If last year’s Cannes was all about the metaverse, this year it was all about AI.

Mark Singer, US CMO of Deloitte Digital, told us ahead of the festival that he expected AI to be a “universal topic of conversation,” with implications across adtech, martech, agencies, consultants, and creatives. Nicola Mendelsohn, head of global business group at Meta, agreed: “I think it’s fair to say that AI is having a moment this Cannes. If you think back a year ago, nobody was talking about it. And now, it really is everywhere.”

Everyone seemed to have at least something to say on the topic, and marketers were eager to demonstrate that their company was no exception, as evidenced in some of the activations and ads we saw around town.

Talk of the new tech was also dominating behind-the-scenes conversations. Vidhya Srinivasan, VP and GM of advertising at Google, said that in her time at Cannes this year, she talked about AI in “every single one” of her meetings, of which there were many: some days her scheduled meetings spanned 14 hours.

But while some marketers were excited about new AI products and possibilities, others expressed concerns around the largely unregulated environment that AI seems to be operating in as new capabilities emerge.

Read more about the conversations happening at Cannes here.—KH

The important things don’t always come easy. And that goes for marketing videos—a polished, quality asset that garners audience interest and timely attention. But turning around marketing videos takes precious time and resources.

Until you meet Wistia’s new recording tool. Record, polish, and add branding to your videos in Wistia’s complete video marketing platform. Pick the perfect thumbnail, stitch and edit recordings with intuitive ease, dabble in video player color palettes, sprinkle on your logo, and voilà! Your masterpiece is live.

No need to download an extension or hire a pricey producer. Make top-notch vids with just a webcam, a browser, and something to say.

From product demos to talking-head videos, Wistia makes video marketing a breeze. Start recording videos for free.

Apple let the Foo Fighters make most of the noise at Cannes last week.

Despite reports that the tech giant would be making a splash at the annual festival (uh, guilty), the company took a more subtle approach to wining and dining the ad industry.

Less is more? At the annual festival, Apple declined to share any major announcements with its advertising partners. Instead, the company pushed search ads within its own app store.

• The company “could make the case for the biggest Cannes presence with the lowest visibility,” Ad Age writers opined.
• Apple executives “opted to observe from the sidelines,” Digiday reported.

Looks like advertisers will have to keep waiting if they’re ever going to see that demand-side platform or that sweet, sweet Apple TV+ inventory.

Big stage, small headlines: Instead of speed-dating the adtech ecosystem like it did last year, Netflix took a more formal approach to Cannes this time around—taking over the JW Marriott and hosting buyers and brands to talk about its ad-supported tier. The pitch came about a month after the company’s first-ever upfront presentation, which was held virtually due to the ongoing writers’ strike.

Despite the platform’s big presence at Cannes, there wasn’t a lot of Netflix news. Jeremi Gorman, Netflix’s president of worldwide advertising, posted on LinkedIn that the platform met with “hundreds of our amazing clients and agencies,” before bumping the average age of subscribers to its ad tier from 34, as announced last month, to 37. But who’s counting?

More is more: Netflix and Apple’s muted approach stands in stark contrast to some other streamers in attendance. Tubi, the Fox Corp.-owned ad-supported streaming service that received five awards at the festival for its Super Bowl ad, ran a Cannes campaign featuring fake ads for movies like The Economy Class, Posing with a Lion, and Unattended Panel.—RB

Diverse casts in TV shows on both linear and streaming are more likely to attract diverse viewers, but on-screen representation in popular programming is still lacking, according to data from Samba TV.

The research, which analyzed TV viewership from the beginning of 2023 through May 1 and conducted a nationwide survey, found a positive correlation of 43% between diverse households tuning into programming and the diversity of a show’s cast—which may have implications for media companies and advertisers looking to court diverse customer bases.

• Two-thirds of Black audiences said they were more likely to watch programming where they “see themselves represented.”
• Shows with a higher proportion of Black, Hispanic, Asian, and white leads were correlated with attracting more viewers of the same ethnicity.
• Among streaming shows with the highest percentage of non-white leads, nearly every one—including shows like Netflix’s Beef and FX’s Snowfall—over-indexed among households whose ethnicities were similar to the top-billed cast.

But: Hispanic and Asian on-screen representation in popular shows is still lacking. Hispanic actors in particular only represented 10% of lead cast members of the 50 most-watched shows on TV, despite making up nearly one-fifth of the US population, Samba TV found. That underrepresentation was consistent across both streaming and linear TV programming.

• Less than half of the 50 most-viewed shows had Hispanic or Asian leads, and none of the top 50 shows on television featured a majority Hispanic cast, Samba TV found.
• Among the top 50 programs, Black lead-actor representation was higher on linear TV than on streaming, while the reverse was true for Asian lead-actor representation.

The ad gap: Diverse audiences are also being underserved ads, Samba TV found.

• Hispanic audiences were only served 15% of total ad impressions, despite making up 18% of the US population.
• Asian audiences, which make up 6% of the US population, were similarly underserved at 4% of total ad impressions.—KS

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

Social: How Linkedin became an “unlikely champion” of the creative industry.

Gen Z: They’re everywhere, and we’re terrified. Just kidding. Here’s how to reach them, according to Snapchat.

Explainer: What is a Google Search operator? Semrush has all the details.

Aaand action: Record, edit, and polish marketing videos in a snap with Wistia’s easy-to-use video recording tool. No downloadable extension or producer required—just a webcam, a browser, and your message. All for free. Marketers, start your engines.*

^{*This is sponsored advertising content.}

Quote: “I feel cheated…What I requested to buy was not what I got. This should entitle me to a refund for invalid traffic.”—Giovanni Sollazzo, founder, chairman, and chief executive of digital ad agency AIDEM, to the Wall Street Journal about research suggesting that Google sold low-quality ads as premium inventory

Stat: $7.99. That’s how much a subscription to Meta Quest+, Meta’s new VR game subscription service, will cost per month.

Weird internet: The Reddit blackout may have made Google Search worse.

Read: The man trying to market (and make) condoms sexy. (The Guardian)

He’s back: The Bud Knight is back to help Bud Light rebound.

Another read: “Nothing—not even Congress—is stopping the NIL era” (The Ringer)