It’s that time of year again when the mega-yachts of titans of media, tech and advertising drop anchor in the Mediterranean Sea, where the industry’s biggest names will convene in the glitzy French seaside town of Cannes to make deals and debate the industry’s biggest issues.

The rosé and champagne-infused week-long event, known as the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, is roaring back this week for its 72nd year – and boasting over 12,000 attendees from over 97 countries, including a heavy-hitting list of top execs, celebs and athletes.

“These are the biggest numbers they’ve ever had,” said 3CV founder Michael Kassan, who has not only been going to Cannes Lions for over 25 years, but is also instrumental in shaping it into what the event has become.

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9 The VIP dinner party hosted by iHeartMedia and MediaLink at Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc during the Cannes Lions Festival in 2023 in Cap d’Antibes, France. Getty Images for iHeartMedia

“You have the agencies, you have the brands, you have the creatives, you have the media side and the platforms,” he said. That’s why you get the buzz and that’s why Cannes is a must-attend event. I’m not saying it’s immune to economic pressures and the like but the numbers for Cannes Lions are through the roof [this year].”

The self-proclaimed grand poobah of the illustrious event rattled off a slew of top names in media who will be at this week’s event, including Amazon CEO Andrew Jassy, newly named Instacart CEO Chris Rogers and Disney Entertainment co-chair Dana Walden, who is in the running for the top job when Mouse House CEO Bob Iger is slated to step down in late 2026.

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9 Adobe Systems CEO Shantanu Narayen will grab the Creative Champion of the Year award at Cannes Lions. AP

Headlining speakers for the five-day fest, which starts Monday, include Adobe Systems CEO Shantanu Narayen, who will grab the Creative Champion of the Year award, as well as YouTube CEO Neal Mohan tennis star and entrepreneur Serena Williams, NFL player and Taylor Swift beau Travis Kelce, actress and Hello Sunshine founder Reese Witherspoon and “Tonight Show” host Jimmy Fallon.

Despite the strong attendance, the economy will be top of mind for execs, who are grappling with how to deal with President Trump’s looming tariffs, a tepid mergers and acquisition environment and uncertainty about how the implementation of artificial intelligence will impact the advertising industry.

“I might have a bit of a hot take on the economy,” said Yahoo Chief Revenue Officer Rob Wilk.”If you look at what you read, it seems way more gloomy than what I experience day to day.”

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9 Tennis legend and entrepreneur Serena Williams will speak at the media and advertising conference. AFP via Getty Images

Wilk. whose media company is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, said that the advertisers are “holding on to dry powder” and waiting to spend versus “slashing budgets and pulling back” and that he’s seeing that same caution reflected in dealmaking, due in part to the tariff conversation.

He said M&A deals will only happen if they’re an “accretive acquisition,” giving the example of Yahoo’s April acquisition of Artifact, the AI-driven news aggregation app from Instagram cofounders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger.

3CV’s Kasan said he expects the M&A environment to heat up later once two major deals close. He cited the $13.25 billion merger between ad giant Omnicom and Interpublic, which is expected to close later this year, and Skydance Media’s $8 billion acquisition of Paramount Global.

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9 NFL star and Taylor Swift beau Travis Kelce is returning to Cannes this year, as the festival continues to lean into the topics of sports media. Erik Messori for NY Post

CBS-parent Paramount is currently embroiled in talks to settle President Trump’s $20 billion lawsuit against “60 Minutes” over the editing of its sitdown with former Vice President Kamala Harris. The legal settlement will be key for the deal to move forward, according to media experts.

“I do think the M&A landscape and entertainment will get a little busy once the Paramount deal is done,” Kassan said, noting that Cannes will be a hot bed for dealmaking and conversations about how to grow businesses.

9 Media execs and ad titans will explore how artificial intelligence, influencer marketing and retail media can boost their businesses. Getty Images for iHeartMedia

This year, execs will be focused on four top issues that can drive revenue; artificial intelligence, commerce, creators and sports media, he said, adding that his new company 3CV will be hosting talks on these themes throughout the week at Plage 3CV on the Croisette.

“AI is everything, everywhere all at once,” he said with a laugh.

Christopher Vollmer, managing director of MediaLink and partner at UTA agreed, explaining that the “conversations around AI have shifted from can AI create something interesting to how do we create AI responsibly, distinctively and at scale?”

