By Karsten Weide, Chief Analyst
If you wanted a single word to describe the 2026 Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, “agentic” would do most of the heavy lifting. The Croisette was awash in announcements from platforms, agencies, SSPs, and martech vendors all racing to plant their flags on the infrastructure layer of a world where software agents – not humans – will buy, sell, and optimize advertising. But the festival was never just one story. OpenAI made its audacious advertising debut, Walmart moved on connected TV’s long tail, Amazon turned Alexa into a shopping agent with a checkout button, AppLovin opened its doors to every advertiser on the planet, and Zeta Global signed one of the strangest seven-year deals in AdTech history. What follows is a dispatch from the most consequential Cannes in years – who moved, who mattered, and what it all means for where this industry is headed.
1. OpenAI Crashes the Party and Calls Itself an Ad Business
OpenAI made its Cannes Lions debut this year, with CRO Denise Dresser telling brands and agencies the company is “clearly in the advertising business now.” The pivot reverses Sam Altman’s 2024 “last resort” framing of advertising on ChatGPT with remarkable speed. ChatGPT ads launched in February 2026 as clearly labeled sponsored content placed below organic responses, targeting free and Go-tier users, and OpenAI is already projecting $2.5 billion in 2026 ad revenue. The company positions ChatGPT as a third gatekeeper alongside Google and Meta, leaning on the argument that users arrive with specific intent rather than to browse. The measurement infrastructure – attribution, verification, brand safety – is still kinda lacking, errr, I mean, being assembled, with LiveRamp named as a new partner at the show. Credible or aspirational? Both.
2. Criteo Clocks 2,000 Brands on ChatGPT
The most concrete data point of the festival came not from OpenAI itself but from one of its resellers. Criteo disclosed on June 22 that more than 2,000 brands have activated ChatGPT ads through its platform, alongside an expansion into three additional markets and a new format it calls Prompt Smart Ads, which it said drove four times higher spend after activation. That number matters as a signal of how quickly conversational AI has been wired into the existing commerce stack. Criteo and StackAdapt have lowered ChatGPT spending minimums in recent weeks, reducing the barrier for smaller brands to experiment. Criteo’s role here is that of a classic intermediary – packaging demand, routing budgets – which suggests the ChatGPT ad ecosystem isn’t yet mature enough to live without resellers.
3. Agentic AI Becomes the Industry’s Organizing Obsession
The dominant theme running through this year’s ad tech announcements was the industry’s attempt to move beyond AI-assisted tools and toward agentic systems capable of making, coordinating, and executing advertising decisions. Practically every major player showed up with a piece of this story. Horizon Media built a software layer into its platform, Horizon OS Blu, so its ad-buying agents can interact with agents from partners including Innovid, Magnite, Vidmob, Smartly, and media companies such as Fox, Disney, TikTok, and NBCUniversal. The competitive logic is clear: whoever controls the agent-to-agent infrastructure layer owns the margin. The agency holding companies are racing to be that layer before the platforms outrace them.
4. Walmart Acquires Vibe.co to Chase the SMB CTV Market
Walmart announced its acquisition of Vibe.co, a self-serve video ad platform, with the deal tipped at a valuation north of $1 billion. The move is designed to bring Vibe’s 10,000 small-and-medium enterprise advertisers onto Walmart Connect, equipping the retailer to better compete with Meta and Pinterest for small-business budgets. The strategic logic is sound: Walmart’s retail media network already has the first-party purchase data; what it has lacked is a self-serve on-ramp for the long tail of advertisers who can’t afford a managed-service minimum. Vibe solves that distribution problem. It’s the same playbook Google ran with YouTube’s self-serve ad tools, adapted for the retail media era.
5. The Trade Desk Builds a Travel and Hospitality Commerce Network
The Trade Desk expanded its relationships with a host of travel, hospitality, and mobility-focused commerce media partners at Cannes, including Uber Advertising, Booking.com, United Airlines’ Kinetic Media, and Riot Media. The announcement is consistent with TTD’s broader commerce media strategy – assembling a coalition of non-retail data sources to compete with the retail media networks that have dominated commerce advertising. Travel and hospitality data carries strong purchase-intent signals, and aggregating that inventory under TTD’s demand platform gives advertisers a programmatic path to reach consumers actively planning trips and their spending decisions. Expect this network to keep growing as TTD looks for every possible data edge in its ongoing cold war with Amazon.
6. Amazon Brings Agentic Commerce Ads to Alexa+
Amazon used Cannes to announce Alexa+ Agentic Ads, described as the first ad format that takes a customer from seeing an ad to completing a purchase entirely within the conversation, without leaving the interface. Launch partners include Papa Johns for food ordering and several music artists for concert ticket sales via Ticketmaster. Separately, Amazon expanded its Responsive eCommerce Creative tool with rich media layouts, in-banner video, and AI-powered animation – including motion effects and seasonal overlays – and announced it will extend its Sponsored Products conversational prompts beyond Amazon-owned surfaces to the open internet via display ads starting in July. Taken together, the announcements describe Amazon’s vision of advertising as a layer woven seamlessly into the act of purchasing, rather than an interruption that precedes it.
