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Ahead of any given Cannes, at 7:49 a.m. a villa is being checked for internet speed. Thirty minutes away at the airport in Nice, a flight has just landed, while a driver is already working through three last minute amended pick up lists and a detour on his phone. On the Croisette, a beach stage crew is tying down the roof because there’s the slight possibility of a passing thunderstorm. And somewhere in the Carlton Hotel lobby, a guest list is being rewritten for the fourth time in 24 hours.

Behind the scenes of the awards festival is a temporary economy, built on constant revision and adaptation, where almost nothing is fixed except the deadline. None of it ever reaches the stage because there is an invisible group of people who act as the event’s infrastructure. They absorb the changes in real time, and turn instability into something that functions, as though it was just all part of the process.

Ahead of Cannes Lions 2025, Dept spent a year planning its festival merchandise. But after a series of supplier delays, the shipment became stuck in customs — and the transport carrying materials to Cannes had already left for the festival. A logistical nightmare by anyone’s standards.

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Stagwell has launched The Media Machine, a media-side extension of The Machine, Digiday has learned. The Media Machine is essentially the challenger holding company’s equivalent of an operating system, powered and empowered by AI. 

The Media Machine extends what Stagwell has spent the better part of two years building with The Machine (but which formally launched in January 2026), in that it’s a media-specific operating layer that enables workflow through an integrated operating system. Working up and down the funnel, The Media Machine aims to execute agentic buying via a more connected process across Stagwell’s existing media stack. 

The operating system can work directly with sell-side ecosystems including Google’s GMP products, Meta, Microsoft/LinkedIn, TikTok and The Trade Desk, and can plan and activate in one workflow. There’s separate audience-first planning from brief through to activation via an ID graph, and advanced market mix modeling helps to make quicker and more accurate performance insights followed by decisions. Its builders say it’s open-sourced enough to work across platforms including Figma, Slack, Teams, Adobe, and performance dashboards, which obviates the need for new closed-system software.  

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