On his return from the Riviera, Chris Childs, managing director UK at creative mobile DSP TabMo, looks at some of the key themes from this year’s Cannes Lion’s festival, including AT&T’s programmatic venture, lower attendance and the GDPR void.
Cannes the party continue?
As the advertising industry returns from the south of France, noting significantly reduced attendance (at least 25% according to anecdotal figures) and a more reflective mood, it raises the question of how long the event can – and should – survive in its present format. In the currently uncertain financial climate, companies renting super yachts and taking over beaches to entertain their clients and upstage their competitors becomes more difficult to justify as an efficient use of corporate expenses.
Factor in that more organisations from other sectors are buying up media businesses, and it seems inevitable that the bubble is close to bursting; adtech funded partying on the Riviera will fast become a bygone era.
AT&T and AppNexus – a threat to the major players?
The programmatic buying market is currently dominated by a handful of platforms (DBM, The Trade Desk and Adobe, Brightroll in the US – and Amazon poised to increase its share), so the rumours of AT&T’s potential purchase of App Nexus (confirmed yesterday, 25 June) were big news.
App Nexus operates on both the supply and demand side; it will be interesting to see the impact that this buyout has on its place in the market. Assuming the offering includes access to AT&T first party opted-in data, could this be a threat to the likes of DBM and The Trade Desk?
The GDPR void – what shall we talk about now?
We spent so long talking about little other than GDPR, now the deadline has been and gone it feels almost like a void; what should we discuss now?
Even the immediate aftermath offers no definitive conclusions. It appears that GDPR has impacted scale for a handful of smaller, data-led businesses, with some forced to erase historical non-compliant data; how these companies survive this period and how they prepare for the future will be critical.
Otherwise, for now, the knock on seems minimal – time will tell whether this is really the case.
By Chris Childs
Managing Director UK
TabMo