7. Adobe Positions Itself as Creative AI Infrastructure for Agencies
Adobe announced CX Enterprise partnerships at Cannes with Accenture, Omnicom, Stagwell, WPP, Anthropic, and Microsoft to deploy agentic AI at scale, staking its claim as the operational backbone for AI-powered creative production across the holding company ecosystem. (CX is the company’s consumer experience product.) The Anthropic inclusion on that partner list is worth flagging: it places a frontier AI lab directly inside the agencies’ agentic creative stacks, which blurs the line between model provider and ad tech infrastructure. Adobe is positioning itself as the default creative technology partner for the creator economy, betting that brands producing AI-generated content at volume will need a platform with licensing, compliance, and workflow management baked in – which is precisely what Getty and Shutterstock cannot offer alone.
8. Magnite Launches Orchestration for Agentic Transactions
Magnite introduced Magnite Orchestration, a framework designed to facilitate interactions between buyer agents and seller agents across premium advertising inventory, intended to support automated campaign planning, inventory discovery, and transaction workflows. The positioning is deliberate – Magnite wants to be the infrastructure provider for the emerging agentic advertising market rather than just another SSP. Whether the buy side actually routes its agents through a Magnite-controlled layer is an open question, but the product acknowledges a structural shift: as software agents increasingly manage elements of media trades, the matching and routing functions that SSPs perform need to be re-engineered for machine-to-machine interaction, not human buyers.
9. AppLovin Opens Its Platform to All Advertisers
AppLovin announced that its self-serve advertising platform – previously available only through an established sales relationship or via a referral code since its October 2025 launch – is now open to any business without restrictions. In the same announcement, the company retired the Axon brand name for its ad platform and consolidated everything under AppLovin Ads, while retaining Axon as the name of its underlying AI recommendation system. The platform reaches more than one billion daily active users through mobile gaming inventory, and offers three buying models: return on ad spend, cost per purchaser, and leads – the last of which targets categories like auto insurance, health insurance, and home services. AppLovin is a pure performance marketing shop; it does not do brand advertising, which keeps the value proposition simple and the funnel accountable.
10. Zeta Global and Palantir Ink a Seven-Year Deal
Zeta Global announced a seven-year partnership with Palantir, the data and AI infrastructure company best known for its government and defense contracts, with a joint go-to-market strategy targeting over $100 million in annual revenue. Zeta gets access to Palantir’s Foundry data orchestration platform to fix its real-time data latency problem, plus a joint go-to-market arrangement that puts Zeta in front of Palantir’s commercial clients — companies like Airbus and BP that spend heavily on marketing and user acquisition. Palantir gets a marketing technology capability it can bundle into its commercial enterprise offering, making Foundry more attractive to clients who need AI-driven marketing outcomes, not just data infrastructure. It also presumably gets revenue from Zeta for the Foundry licensing. The pairing is unusual – a marketing cloud staking its future on a firm associated with intelligence agencies and immigration enforcement – but the technical rationale is real: Foundry resolves latency issues in Zeta’s real-time data processing that Athena currently can’t fix alone.
11. Meta Doubles Down on AI-Powered Creative at Scale
Meta used Cannes to unveil a new suite of AI-powered advertising and creator tools, framing AI as a “threshold technology” that has reached practical, everyday utility for marketers. A key addition is Brand Memory, which enables AI systems to learn from a brand’s historical advertising identity and creative tone, maintaining consistency across generated content. Meta also moved to consolidate its creator tools, announcing the merger of Creator Marketplace and Partnership Ads Hub into a single destination called Meta Creator Marketing Hub. The broader pitch is that Meta can close the loop between AI-generated creative, creator partnerships, and performance measurement in one system – a bundling strategy designed to make the walled garden even harder to leave.
It remains to be hoped for Meta this news makes the industry forget the grumbling of numerous ad buyers on X who are roasting Meta’s ads as a once-reliable cash printer turned high-CPM creative fatigue trap, where bloated AI, saturated inventory, and exhausted audiences drive significant ROAS drops.
12. Omnicom Cracks Open the CTV Measurement Silo
For the first time, Omnicom can directly compare ad frequency and performance across multiple major streamers, which typically prefer to keep data locked inside their walled gardens. The development is quietly significant: the CTV measurement problem has been intractable precisely because each platform hoards its data as a competitive moat. Omnicom’s deal to pull that data into a unified view – even partially – reorders the negotiating dynamic between agencies and streamers. Separately, Omnicom announced a dynamic contextual content partnership with NBCUniversal, pairing Acxiom audience data with NBCU show metadata to optimize creative in-flight, down to the episode level.
Conclusion: Where This Is All Going
The 2026 Cannes Lions sketched the outlines of an advertising industry three to five years from now, and the picture is both exciting and unsettling in equal measure. The ad transaction – the actual decision of what to show whom, where, when, and at what price – will increasingly be made by software agents operating at machine speed, with humans setting objectives rather than executing trades. The platforms that control the agent-to-agent plumbing will extract toll-road margins from everyone else. OpenAI’s arrival as an ad surface introduces a genuine third gatekeeper, but whether it can close the measurement gap fast enough to earn media-plan dollars at scale remains an open question. Retail media will keep absorbing share as Amazon, Walmart, and their peers turn purchase data into advertising products. And the creative function will be industrialized by AI at a pace the industry is still reluctant to fully acknowledge. The agencies that survive will be the ones that become product companies before their clients realize they no longer need a service.
Leave a Reply