For his part, Pritchard gave Sadoun and Publicis a ringing endorsement in closing remarks.
“The agency world is a tough world, and it’s frankly in many ways declining,” Pritchard said, yet Publicis “is going the opposite direction. And because he had the foresight, he and his predecessor, to buy Sapient and Epsilon. They knew that they had to combine creativity with data with media.”
Pritchard added that “we’re looking at totally different agency models now. …Because the agency world isn’t going away. It’s just going to morph.”
Despite taking out ads at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity to poke fun at the people who took jabs at Publicis in 2017 for hyping its Marcel AI platform, Sadoun admitted he’s pretty tired of AI talk.
“I’m pissed off at what’s happening at the moment,” Sadoun said. “It’s like AI was invented with ChatGPT. It’s ridiculous. …AI has been at the core of everything we do for years now.”
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Netflix in no hurry to add DSPs, even if it loses P&G business
Media presenters got plenty of opportunities to sell P&G on their inventory. Jeremi Gorman, president of worldwide advertising for Netflix, was having none of that, at least not at the price of letting a demand-side platform, specifically P&G’s preferred one, The Trade Desk, into the game.
“We are fortunate enough to be big enough—or we will be big enough on the ad-supported tier with our streaming hours—that we’re not selling into DSPs at the moment,” Gorman said. “We will run on the Xandr stack, which is great, but they are our sole provider.
“There are a number of companies, like Procter, where rightfully you say this is the one I want to use. And if you don't use this one, then we won't do business with you. You're not the only company that says that, and it's super fair, and you should absolutely have your preferred sources.”
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But Gorman said saying yes to one DSP means saying yes to all, and Netflix has no interest in that right now. She suggested advertisers and Netflix could “help each other” by determining which three DSPs are the best, which in turn she said would reduce such inevitable problems as unintentional violations of frequency caps.
She suggested the industry needs to come together “saying this is a problem. People ran away from TV because of this problem. And we can fix it with a more finite set of choices.”
Snapchat vs. TikTok
While TikTok wasn’t in attendance this year, it remained part of the conversation. Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel drew laughs from the crowd when asked what one word came to mind regarding TikTok. “China,” he answered.
Spiegel had a few more words about TikTok relative to Snapchat’s place in media plans. Pritchard, he noted, had been clear in P&G’s goal that Snap help the company’s brands reach 90% of their target audience with no waste and great creative. Snapchat fits nicely, he said, in part because nearly 50% of its users on any given day don’t also use TikTok.