June 25, 2026  |  SIGN UP

Jim Cooper
DIGIDAY, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

It’s day four of Cannes Lions 2026 and I really haven’t laid eyes on half of Digiday’s editorial team here in the south of France.

But Seb Joseph, Krystal Scanlon, Kimeko McCoy, Michael Bürgi and Sara Jerde are far from absent – and they have been very busy. Their daily Cannes Briefings and dispatches for all five days of the festival have been must reads, incisively cutting into the key trends emerging from the Croisette that will most likely set the trends and pace for the coming year.

Certainly, brands and their position around AI and the business parameters around creator-based brand marketing – creators, as predicted, were here in force – made Cannes especially frothy this year. Under that foam remained the less sexy, but nonetheless urgent, issues of industry fraud, the future competitive course and the identity of agencies and ad tech providers and industry M&A.

Our team hustled hard, working through some of the hottest days in France’s history – sincerely hoping there is a chaise and ice in their rosé by this evening.

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DIGIDAY @ CANNES

Cannes Briefing: Creators didn’t come to Cannes for parties this year. They came for briefs.

MediaLink has spent years owning the art of wining and dining CMOs at Cannes. This year, it turned that same playbook on creators. UTA, its owner, hosted an invite-only dinner for more than 70 creators spanning sports, fashion, food, lifestyle and news.

DIGIDAY @ CANNES

At Cannes, Omnicom Media and NBCU say they’re crafting dynamic contextual ads for content

The partnership pairs audience and performance data from Omnicom’s Acxiom unit with contextual metadata on NBCUniversal’s shows in order to optimize in-flight creative from Omnicom clients, who can dynamically align their ad messages with specific shows,

PARTNER INSIGHTS FROM CELTRA

Why AI-generated creative makes measurement essential

Connecting creative decisions to business outcomes has been the hardest part of advertising to operationalize. The volume pressure that generative AI has introduced is the strongest argument the industry has for doing it properly.

DIGIDAY @ CANNES

Meta courts agencies with expanded ad tools while AI reshapes the industry

The platform made a series of announcements at the festival, including expanded ad tools, a unified creator marketplace hub and AI-powered end-to-end creative solutions.

A MESSAGE FROM NEXXEN

ACR data is invaluable, but only if it lives within DSPs

TV has never been richer in signals, ranging from contextual intelligence to identity graphs, outcome measurement to overloaded dashboards. Despite this sophistication, too many TV strategies still break down at the moments that matter most.

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DIGIDAY @ CANNES

The hunt for a post-LiveRamp successor is already underway

Earlier this week — on Tuesday evening to be precise — several ad execs from both advertisers and agencies gathered at the Il Teatro restaurant in Cannes, France, to talk about what should happen now that LiveRamp is likely to be acquired by Publicis Groupe.

DIGIDAY @ CANNES

Cannes Briefing: The AI search crisis everyone’s talking about at Cannes is actually about brand coherence

This year, the conversations actually happening in the villas and the beach cabanas aren’t about creative execution at all. They’re about something closer to brand infrastructure: how brands get discovered, trusted, and recommended by AI systems that don’t care about a media plan.

PARTNER INSIGHTS FROM ADJUST

How mobile gaming companies are navigating measurement migrations

Measurement platforms have always been foundational to app marketing and growth success. But as complexity has grown and signal loss persisted, the underlying infrastructure has taken on greater strategic importance.