Cannes Lions 2024: Key takeaways from the International Festival of Creativity

The Cannes Lions event is important to Yahoo every year, and this year it was particularly impactful due to the serious momentum we've had in market. After a week of countless meetings, panels, and ideation sessions, the real effort begins with follow-up work to capitalize on opportunities established in the south of France.

Here are some of the major themes we heard on the ground.

AI: Everything, Everywhere, All At Once

We’ve hit the inflection point where AI isn’t just an anticipation, it’s an expectation. If it feels as though AI really is everything, everywhere, all at once, that’s because, well, it is. 

All partners in adtech, be it platform, publisher, or brand, are actively looking for ways to incorporate AI into their media process. The options are many, but now comes the real work of determining what can be done effectively, and what’s next after that.

With the launch of Yahoo Blueprint Performance (YBP), the Yahoo DSP seamlessly puts the power of AI into the hands of buyers. YBP is a buyer-enabled feature that unlocks better performance through AI-driven effectiveness and efficiency. Initial results for customers that have enabled YBP show an average of 14% performance improvement.

Retail Media: What’s the plan?

There has been such a flurry of activity in the Retail Media space that it can be hard to keep up with who’s launching what. Couple that with the fact that we’ve really expanded beyond Retail and into Commerce, and the doors really fly open.

With great power, comes great responsibility…The RMN world feels a bit chaotic at the moment, with little consistency in the approach for both buyers and sellers. Now is the time to figure out the long-term strategy and introduce operational process into the RMN equation.

The Yahoo DSP view is to make it simple but effective. Our goal is to offer consolidated data access, where buyers and sellers can transact in one place. This also means offering a platform to retailers to power their own RMN solutions.

TV Currency: Expanding opportunity

There are some new JIC-certified players in town, expanding the options for brands in terms of which TV currency they prefer to use in the TV/CTV space. These certifications bring more transparency and trust into the process, allowing buyers to make more informed media decisions.

But it doesn’t stop at TV currencies. This expansion is allowing brands to push measurement into their strategies in new ways, including insights, targeting, and real-time optimization opportunities.

Brands have been eager for choice in the TV world, and we’re starting to see that come to fruition with currency expansion.

Through our Unified TV Solutions, the Yahoo DSP just announced partnerships with VideoAmp, comScore, iSpot, Samba, and Vizio.

Buyers in the Yahoo DSP will now have the choice of which partner best aligns with their needs for insights, targeting, optimizations, and measurement. 

Cookies: Delay or stay, change is today

Here’s a hot take - cookie delays don’t actually matter. We’re already living in a world of signal loss, and whether that continues or not (spoiler alert - it will), what matters is how brands are responding now.

Brands have the opportunity to be early movers in how they are responding to signal loss and ensure they’re still reaching their entire audiences.

Yahoo Identity Solutions provide options for both known users, via Yahoo ConnectID, and unknown users, via Next-Gen Solutions.

With signal loss continuing, the ability to continue reaching known users and inferring unknown users is critical.

While it was very nice to sleep in my own bed again, you better believe I was dreaming about all the new opportunities we talked about with partners around the industry. We look forward to building on the topics above and much, much more.