9 Cannes will soon be flooded with mega-yachts as elites from tech, media and advertising descend on the seaside town. Ella Pellegrini for NY Post

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“It’s more about a pragmatic application of AI versus a ‘gee whiz’ reaction,” he said, adding that chief financial officers of companies are pushing their marketing heads to spend efficiently and do more with less money.

“The ability to do that – with the advancements in data, technology, etcetera— reinforces that it is possible to do more with less every year,” he said. “There’s a real focus on what price performance, what marketing investments of any kind can be tied to return on investment.”

Retail or commerce media has become a huge focus for brands looking for growth. He pointed to Amazon– which will have a strong presence once again at Lions– as leading the charge in its value-proposition to partners.

“Amazon’s whole proposition is ‘we know what you watch and we know what you buy,’” he said, adding that the e-commerce giant is driving a convergence across content, advertising, commerce and shopping.

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9 Sports Beach will return this year and welcome a slew of athletes once again. Erik Messori for NY Post

“It’s not just the big giants anymore,” said Lauren Wiener, Global lead of the marketing, sales and pricing practice of the Boston Consulting Group.”New players and category leaders are turning commerce data into media engines and redefining how advertisers reach consumers.”

Wiener added that chief marketing officers are “reshaping” how they spend, “not retreating,” and this is taking the form of “doubling down” on areas that unlock both efficiency and growth while slashing costs and legacy business models.

Brand building is also central to any marketer’s agenda, and that the importance of sports media and creators/ influencers have exploded in recent years due in part to, its ability to reach younger audiences.

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Professional athletes will take center stage at events held by Axios, Medialink, Deep Blue Sports and Stagwell with its impressive Sports Beach complex, addressing a variety of topics from the creator economy, AI, mental health, style and how to support female athletes.

9 “Tonight Show” host Jimmy Fallon will take to Cannes Lions this year and talk about how his viral comedy segments have help draw in new viewers and advertisers. Todd Owyoung/NBC via Getty Images

Cannes will welcome NBA all-star Carmelo Anthony, WNBA champion Sue Bird, former NFL star Chad “Ochocinco” Johnson, former Yankee slugger Alex Rodriguez and soccer stars Alex Morgan and Megan Rapinoe, among others.

Brands have leaned on athletes because they have become as important as traditional entertainment franchises due to their popularity and ability to drive engagement with consumers.

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Pointing to the NBA finals, Josh Rosenberg, CEO of creative communications firm, Day One Agency said fans across the country are “really lit up.”

“I think it is perfect for storytelling,” he said, referring to the finals. “Everyone is rooting for their person and I think that in this day and age, it is what is uniting large groups of people – and also this is one of the only times that audiences are tuned in at the same time to the same things.”

Rosenberg touted the rise in popularity of women’s sports and sports overall, as a way to also reach younger audiences.

9 Cannes is expected to welcome over 12,000 attendees to Cannes Lions this year. Ella Pellegrini

“There are all these new personalities that have their own social media followings and platforms and communities that fans are really engaged with, which are prime opportunities for a brand to capitalize on and for them to support athletes on their journey,” he said.

According to Harry Kargman, CEO of ad tech agency Kargo, working with creators can help brands expand their reach but it’s imperative to have a diversified, measurable and targeted marketing strategy.

Working with influencers can be tricky because it’s almost impossible to measure the power of their reach, unlike with targeted ads, but he said it can be worth it for a brand if they’re looking to reach new customers.

“I think influencers unlike other places- if they build the right content around a brand or around the brand message and if they have authenticity- it can be extraordinarily effective,” Kargman said, “It’s like close to word of mouth but it’s word of mouth to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of followers.”

During a meeting of women’s basketball coaches with NCAA President Mark Emmert on Wednesday, Georgia Tech Coach Nell Fortner issued a plea. Instead of treating her sport like a cost to minimize, the NCAA should see it the way so many others increasingly do: as an opportunity for growth. “We’re a huge potential revenue stream,” Fortner explained. “Our athletes stay [in college] for four years. They garner new fans. They get more attention and will continue to. I think we’re going to miss a huge window if we don’t change things now.”

The virtual meeting came after weeks of complaints of gender inequity that Emmert and the NCAA met with apologies but also rationalizations purportedly rooted in economics. In a fact sheet distributed to news outlets, the association said the women’s tournament loses millions every year and has to be subsidized by the men’s event.

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Fortner wanted Emmert to change his thinking, and her appeal comes at a moment when plenty agree with her. There is a growing belief across sports that women are one of the best investments in the industry.

