eCommerce's annual beach party: Why you should attend Cannes Lions
Amazon Port at Cannes Lions. Image by Amazon Ads
Are you ready for Cannes Lions 2025?
Taking place on 16-20 June, at the wonderful Palais des Festivals et des Congrès, the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 2025 is a fantastic event for the eCommerce sphere, attended by the likes of Amazon, other marketplaces, and of course the e-Comas team.
Lighter and more glamorous than other events, here’s everything we like about Cannes Lions - and why you should join us there.
What is the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity?
Cannes Lions is a world-famous event, established in the 1950s as the advertising industry’s own version of the Cannes Film Festival. The idea was that the makers of screen advertising deserved their own recognition and trophies - the Lions awards.
Since then, Cannes Lions has consistently been one of the world’s biggest and most glamorous networking events for the advertising and creative industries. These days, it’s a major pull for eCommerce agencies, retailers and sellers, with a packed programme of seminars and talks from the world’s biggest brands, and hundreds of learnings for the marketing and creative industries - as well as the most exciting networking opportunities.
With the eCommerce advertising world changing so quickly, we find it a massively important date in the calendar: one of the best events for finding out what’s coming next, and networking with all our favourite people in the industry.
Amazon Ads at Cannes Lions
The e-Comas team at Cannes Lions 2024
Last year Amazon Ads had an amazing presence at the show, attracting thousands to their Amazon Port area, which was themed as “A’Maison: The House of Amazon”. The Amazon Ads team hosted a full programme of daytime talks around culture and creativity, and filled the evenings with impressive networking events, including a gig by The National.
Details of their show content this year are yet to be announced, but we are assured it will cover their 2025 pillars:
- Streaming TV
- Non-endemic advertising
- 1P data
- 3P inventory.
We’ll be adding more detail to this blog as soon as we have it - but expect the return of the rosé fountain!
“Amazon Port is the best opportunity to meet the Amazon execs in a very relaxed way,” says our founder and CEO Jérôme de Guigné. “Lighter than the more corporate Accelerate and Unboxed events, and with Amazon staff, colleagues, competitors and tools on hand, it’s the place to meet everyone in a great set-up.”
e-Comas at Cannes Lions
You can meet some of the brains behind our organisation at Cannes Lions, including Jérôme. Our CTO Claudiu Clement and Head of Performance Marketing Tiffany Lemprière will also be attending, and all three are looking forward to seeing clients and friends at the show.
Invites are being sent out for our third ‘Dinner with Friends in Cannes’ event, where we’ll once again treat our favourite people in the industry to fine French food and wine.
Jérôme adds: “Cannes Lions, with the rosé fountain, the sun, the sea, and the boats, feels like a holiday with business friends. Most of the great connections we make are at Cannes. Nothing business really happens in terms of transactions, but so much networking happens there, it’s invaluable to us.”
Our predictions: Big topics at Cannes Lions 2025
AI was massively talked about at last year’s show, and we think it’s safe to assume it will dominate the conversation this year, too. Giving us new ways to enhance our creativity and make our ad budgets go further, AI is everywhere in eCommerce and advertising, not least in the in-house tools that e-Comas is making available to our customers. Come and see us at the show and we’ll tell you all about them.
Retail media is also set to be a big topic, as the conversation from last year’s show continues. Non-endemic advertising, whereby retailers give ad space to non-competing brands that they don’t sell, is a huge growth area in retail media, and worth learning about at Cannes Lions.
We’re also expecting streaming TV and its opportunities for advertisers to be big news in the Amazon Port are this year.
And, naturally, everyone will be talking about data: how we can extract even more value and insights from our shopping data, using the likes of Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) and other tools.
See the festival programme here. Explore the festival and get your pass here!