From Uber and Reddit, to Omnicom, Spotify and Nvidia – all the latest from day one of the biggest marketing conference of the year.
Affiliate Leaders’ editor Jyoti Rambhai is on the ground at Cannes Lions this year to bring you the latest news, launches and inside chatter among marketers along the Palais des Festivals.
Day 1 saw Uber talk about its new tech platform; Omnicom announcing a deal with Netflix; Nvidia partners showcasing their AI capabilities; Spotify partnering with Coach; and Reddit talk about AI-generated product recommendations.
Uber introduces new marketing manager
Uber launched its new Uber Marketing Manager – a technology platform that will usher in a new era of advertising for the transport giant.
“Uber Marketing Manager reflects our vision to bring these experiences together with a more unified approach – laying the groundwork for more integrated advertising across Uber,” the company confirmed in a statement.
The marketing manager will be built on Uber’s existing ads manager platform, and will serve as a self-service destination to support advertising across both Uber Eats and Uber One in a more unified approach to advertising.
Consumers are increasingly fluid, moving between different platforms and channels with new actions and intent as they go. Marketers must evolve to meet these demands, and Uber’s decision to connect signals between Uber and Uber Eats brands gives them a greater capacity to engage with consumers based on their whole discovery and purchasing journey.
Omnicom Media introduces Netflix deal
Omnicom has announced its first media partnership of the festival with Netflix. The data-driven deal will see the streaming giant and Omnicom media joining forces to integrate Acxiom audience data into Netflix’s ad capabilities for more relevant ads within its shows.
Netflix is said to be using LLM-enabled technology to push the experience for customers, creating a custom ad journey that will blend seamlessly with relevant content.
Nvidia partners showcase their AI capabilities
Nvidia technology is showing up in force at this year’s Cannes Lions, which has seen a whole host of the chip giant’s tech partners exhibiting their capabilities.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is bringing its infrastructure to the adtech community to help scale the new age of AI agents. Adtech companies can use AWS’s production-ready reference implementation to run AI-powered bidding directly inside auctions – helping software vendors, as well as demand-side and supply-side platforms with deep learning inference.
Alembic is helping marketers prove their initiatives do actually drive growth. Alembis has used Nvidia technology to scale its Causal AI model to “analyse more variables, run larger simulations and quantify the true drivers of growth across marketing investments”.
Ad company Criteo is helping retailers target the right customers at the right moments through one of the biggest recommendation networks in digital advertising. Its partnership with Nvidia achieved “a roughly two times speed-up in model training on NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, driven by the NVIDIA cuEmbed open library”.
Spotify and Coach unveil global partnership
Spotify is cementing its push on embedding its platform within the cultural zeitgeist as it launches a new global ad partnership with Coach.
The platform looks to target gen Z through music and cultural experiences, combining on and off-platform experiences.
Reddit’s answer to AI’s recommendations
In Reddit’s presentation, the social network platform acknowledged that AI-generated product recommendations are becoming more and more common – but its research reveals that shoppers still want a human opinion.
Unsurprisingly, they often use Reddit to seek this out. The platform said nearly half of shoppers use Reddit to verify AI-generated recommendations before purchasing, and showcase that real-world experiences shared by other users are a more influential factor than reviews from influencers or critics.
This came alongside a host of new advertising tools, including Reddit-powered shopping ads, AI-generated ad creative, and formats that allow brands to feature positive user comments in their advertising.
