Somewhere in Cannes over dinner, one ad exec asked the question nobody likes asking out loud: would anyone actually notice if they just didn’t turn up to any of this? They weren’t being cynical. If anything, they were being candid. They’d spent the week running from meeting to meeting and couldn’t point to a single one that wouldn’t have happened anyway, eventually. Asked how they measure whether thirty-six hours of meetings, handshakes, dinners, late-night WhatsApp rants and rosé actually worked, they didn’t pretend there was a hard metric. There isn’t one. It’s a soft win, they said. They showed up and so did everyone else and the showing up is the whole transaction.
Nobody at the table disagreed. They just gave the exec the look that means “and what.” Cannes has run on presence over proof for as long as anyone’s been coming here. That part isn’t news. What’s actually changed is the price of admission. This was the year the people writing the checks started doing the math out loud.
The numbers, once you start collecting them, get hard to unhear.
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