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When people ask me what I saw at Cannes, I am reminded of the old story of the seven blind men and the elephant, where each felt a different part of the elephant and decided that it was more like a snake or a fan or a piece of leather.
That’s because Cannes is so big and has so many, well, bubbles, that most people only see a particular side of it and thus walk away with a very narrow viewpoint.
To wit, The Hollywood Reporter has a whole story about how creators and influencers are making Lions more Hollywood than the film festival.
And yet I can all but guarantee you that for many attendees, especially those in ad tech, creators barely registered on their radar.
That said, it was pretty clear that many of the elements of Feudal Media were in play throughout the week.
Starting with the aforementioned creators who have become celebrities in their own rights, but whose fame is generally limited to a specific bubble or series of bubbles.
That was something we highlighted in our recent study with Viant’s TVision Insights around what people watch when they watch YouTube on TV.
What the study found is that the more popular creators get TV-like co-viewing with less attention and the more niche creators get greater attention but much less co-viewing.
Which tracks to what was going on the Croisette: there were a lot of Creators there, but most elicited a giant “Who?” from much of the audience.
Whereas when Amazon rolled out their Creator Hub program, it included the likes of MrBeast and Dude Perfect, creators whose appeal extends across multiple bubbles…without ever reaching a monoculture level of fame.
Why It Matters
On the ad and ad tech side, everyone was dealing with a more existential issue: in the days of the monoculture, brands could rely on the fact that if they were putting big bucks behind a broadly targeted TV commercial or banner ad, they could expect that eventually most of their target would see it.
That is no longer the case—if your ad is not on the two or three TV shows your target is watching, if it’s not on the half dozen websites they go to and allow ads on, if you’re not in the feed for their top five creators, then they are just not going to see your ad.
Dealing with that is something the ad industry is not particularly well suited for, at least not in its current incarnation.
Everything is optimized for reach, for “you hit your target, why do you care” and for the aforementioned assumption that if you throw enough money at a campaign, everyone will indeed see it.
There are several solutions being bandied about, but no one seems to own any of them.
Focusing On Attention. This is pretty basic. The spin here is not new—ads that people pay attention to are better than ads people ignore—but the stakes are higher and, just as important, we now have ways to better measure attention and reactions.
Focusing On Quality. This one gives me pause. Not because it’s wrong, but because the potential for abuse is pretty high. Meaning that the definition of “quality” impressions is pretty loose, the people claiming to deliver on it are growing rapidly in number, and so there’s a real danger the term soon becomes meaningless.
Which is too bad, because acknowledging that not all impressions were created equal is a long-needed adjustment and, in the age of Feudal Media, identifying which impressions resonate with which bubbles is also quite valuable.
So the charge here is to not muck it up.
Focusing on Context. Contextual targeting is probably the best way to find audiences across bubbles, but it needs to be refined so that is its actual goal. Right now, contextual is still largely siloed between CTV and digital, with different players providing contextual targeting on each.
More than that though, it’s aimed at connecting brands with people who might be interested in what they are selling. Versus finding audiences who might find what the brand is saying to be of interest.
It’s a subtle distinction, but an important one: basically pushing your message out (old school) versus trying to pull in audiences (Feudal Media).
Fixing Measurement. Not holding my breath on this one, but as media plans will contain multiple narrow buys across a broad range of platforms, the industry needs to figure out how to provide something resembling a standardized way to compare them all to each other. This does not have to be all about reach. It can be about attention or efficacy or a number of other metrics. But it does need to be standardized across walled gardens and streaming and the open web and easy to understand. Because advertisers do not relish the idea of having to do work to actually understand whether their media plans were working correctly.
That is the ad part.
I am sure that somewhere else on the Croisette, conversations were being had about how to pull people out of their increasingly more fragmented news bubbles.
Mostly because I am an optimist.
What You Need To Do About It
If you are an advertiser, it’s going to be easy to wait for someone else to do it before trying anything new. But I am going to urge you to be bold, to take steps to try to make this new world work, to push your agencies to look at the landscape differently and measure it differently. To think of the media landscape as the mosaic it is, rather than the neatly siloed entity it once was.
If you are the ad industry, stop thinking that “AI” is going to solve all your problems.
Because honestly, you sound like Linus waiting for the Great Pumpkin.
And we all know how that turned out.
You need to solve your own problems. AI can help you once you’ve done that. Maybe. But it’s not going to rise from the pumpkin patch and shed its warm light over your outdated algorithms and make them all shiny and relevant.
Finally, if you are Arthur Querou, take a massive bow.
You worked hard to make Vibe a thing. You even dressed in drag AND did two videos for TVREV.
So congrats on finding someone who believed in your dream as much as you did. And paid you royally for it.
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