Walk the Croisette on the first morning of Cannes Lions and the whole apparatus has reassembled itself, as it always has — more or less. Meta at the Plage Barrière Le Majestic. Amazon at its port. Pinterest and its Manifestival, a word that should not exist and yet somehow does, and somehow fits. Spotify, Salesforce, LinkedIn are present, and accounted for, exactly where you left them, like very expensive furniture in a house no one has actually lived in. Havas has a café at the Mondrian, which is its way of having a beach.
The rosé is at the same temperature it was last June. The same people are making the same speeches about transformation, and the speeches are, in their way, also at the same temperature.
There are, of course, structural reasons for the stasis, and the industry will tell them to you if you ask, and also if you don’t. Beach leases are negotiated months in advance. Sponsorship arrangements run multi-year. The platforms that have colonized the waterfront have both the resources to stay and an incentive so elementary it barely requires articulation: to be seen.
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