Cannes

1. Must-reads
2. Grand Prix

Welcome to Day 5 of Semafor Cannes, the final edition of our pop-up newsletter.

Thank you for joining us this week in Cannes! We deeply appreciated the tips, the feedback, and the general sense that you were… actually reading this thing.

You can also find me, Nayeema, and Max talking about what we learned this week on our new Mixed Signals podcast. We’ll unpack, in particular, a surreal TikTok press conference, and explore the distance between the Croisette and the Beltway. And if you’d like to stay at the forefront of the AI conversation, please also check out Semafor Tech, where Reed and Katyanna are breaking news and taking on the hard questions. Sign up here.

Finally, I’d like to leave you with something Simon Cook, who runs the actual Lions awards operation, said to me Thursday. After years of earnestness and purpose in the winning campaigns, what he saw this year was “levity.”

This is, he says, cyclical. The last really goofy year was 2007, as the global financial system began to shatter and a Cadbury ad featuring a man in a gorilla suit drumming to Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” swept Cannes.

So prepare for some darkly funny culture in what promises to be a pretty heavy year in the US, France, and elsewhere.

— Ben Smith

Must-reads

• Will GenZ shift toward old-fashioned TV consumption at some point, asks Mike Shields. Or will today’s young people — as some marketers he talked to think — “just keep on scrolling, and never look up.”
• Athletes were everywhere at Cannes, reflecting “the increasing clout of sports among marketers.”
• John Deere has named an influencer its first “chief tractor officer.”
• Tombras found a real use case for Gemini: Hyperlocal moving truck marketing.
• And Brian Morrissey can’t figure out why Elon went to Cannes: “Very hard to see a future in which X is a major advertising player.”

Penned by Reed Albergotti and Katyanna Quach, Semafor Tech is a twice-weekly newsletter on the people, the money, and the ideas at the center of the new era. They keep a finger on the pulse of the shifting dynamics and the new ideas that just might be crazy enough to change the industry as we know it. Sign up for Semafor Tech for free.

Award

The Industry Craft Grand Prix went to Scholz & Friends, Berlin, for “The 100th Edition,” a Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung campaign featuring a 102-year-old Holocaust survivor reading the paper.

In the latest episode of Mixed Signals from Semafor Media, presented by Think With Google, Ben, Nayeema, and Max report from Cannes, decoding the year ahead for the ad business amidst the panels and parties. While enjoying the Côte d’Azur, they discuss Washington’s move to ban TikTok and the company’s denial of what’s unfolding. Then, they weigh in on whether Will Lewis, CEO of The Washington Post, will survive the controversy over his alleged unethical methods.

Listen to this episode of Mixed Signals wherever you get your podcasts.

• Can tiny-home mortgages fix California’s housing crisis?
• The US firm planning to fly first the Nigerian to space on Bezos’ rocket
• House panel to scrutinize China’s semiconductor, drone industries