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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.