I’ve written about James Murdoch’s revenge tour and deep-pocketed Gulf investors backing Paramount’s bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, and analyzed why Wall Street soured on the deal. I also write The Media Mix and am working on a biography of Rupert Murdoch to be published by Hachette’s Grand Central.
Hello from Cannes, where 90-degree weather isn’t the only thing that has Hollywood sweating.
France this week is the center of the advertising universe. As Cannes Lions opens on the Croisette — Paris Hilton and Substacker Emily Sundberg colliding with Tina Knowles, Stella McCartney and Apple’s Eddy Cue under the festival’s familiar banner of “creativity” — the media, tech and marketing chiefs booked back-to-back have something heavier on their minds.
The TV upfronts that began in May in midtown Manhattan still aren’t done. Fox just rewrote everyone’s competitive map with a $22 billion deal for Roku. And the machines are quietly taking over the job of deciding where the money goes.
The through-line to all of it is a single demand: proof. After years of promising that streaming and connected TV would marry television’s reach to digital’s precision, sellers are now being asked to show advertisers’ CFOs that the money they spent actually made someone buy something. It’s called performance marketing, and the race to prove it is driving the deals, the AI arms race and the wait-and-see mood of buyers walking into a festival with more unsettled than settled.
Only Fox has crossed the line, wrapping its upfront last week with more ad commitments than last year and a newly announced effort to launch a new agentic-AI ad platform that the company says will radically change how advertising is bought and sold. This after starting last week with its blockbuster $22 billion agreement to buy Roku. Investors balked — Fox shares fell 17 percent on the news to a 52-week low — but the rest of the business arrives at Cannes with ad deals still hanging in the balance.
The biggest question mark is Paramount Skydance’s $111 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, rubber-stamped by the Justice Department on June 12 but still under EU review, with Brussels scrutinizing the roughly $24 billion of Gulf sovereign-wealth money — a 49.5 percent ownership stake — behind it. Comcast’s NBCUniversal, meanwhile, has spun most of its cable networks into Versant. And at least one Wall Street analyst at Wolfe Research wondered aloud whether Netflix or Disney might yet try to top Fox’s Roku bid.
Buyers, for their part, are inclined to wait. “On Paramount-Warner, the quality of the content isn’t in question,” says Tim Lathrop, VP of platform digital at the Connecticut agency Mediassociates, who buys programmatically for fintech clients. “But most buyers are taking a wait-and-see approach until there’s more clarity on how the merger plays out.” More broadly, they’re arriving with one demand: better answers on measurement, transparency and flexibility.
“The one-stop-shop pitch is appealing,” Lathrop says. “But buyers want proof behind it, not just their word.”
Sports inventory “will be in high demand, now representing more than half of upfront volume,” he adds, with supply tight and competition for rights still climbing. And digital is no longer an afterthought: Buyers want to move dollars across linear, streaming and digital within a single agreement — flexibility the market has long denied them, since digital video is usually bought separately from TV.
Below, I follow the big money on the Croisette, where the future of Hollywood is being written check-by-check.
The big topics:
• Why the next streaming ad war will be won by whoever can answer one blunt question: Did the spot sell anything?
• Fox-Roku as the Cannes deal everyone is decoding — and why data, not shows, is the real prize
• How CTV is overtaking linear primetime and upending the upfront market
• Why “agentic AI” is suddenly the buzzword every buyer, seller and agency chief is using at Cannes
• What Netflix, Disney, Comcast, Fox and WPP are telling advertisers as ad buying moves toward machines
• The advantage Amazon has over almost everyone else
• Who’s getting what slice of the ad pie this year
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