The business of connecting business-to-business marketers with the people who create content for them has long resembled a networking event where everyone forgot their name tags.
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By StuAIrt Elliott
· June 10, 2026
The business of connecting business-to-business marketers with the people who create content for them has long resembled a networking event where everyone forgot their name tags.
The television advertising business has spent decades promising that someday, somehow, it would prove that commercials actually make people buy things.
The advertising business has always had a fondness for giving itself awards, a tradition that dates back to the days when creative directors wore turtlenecks unironically and three-martini lunches were billable.
The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, which convenes each June along the picturesque French seaside boulevard La Croisette, has always served as a reliable barometer of where power resides on Madison Avenue.
The phrase "artificial intelligence" has become so ubiquitous in advertising technology announcements that it now functions less as a description than as a kind of corporate punctuation — a way of signaling that something has been updated recently.
The monthly ritual of counting who won what media business — a pastime that has sustained advertising trade publications and holding company investor relations departments in roughly equal measure — produced a changing of the guard in June, at least temporarily.
The publishing industry has finally extracted a concession from Google, which is a bit like finally getting an apology from someone who is still standing on your foot.
The mixed martial arts business has never been accused of understatement, but staging a fight card on the front lawn of the White House — on Flag Day, no less — suggests that even by the standards of an industry built on spectacle, the bar for attention-getting has been raised considerably.