Cannes Lions 2018 Insights

By Zayi Reyes, VP of Marketing at MetaX

Cannes Lions is one of the most significant advertising and creativity festivals in the world. With over 16,000 attendees, more than 1,000 speakers, and approximately 4,700 companies, this year did not disappoint.

Mike Goldin of ConsenSys and I arrived wide-eyed and excited for what the week was to hold as first-time attendees. Lucky for us, we were accompanied by Cannes veterans, MetaX CEO Ken Brook and Global CRO Alanna Gombert.

It didn’t take long to get into the swing of things. Within 24 hours we were already attending a variety of meetings with top agencies, ad tech companies, and publishers. These meetings consisted of brainstorm sessions, discussions around the potential use cases of blockchain in ad tech, and an overall evangelization of the current vision for adChain pushed forward by MetaX and ConsenSys. By the end of the week, we had gathered invaluable insights.

What we learned:

• Blockchain and cryptocurrency were more recognized topics this year at Cannes Lions than last year.
• People are at times scared of blockchains, dubious of them, or eager to invest in them, but there is still a general lack of understanding.
• The decentralized blockchain world is extremely different from that of the mostly centralized ad tech realm.
• There is a desire for “measurement and verification” solutions. Big advertisers are cutting vast amounts of spend and discovering that doing so improves their ROI. Advertisers want to prove that their spend makes a difference, and eager parties in the supply chain desire this as well.
• GDPR makes user tracking and targeting harder…can blockchains make this any better?
• The fact that adChain could eliminate exchanges is an attractive outcome for many publishers exhausted by the current programmatic process.

How we can help:

• We can continue to provide blockchain educational material to the ad tech community, i.e., blog posts, webinars, podcasts, newsletters.
• Attending future conferences will help raise additional awareness of the blockchain and cryptocurrency topics.
• By providing balance to the two communities of blockchain and ad tech, we aim to show them how they can work together in Web 3.0.
• We will develop partnerships with premium publishers and advertisers, allowing them full integration into the adChain Decentralized Server (aDS). We are looking forward to Q1 of 2019 to test this within the aDS private beta.
• The global whitelists for both the publisher and advertiser registries currently being curated set the stage for more accurate measurement and an unprecedented level of verification while protecting user’s data. Establishing a verified and trusted marketplace via the p2p ad server will enable publishers to earn a higher return on their content, lowering the tech tax and providing more transparency for ads on behalf of advertisers.