Ratings are up. Female athletes are steadily commanding more attention from fans and marketers. And brands and venture capitalists are pouring money into women’s sports.

As a result, TV and sponsorship revenue for women’s sports are expected soon to eclipse $1 billion globally, according to a recent report by the accounting firm Deloitte. About $467 billion flow through men’s and mixed sports, but that massive figure includes events such as the Olympics and tennis Grand Slam events, in which female athletes bring much of the value.

“The stakeholders on the commercial side of sports are constantly searching for the next frontier, the next growth play,” Dan Cohen, who leads sports marketing company Octagon’s media rights consulting division, said in an email. “It is clearly women’s sports.”

Something worth selling

The finances of the women’s tournament presented by the NCAA say less about the event’s popularity than they do about the way the organization thinks about women’s sports, according to four media executives and industry consultants. The NCAA casts the tournament as an economic burden, but it has made little attempt to maximize its revenue, they said.

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The NCAA sold broadcast rights for the men’s tournament to Turner and CBS in a 14-year deal worth $10.8 billion in 2010 and extended the deal for another eight years and $8.8 billion in 2016. The women’s tournament, by contrast, is packaged with a group of around two dozen college sports championships, including baseball, softball, hockey and wrestling. In 2010, ESPN paid $500 million to broadcast those championships over 14 years, an average of about $35 million a year.

An NCAA spokeswoman, citing a third-party analysis the association commissioned, said women’s basketball is responsible for just more than 15 percent of that deal. By that math, the women’s tournament brings in an average of $5.7 million a year in TV revenue. The NCAA claimed last week that the tournament loses $2 million a year.

But three people who have worked on media deals involving the NCAA, including two who worked on the ESPN deal, said the women’s basketball tournament is the prize of the package, delivering around a third of the deal’s value, which would make it worth closer to $12 million annually.

Between 2016 and 2019, the women’s championship game averaged nearly 4 million viewers, nearly double that of the baseball and softball series, the next most-viewed championships in the package. With 63 games, the women’s tournament, alongside the softball championships, also provides the most volume for ESPN and ESPN2. As a stand-alone event on the open market, analysts and executives speculated the tournament could fetch as much as $20 million a year.

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The NCAA declined to comment. One former NCAA executive stood by the association’s figures, noting that part of negotiations with ESPN — including for women’s basketball — focused on promotion and guarantees to be featured on its main network as much as money. They added that the NCAA had made attempts to renegotiate the deal and the package, signed a decade ago, now is undervalued significantly.

The women’s tournament, meanwhile, continues to demonstrate it can deliver viewers. Saturday’s Connecticut-Iowa game averaged more than 1.5 million viewers on ABC; the following game, Michigan-Baylor, then pulled more than 1 million. On Monday night, Connecticut-Baylor drew an audience of more than 1.7 million on ESPN.

The money follows

Scrambled by the pandemic, nearly every major men’s sport has struggled to retain viewers over the past year, with audiences shrinking for everything from the NBA Finals to the Super Bowl. But amid those drops, the WNBA and National Women’s Soccer League scored notable increases, thanks in part to more exposure on cable and broadcast TV.

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Those gains come on the heels of the 2019 Women’s World Cup, which delivered record audiences in the United States and Europe, prompting a new wave of investment in women’s soccer from Europe’s biggest club teams.

The booming interest can be attributed to a confluence of factors. Four decades after Title IX, the infrastructure around women’s sports has improved over multiple generations. The cost of entry to stream or broadcast women’s sports remains relatively low, even as the value of live content in a fracturing media landscape grows. The players are also deftly marketing themselves, often on social media, proving their viability to advertisers at a time when consumers, especially young ones, value supporting women’s empowerment.

The proof is in the steady stream of new business deals, from new TV rights deals to sponsorships, marketing opportunities and programming that supports women’s sports.

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WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert said she had been thinking about how to increase valuations for her teams, from sponsorships to creating new media packages to sell to esports to gambling. The WNBA has lost more than $10 million a year since its inception in 1997, according to the NBA.

“We have a valuation problem here,” she said. “And it starts with marketing and partnerships.”

Last year, AT&T, Deloitte and Nike signed on to be a new class of marquee partners with the WNBA, and players were added to the NBA2K video game. Sky Sports and the BBC just agreed to pay around $20 million annually in broadcast and sponsorship fees to the Women’s Super League in the United Kingdom. The NWSL has added four national sponsors since last summer.

