, from Sport Beach to AdWeek House and every plage in between. Heavyweights from top publishers and ad tech platforms have been talking about the state of journalism and advertising for at least the last several years. But this year, the familiar appeals to audiences around civic responsibility and democracy preservation were replaced by discussions about performance.
Publishers have learned that the moral case for supporting journalism doesn’t sway media buyers. Instead, they pitch the 14% of online consumers who, according to Stagwell, are unreachable outside of quality news outlets.
The same approach can be seen when framing sustainability efforts as eliminating waste from the supply chain, or reframing brand suitability as ad relevance. Just like any other investment, responsible media initiatives need to quantitatively drive business outcomes — and be pitched accordingly.
Though I wish we’d gotten to this point via happier means, this shift in perspective is probably a good thing. It may just be what’s required to get this work done in 2025, but framing media responsibility through an ROI lens vs. as a moral imperative may have helped us achieve far more than we were able to for the first half-decade that many of us were doing this work. Hindsight is 20/20, but regardless, the perspective shift this year was notable. If Cannes was once a place for selling visions, this year it was a place for selling results.
AI: Force Multiplier or Replacement?
For at least the second consecutive year (this being my second Cannes), there was no shortage of buzz around AI, and nearly every beach, panel, and product demo featured it in some way. The tone was overwhelmingly rosy — focusing on the potential of AI to save time, to allow us to transcend the mundane, and to make us more effective. This stood in stark contrast to the more existential takes on AI outside the Cannes bubble, where the fears around AI fully automating ad targeting, creative generation, and more are on full display.
It’s easy to see why the existential perspective wasn’t center stage at the Palais. The people who attend Cannes — marketers, agency leads, platform execs, tech vendors — aren’t eager to discuss or hear about their own obsolescence. We’d much rather talk about how AI is making us more efficient, more creative, and more scalable. And to be fair, many of the use cases discussed on those fronts are genuinely valuable and exciting.
Still, it felt like attendees were zeroing in on ways in which AI is making us more efficient within an outdated digital advertising paradigm, rather than zooming out to assess how the paradigm itself is shifting. The tension between AI as a force multiplier and AI as a replacement hovered just beneath the surface — unspoken, but very relevant.
We at BSI were intrigued by the ways in which this dynamic is playing out for both legacy and emerging brand safety solutions. As with many facets of our industry, the AI wave has been accompanied by a host of upstart brand safety providers (Mobian, Mantis, Optimera, and even Scope3’s foray into the space) offering AI-forward pre- and post-bid solutions that claim to go far beyond keywords to distinguish between Pulitzer-caliber journalism and potentially toxic UGC. Legacy titans are similarly overhauling their solutions (or at least how they talk about them) to put AI at the forefront.
If these systems can deliver that level of nuance and precision, then AI truly becomes a force-multiplier in this space: protecting brands while unlocking revenue for high-quality content producers. Yet the tension between automation and human involvement is still relevant here. The extent to which these solutions are trusted will hinge on whether they’re viewed as nebulous black boxes or as AI-enhanced processes that keep human experts — moderators, editors, policy analysts, cultural specialists — in the loop to correct and contextualize.
Authentic Influencing
The tension between the automated and the human played out across many fronts, perhaps none more prominent than in content creation. Cannes continues to be the summer’s influencer Olympics. The competition to book the biggest names was in full swing, with rooftops and beach stages featuring Serena Williams, Diplo, the Kelce brothers, Jamie Lee Curtis, multiple Peloton instructors that got many of us through the pandemic, and so many more. Ironically though, a common thread throughout these star-studded sessions was restraint.
Consumers are drowning in ads. If a brand’s collaboration with a creator doesn’t feel authentic, it won’t break through — and it may even backfire if a creator’s followers feel that they’ve sold out. In conversations including Olympic rugby star Ilona Maher discussing her collaboration with Maybelline, MasterCard CMO Raja Rajamannar sharing the love of music with Diplo and Peloton’s Jess King, and Hershey’s Vinny Rinaldi debating with the Kelce brothers how “Reese’s” is pronounced, there was a clear and mutual acknowledgment between creators and brands: authenticity is critical. When a creator and a brand authentically resonate with one another, they make content; when they don’t, they make an ad.
All this talk about authenticity stood in contrast to the AI conversation. As platforms and tech providers tout new AI-powered content creation tools for marketers and creators alike, there’s simultaneous pressure to make collaborations feel more human than ever. It will be important for brands and creators to mindfully navigate this tension between the synthetic and the authentic when creating sponsored content, but it also highlights a discrepancy in how AI usage is viewed for making ads vs. the content surrounding them.
While Cannes booths were aggressively pitching tools for brands to churn out hyper-real, partially-or-fully synthetic ad creative, the industry simultaneously vilifies “AI slop,” the avalanche of low-grade, auto-generated articles, images, and short-form videos that pollute feeds and game monetization algorithms. Many vendors and platforms now offer filters to detect and demonetize this content, and many marketers are eager to avoid it. It raises a cautionary question, which feels appropriate to end with as marketers begin integrating these shiny new content creation tools: if audiences start viewing AI use in ads as “slop,” could an overreliance on synthetic creative become a reputational risk to brands in its own right? If authenticity is the currency of trust, brands may need to apply the same standards to their own creative that they demand of the content surrounding it.
