The Scoop
The American right is arriving in force at this week’s Riviera advertising extravaganza to “force the conversation Cannes has spent decades avoiding.”
On Wednesday, The Daily Wire, the conservative digital media site launched by Ben Shapiro, will make its debut during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the annual award show and advertising and marketing convention. The company is hosting a day of programming with LSKR, an Atlanta-based creative firm that says the ad industry is “built on groupthink — run by the same people, with the same ideas, targeting the same audiences. And they’re missing half the market.”
The companies are offering an overtly partisan alternative to advertising gatherings that often stay far away from politics (and right-wing politics, in particular). The events will take place near the Palais where the Lions are awarded, and down the road from where OpenAI is pitching its new advertising business on Monday.
The slate includes panels titled: The Market You’re Missing: Addressing brands’ antigrowth strategies; The Influencer Orbit: Where trust is won and lost; Institutional Pressure: How brands drift from their core consumers; and Original Thinking in a Conformist Market.
The Daily Wire isn’t the only right-leaning media brand making its presence known this year at Cannes. Trump Media & Technology Group, the company behind Truth Social, also sent executives, who are taking meetings with media and ad brands along the Croisette. The politically heterodox Piers Morgan, now an increasingly popular YouTuber, is co-hosting a party on a yacht with an AI company later this week.
In a statement, LSKR creative director Matthew Mazzone said LSKR Connects is partnering with the Daily Wire’s paid subscription service on a day of content “to refocus the conversation on the consumer.”
“Brands are realizing they can’t afford to ignore large portions of the market. Too many voices have been absent from conversations at Cannes, while the industry focused on vanity metrics and secondary objectives instead of advertising’s core job: connecting brands with consumers and helping them sell goods and services more effectively.”
Max’s view
In the four years I’ve been attending Cannes Lions, the unspoken rule is to avoid anything remotely political. There are lots of obvious reasons for this: Brands are terrified of alienating customers (Republicans buy sneakers too, and all that), and the influencers who populate the “press” briefings at Cannes are often more interested in a partnership than getting a question answered. And hey, who really wants to talk about electoral politics during a nice day at the beach?
Conservatives would argue that big tech, advertisers, and the media companies assembled here at Cannes have been political, just not in a way that’s favorable to their side. Indeed, in the years after 2020, major marketing companies and brands touted fairly milquetoast diversity initiatives that made the right seethe. The political left also occasionally makes its voice heard at Cannes via climate protesters horrified by the destructive environmental impact of some major companies that spend big dollars to improve their image (and set up shop for the week along the Croisette).
The Daily Wire and the Truth Social crew aren’t the first right-leaning figures to show up at Cannes.
Stagwell, the company of ex-Clinton pollster-turned-Democratic Party critic Mark Penn, throws one of the most lavish events every year at his Sports Beach, which features scores of major American athletes. Linda Yaccarino spent some of her final days as CEO of X mingling with advertisers while wearing a necklace with her X handle on it (she stepped down from the company a few weeks later).
Last June, RedSeat Ventures founder Chris Balfe was on hand as he scoped out deals for his clients, and iHeartMedia brought along Buck Sexton, who took over the radio slot vacated when Rush Limbaugh died, though he seemed slightly uncomfortable in the setting when I introduced myself to him at an afterparty at Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc.
But while Penn and Yaccarino have been sensitive to being portrayed as too friendly to Trump, The Daily Wire has leaned into the idea that there’s a large segment of conservatives out there who want to be spoken to, the way major brands occasionally feel able to speak to more progressive audiences.
The question Wednesday will answer is: How receptive are the big (and medium-sized) advertisers here at Cannes to hearing not just an openly political message, but one coming from the right?
“We’ve fought really hard for fair treatment from the advertising industry. We have a responsibility to show up and try to engage with it,” Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Brent Scher told Semafor in an email.