Cannes 2026: Four Things I Couldn't Stop Hearing About

One consistent thing about Cannes each year is that there’s typically one big story that defines the week. This year we had four, and they were all connected in ways that made the week feel even more cohesive than usual. Here's what stuck with me.

Interoperability is the expectation now, not the differentiator

I lost count of how many conversations started with someone telling me, unprompted, that Yahoo DSP feels like the obvious next move. Of course I love to hear that, but the more interesting part was why. It was the fact that we let people work the way they already want to work, instead of asking them to rebuild around us.

People brought up the Agent Network constantly, both as a feature and as a sign that we're thinking differently than most of the industry. Buyers told me they like that we're doing the work of identifying trusted partners for them, rather than leaving them to sort through a hundred vendors making the same pitch. I heard that curation matters more than people expected it to.

Agentic went from a roadmap conversation to a now conversation

Last year, agentic was a whisper, something a few people were curious about. This year it was loud, and it's something everyone has a stated position on (most of those positions involve wanting in on what we're building). We heard from partners who are already in the Agent Network asking how they get more involved; we heard from partners who aren't in it yet asking how to join. 

The bigger shift was around speed. The pitch from partners used to be "let's build something together," which always meant a multi-quarter roadmap conversation. Now it's "give us an MCP connection and we'll have something live in weeks." That's a real change in how fast the ecosystem expects to move, and it's only going to accelerate.

Our team has been saying internally that we no longer have a head start in agentic, in the sense that everyone now has a strategy. I think that's true and I don't think it's a problem. Having a strategy and having execution are different things, and most of what I saw was still early. Yahoo has moved past talking about agentic  to actually shipping it.

CTV is officially a performance channel, and the measurement is catching up

This was the most consistent theme of the week, full stop. CTV doesn't get talked about as a brand channel anymore. It gets talked about the way people talk about search and social: outcome-driven, AI-optimized, tied directly to revenue. Closed loop measurement is genuinely improving, not just getting promised.

Live sports also came up constantly in these same conversations, and it makes sense. The expectation now is that CTV needs to perform across the board, including the premium, high-attention inventory that sports brings. This means buyers need a DSP that can actually turn that signal into something usable instead of just more impressions to sort through.

The way we work is shifting, and it's worth naming

Not every conversation was about what's already working. A lot of agency and publisher conversations this year centered on something less settled: what AI actually changes about how people do their jobs day to day. The dialogue has moved well beyond just creative, and the questions have gotten broader. This is a sign the industry is asking the right question: how will AI define the new ways of working.

I've been using a dinner analogy to explain how we think about this, and I think it resonated with people, so I'll share it here, too. Here goes:

Agents are great at the parts of cooking dinner that take time but not judgment: shopping for the ingredients, doing the prep, cleaning up after. What they free you up for is the part that actually matters: making something nutritious for your family. We want to be the meal kit service, not the delivery app charging a markup for someone else's cooking. The tedious parts are done, but you’re still the one cooking.

That's the model we think makes sense for agentic more broadly. We're not trying to hand people something pre-made and call it done. The goal is to handle the busywork so people can spend their time on the part that requires them. I don't think we need to have all the answers to that yet;  But the companies that take it seriously now, instead of treating it as a 2027 problem, are going to be in a much better position than the ones that wait.

What I'm taking back with me

The common thread across all four of these is control. Buyers want more of it, not less. They want to choose their tools, move fast without giving up trust, measure what's actually working, and understand what's coming before it arrives instead of after. That's an already existing idea that Cannes made feel urgent in a way it hasn't lately.

The industry is moving fast. The job is keeping up with what people actually need