Sports are coming to France, and no, we don’t just mean the Olympics.

A month before the Paris Games kick off, marketers are convening further south for Cannes Lions, where there’s sure to be plenty of sports talk.

“It’s the only appointment viewing left in the world, and the audience that loves sport is global, diverse, influential, and it is a door opener to a lot of other conversations,” said Beth Sidhu, chief brand and communications officer at Stagwell, which is putting on its Sport Beach at Cannes for the second year in a row. “Rather than put up a tent and serve rosé and make it about us, we decided to do what we would suggest a client does, which is make it about an audience, and that is the audience that loves sports.”

Marketers interested in sports should keep an eye out for athlete-focused programming from agencies like Stagwell and Deep Blue Sports + Entertainment, as well as plenty of talk of women’s sports, sports tech, and the Olympics.

Beachball: In its second year, Stagwell’s Sport Beach is taking up 60% more space in a physical sense, Sidhu said, and it is also bringing more content and athletes than in 2023. The lineup features more than 30 athletes, including:

• Soccer icons Megan Rapinoe and Mary Earps;
• Basketball stars Sue Bird, Draymond Green, Flau’jae Johnson, and JuJu Watkins;
• And Joe Burrow and the Kelce brothers from the football field.

Read more here.—AM

Stuck in never-ending rounds of review with clients or stakeholders? Pretty much business as usual for creatives, especially those working in the brain-bending world of video. If only there was a way video creatives and clients could collab more cohesively.

Good news: There is. Say hi to Dropbox Replay, a user-friendly media review and approvals solution built to speed up the feedback process of rich media projects—tough stuff like brand campaigns, promotional vids, product demos, podcasts, you name it.

With Dropbox Replay, you can:

• Eliminate endless back and forth with collaborators.
• Recreate the in-person experience, virtually.
• ​​Review and resolve feedback right from your editing app.
• ​​Give and receive precise feedback with frame-accurate commenting.

Say goodbye to endless review cycles.

We’ve made it to Thursday! My cumulative step count suggests I traveled to Monte Carlo on foot this week, but I’ve actually just been walking up and down the Croisette.

Last night, there were rival performances keeping people out late—Amazon hosted The National, Spotify Beach featured Arcade Fire, and Yahoo put on a concert with The Chainsmokers—and it’s safe to say that it made for a slower morning at Cannes Thursday. With that said, when I caught up with Brigitte King, Colgate-Palmolive’s chief digital officer, this morning, she said she ended her night working on a deck for the company’s 2030 goals. Now that’s productivity!

Today at Cannes, PepsiCo unveiled its latest marketing innovation, the Pepsi Smart Can, an “LED engagement platform” in the form of a beverage can, Mark Kirkham, SVP and CMO of international beverages at PepsiCo, told us. The idea is to allow the company “to share content in a whole new way.” He, along with Chief Design Officer Mauro Porcini, met up with me to give me a demo of the can, which is first being rolled out to influencers and media (stored and sent in a sort of futuristic chamber to keep it safe) to share content like celebrity videos and campaign teasers.

Each can contains its own SIM card, allowing the company to tailor content shared on the device to each recipient, Kirkham said. “We get to bring our product, our brand, and our message together in an incredibly innovative way,” he told us.

From beverage news to “new news” (IYKYK), in the afternoon I braved the crowds at Sport Beach to see Jason and Travis Kelce. There were perhaps overly optimistic rumblings that Taylor Swift would join the Kelces in Cannes (so much so that Stagwell CEO Mark Penn weighed in on the rumors), but I sadly haven’t spotted her. Yet.

That wraps up my daily Cannes coverage. Thanks for following along! I need an Aperol spritz—and then a nap. Au revoir!—EC

Prep the flower arrangements. Advertisers are anticipating that IP addresses may soon go the way of the third-party cookie—that is, if the third-party cookie actually goes anywhere.

“The reality is that the third-party cookie is on its last legs, and the IP address will likely be obfuscated,” Anthony Katsur, CEO of the IAB Tech Lab, said this week during a keynote at the TechLab’s annual summit in New York City. “We’re very clearly at the end of the beginning for both of those signals.”

IP addresses, as a refresher, can identify devices and, over time, give tech companies a pretty good guess as to who users are and what their online habits look like. In the name of user privacy, though, companies like Google, Amazon, and Apple have all taken steps to limit access to or obfuscate the signal.

While third-party cookie depreciation has long been expected, Google has kept kicking the can down the road, moving the deadline to remove third-party cookies from Chrome several times. As the industry has prepared to phase out the cookie, IP addresses have become a key signal that some ad tech companies have turned to as an alternative.

Alternative IDs, which have cropped up in advance of the cookie phaseout, use a variety of signals, including IP addresses, to connect advertisers with users, and some Alt-ID executives believe that the death of the IP address as a signal has been greatly exaggerated.

“Getting rid of IP addresses means rewriting the Internet Protocol, plain and simple,” Mathieu Roche, co-founder and CEO of the identity company ID5, told Marketing Brew in February, adding that a massive change “isn’t around the corner.” (ID5, FWIW, sponsored the lanyards at the TechLab summit.)

Continue reading here.—RB

Influencers + affiliates. On the surface, these two don’t always align, but when they work together seamlessly, big things can happen for your brand. Fortunately, Partnerize put together the definitive handbook on how to navigate the influencer–affiliate relationship. Prepare to maximize your ROI and crush your channels. Give it a read.

Can’t make it to New York this Tuesday? We have good news! We’re bringing the event to you via livestream on June 25, so you can tune in wherever you are (well, wherever you have Wi-Fi). Register now.

Stories we’re jealous of.

• The New York Times wrote about why the advertising industry at large remains predominantly white.
• Vox looked at why it feels like no one is watching the same TV shows anymore.
• The Wall Street Journal dug into the steady decline of customer experience.