Cannes In Summary; FPC Salutes Andy Cocker; And Thanks For Coming To Our Cannes Drinks

This is the FirstPartyCapital weekly newsletter.  It covers news and updates about the FirstPartyCapital fund and its portfolio companies.

Cannes - The FPC Hot Takes

This is going to be a short newsletter edition - given the full-on week we have all had at Cannes.

There’s been some really good retrospectives on the International Festival of Creativity, and the fringe ad tech carnival that runs parallel.

Rob Webster’s LinkedIn post is an excellent summary from the martech perspective.

And if you want a more acerbic overview (particularly on ad tech excess at the festival), then you should read Brian Morrissey’s take of Cannes over at Rebooting.

Cannes rules

We are not going to give you a 15 paragraph summary - as clearly there are better articles out there to read.

Instead, FPC is going to list its hot takes of the week so you can breeze through them as you sink that last glass of rosé on the flight home or onwards:

• An industry still in denial: It would be hard to calculate the number of times “cookieless” was uttered on a panel, meeting or pitch this Cannes week. It all sounds very progressive from both a technological and privacy point of view until you get into detail. You see “cookieless” is effectively an ad tech pivot to IDs and fingerprinting - both of which are neither scalable nor - in the long term - privacy compliant. The future of measurement and targeting will be a customised approach, using multiple signals (context, first-party data et al) and technology like clean rooms. And the power will be with the publishers. Just try telling that to ad tech right now.

• Change the channel, please: CTV is still getting all the love in ad tech. There were endless amount of panels on the subject this week. But again very little on data-driven TV. Outside the US, CTV is predominantly YouTube with a smattering of long tail programmatic supply. Most TV ad supply is still made up of walled gardens - and gasp - linear. TV buys are becoming very fragmented. Why aren’t we talking about holistic TV buys? Why are we not talking about addressable TV? Why, indeed?

• Attention getting some traction: We are seeing big raises for startups productising for attention. Attention is definitely seen as a future fix for privacy - and it has been talked up endlessly at Cannes. But it’s still early days.

• Everyone wants to save the planet: Brian O’Kelley is literally the busiest man in ad tech right now, integrating ad tech into his Scope3 framework. It is encouraging to see ad tech piling into sustainability. We do, as an industry, have an ugly carbon footprint. Let’s hope this isn’t just short-term grand-standing. This industry excels at virtue signalling.

• Cannes does have ROI: Despite being endlessly lampooned as the “great industry getaway”, a lot of business does get done in Cannes. There are very few industry events where you can get access to this calibre of decision maker. It might start as a top-of-the-funnel conversation, but the payoff from this type of networking will ultimately have a huge impact - especially for startups battling to get cut through.

Andy Cocker, We Salute You

Andy Cocker, a co-founder of Infectious Media, announced this week he was leaving the Kepler Group to move onto pastures new.

FPC has known Andy since the late noughties when he set up Infectious Media with Martin Kelly.

Andy helped build one of the great independent programmatic shops, pioneering a lot of trading practices that are standard in the programmatic space today. Andy and Martin sold Infectious Media to Kepler Group in 2020, having built the business over a ten year period.

We wish Andy well on his next adventure in MadTech.

It’s important to note here that both Martin and Andy are LPs in the FirstPartyCapital fund.

If you are reading this and are wondering how you too can follow in the mighty footsteps of Marin and Andy by investing in FPC, then click this link:  https://share-eu1.hsforms.com/1ol4kZK-5RxKyCLYtLNjA4gf7q0l.

Thanks For Coming To Our Cannes Drinks

We want to thank all those for coming to our drinks in Cannes this week. We had over 100 attendees - not bad considering who we were up against.

It was a great selection of the great and good of ad tech - as well as our LPs and portfolio companies - that made time to come to Ma Nolan’s.

Our next international event is likely to be Singapore in September - so keep an eye out for that announcement.

Have a great weekend, readers.