After the pandemic sidelined festivities over the last two years, Cannes Lions is back. Spotify is celebrating with a major blowout, treating attendees to performances from artists like Kendrick Lamar, Dua Lipa, and Post Malone.

Marketing Brew sat down with Lee Brown, Spotify’s VP and global head of advertising, to chat about its plans for Cannes Lions and its recent partnership with ad-tech company IAS to work on a “brand-safety tool” for podcast advertisers.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Looking at the full slate of the lineup that you guys have planned—how does Cannes merit this kind of investment? I assume bringing on performers like these isn’t a cheap date. How do you measure the investment in such a large production?

That kind of investment is a way for us to bring our brand to life in real life…that’s what people expect when they come to Spotify. When they come to Spotify on their phone, they’re listening to their favorite creators, they’re listening to their favorite artists. And we want to show up in real life in the same way.

We’re really interested in brand safety for podcasting. You’ve done work with GARM as well. Can you explain the difference between this new partnership with IAS and the work you’ve already done regarding brand safety and podcasting?

I don’t think it’s a difference; it’s just nonexclusive. We want to lead the industry and we want to work with as many third-party partners as we can to help define those standards and to help to bring the right tools and reporting to inspire transparency and confidence in podcast advertising.

As we work with industry organizations like GARM on defining and setting standards, and as we work with companies like IAS on developing technology and tools, we will continue. We’ll work with a broad range of partners to help lead this. It’s a long journey.

What’s the most common thing that advertisers are asking about with regard to brand safety for podcast ads?

We get asked a lot about helping them understand how to define [brand safety], right? Because when they think about immediately not wanting to be around crime, you’re like, “Well, true crime is one of the biggest segments of podcasting,” right? It’s not necessarily what you think about in your typical brand-safety rules or definitions for other platforms and mediums.

So it’s really working with them to adjust how they think about applying their legacy models of brand safety to a medium like podcasting, where there’s some nuances there.

Read the full Q&A here.—RB, AM

Bonjour! If you’re reading this, pour yourself a glass of rosé, then grab a baguette and maybe a nice hunk of brie. We’re reporting to you from the center of the advertising ecosystem (for this week, anyway)—the Cannes Lions festival, taking place in the south of France.

Notable speakers, artists, and companies going this year include Paris Hilton (who’s talking NFTs alongside Gary Vaynerchuk), Ryan Reynolds, McDonald’s, AB InBev (which Cannes Lions named “Creative Marketer of the Year”), Google, Twitter, Unilever, WPP, Dentsu—the list goes on and on…

It’s our first time attending, and we’ll be filing a daily diary, detailing everything we see, from events at night to the #branded beaches, where platforms like Google and Meta will show off their latest tech. We’ll be taking meetings and interviews with important folks in the industry, asking them how they justify an all-expenses-paid vacation to the French Riviera.

The festival officially kicked off this morning, so by the time you read this, we’ll probably already be covered in sweat and desperate for an iced espresso.

Do we know what we’re getting into? Not entirely. Will we keep you in the loop? Absolutely. Check in tomorrow to see what we’ve been up to.—RB

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In just a few years, DTC menswear brand True Classic has grown from $0 to $150 million in revenue. But just how did it fashion such major growth?

The backstory: Founded in 2019, the concept for the California-based company came from CEO and co-founder Ryan Bartlett’s frustration with t-shirt companies “kind of overcharging for premiums.” So, he—alongside Nick Ventura and Matt Winnick, his fellow founders—set out to build a brand that sold basics and was built to actually look good on men.

• “I was running up against the issue of shirts just not really being made for men’s bodies,” Bartlett told Retail Brew. “They expect guys to just throw it on and be happy with it, and I just wanted to do something more intentional. I wanted the shirt to really accentuate the parts of the guy that enhance their body.”

The demand: That idea seemed to resonate with the True Classic customer. At first, the DTC company was selling about 10–20 t-shirts (priced at $25.99 on average) a day. After a few months, that number went up to 400–500 t-shirts a day. “Within six months, we were selling about 1,000 a day, and just incrementally started creeping up as we increased ad spend,” Bartlett said.

He credited advertising on Facebook, in part, for True Classic’s rapid growth trajectory. “We kept putting content out and pushing budgets,” Bartlett explained. “For every dollar, we’re making $2. As long as that number wasn’t creeping down to break even, we were in a good spot,” he said.

• Today, True Classic spends $200,000 a day on advertising, with a focus on Facebook’s AI targeting to help get the product in front of potential customers.

Read the full story from Retail Brew here.—JS

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Return to the Riviera: After a two-year hiatus, media and ad execs are celebrating the Cannes Lions comeback—but a lot in the industry has changed. See what’s in store for this year’s fête in our latest article, sponsored by LinkedIn Ads.

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