A group that includes Silicon Valley venture capital funds just launched a new NWSL team in Los Angeles, citing specifically the expected return on their investment.

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“We built a team like it’s an enterprise software company,” said Kara Nortman, a co-founder of the team and a managing partner at Upfront Ventures. “We have investors who are amplifying our brand, sponsors coming to us to reach an audience that isn’t the NFL. Sports is a prized asset, and men’s teams are very expensive. For us, there is this energy around building something and buying in at a price that could literally [rise in value 10-, 20- or 30-fold].”

Nortman teamed with Natalie Portman and former soccer stars including Abby Wambach and Mia Hamm for the bid. A group that includes Chelsea Clinton and Jenna Bush Hager invested in the Washington NWSL franchise. Many NWSL teams are valued at between $20 million and $100 million, according to two people involved in raising capital for teams.

For investors, persistent doubts about the commercial viability of women’s sports can help create value. A former executive at Discovery, Abby Greensfelder, recalled that when she worked in cable, advertising on female-centric programming was cheaper than programming geared toward men, even if the audiences were the same size. “It was a lagging understanding between the reality of where the female consumer was and where she was perceived to be,” she said.

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Greensfelder recently formed her own production company, Everywoman Studios. Her first project is producing a documentary about the women’s national team’s fight for equal pay, which was recently bought by HBO after a bidding war. Octagon also sold a docuseries about gymnast Simone Biles to Facebook earlier this year.

“We wanted to tell the story of the women’s soccer team not just because it’s a universally resonant story but because people love this team,” Greensfelder said. “It was a commercial proposition first.”

Star power

Last month, Sedona Prince, a sophomore at the University of Oregon, posted a video to TikTok that showed a paltry set of weights provided for women’s basketball players inside the NCAA tournament bubble in San Antonio. It has been viewed millions of times, often contrasted with the state-of-the-art weight rooms set up for men’s players in Indianapolis.

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Prince’s video recalled a tweet sent six years ago by star goaltender Hope Solo, who posted a photo of substandard field conditions before the U.S. women’s soccer team refused to take the field for an exhibition game.

The videos — and the action they sparked — demonstrate the way players drive progress in women’s sports.

The women’s soccer team famously went to court over equal pay, which netted them a better contract and raised the team’s profile. WNBA players opted out of their collective bargaining agreement in 2018 to renegotiate a new deal that tripled pay for star players. (Engelbert said her business initiatives will pay for the increases.)

The unions representing the WNBA and NWSL players and the women’s national soccer team also have ratcheted up sponsorship and licensing efforts, contracting with a group called OneTeam that also works with the players’ unions in the NBA, the NFL and Major League Baseball. A deal between DoorDash and WNBA star Chiney Ogwumike is one of the biggest the company has closed in 2021, according to OneTeam.

Then there is the growing power of social media. Beyond the influence it wields to push awareness for a cause, as evidenced by Prince, it also can be used to create monetizable followings, broadcasting content directly to fans without requiring the blessing of a media executive.

The pros are capitalizing. College athletes may soon. As the NCAA and state legislatures move toward allowing athletes to profit on their personal brands, women stand to benefit enormously.

Tony Pace, former chief marketing executive for Subway and now president of the Marketing Standards Accountability Board, said he had an “aha” moment when he began researching the athletes that brands may want to partner with.

“I was astonished to find that at Nebraska the biggest social media influencer with the largest following is not a football player,” he said. In fact, it is a volleyball player named Lexi Sun who has 77,000 followers on Instagram, 11.9k on Twitter and recorded a TikTok video on Nebraska volleyball that was viewed 90,000 times.

Opendorse, an endorsement company for athletes, calculated this week that of the players in the men’s and women’s rounds of 16 with the largest and most monetizable social media followings, eight of the top 10 were women, Axios reported. Paige Bueckers, a freshman star for Connecticut, has more than 730,000 Twitter and Instagram followers, which Opendorse estimated could be worth nearly $400,000 a year.

In the Deloitte report, the authors laid out several recommendations to maximize the business side of women’s sports, but for Cheryl Cooky, a professor of American studies and gender at Purdue who has studied media coverage of women’s sports, the takeaway was less about the specific guidance as the fact that Deloitte would make them.

“It’s not just feminist academics who are saying there is this opportunity in women’s sports,” she said. “It’s Deloitte now, too.”