The Ad Industry's Weirdest Tradition

Summary

Channels with Peter Kafka

Episode: The Ad Industry's Weirdest Tradition
Date: June 24, 2026
Guest: Brian Morrissey (The Rebooting)

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Overview

This episode dives into the annual Cannes Lions advertising festival—a gathering often overshadowed by controversy and curiosity about its modern-day relevance. Host Peter Kafka explores why the global ad industry still convenes in the south of France each year. Joining him is ad world veteran Brian Morrissey, who unpacks what really happens at Cannes, why advertising has grown more mechanized and less glamorous, and how AI and creators are shaking up the business of marketing.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

What Is Cannes to the Ad Industry?

[03:31 - 05:15]

• Cannes began as a celebration of creative advertising but is now "a carnival of capitalism" where technology and advertising collide.
• Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) are at the center because they control massive ad budgets, making them the most courted attendees.
  • Quote (Brian Morrissey, 05:24): "They decide where their budgets are going to go."
• The festival's purpose is increasingly about buyer-seller matchmaking: marketers (buyers) meet all the organizations that want to sell their platforms, solutions, or ad space.

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Is Real Business Done at Cannes?

[06:14 - 06:55]

• While attribution is "fuzzy," deals do happen, and some attendees claim significant ROI.
  • Quote (Brian Morrissey, 06:21): "One executive...said, last year I spent $50,000 all in here. I got $500,000 in deals. Now would he have gotten those $500,000 without coming to Cannes? I don't know. We'll never know."
• The importance of in-person relationship-building is core, even if exact value is hard to measure.

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The Newcomer: OpenAI’s Advertising Push

[06:55 - 09:42]

• Every year, a new tech giant makes a splash. In 2026, it’s OpenAI moving aggressively into the ad space, in spite of previous skepticism from its leadership about advertising.
  • Quote (Brian Morrissey, 08:07): "They will absolutely get that money... But standing up an advertising business takes time and it's difficult."
• The ad world is interested but cautious—success for AI platforms means building scale, not just landing a handful of big buyers.
  • Snap and Twitter are reminders of how hard it is to achieve staying power.

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The Shift from Creativity to Mechanization

[09:52 - 11:57]

• Advertising has shifted from creative campaigns to highly data-driven, automated, performance-focused models.
  • Quote (Brian Morrissey, 10:48): "The ad world has always been divided between brand advertising... and then what we used to call direct marketing... And guess what? That's the stuff that marketers really like. Because they put a dollar in, they get $3 back..."
• Major growth is now among small- and medium-sized advertisers (enabled by tech giants), not just Fortune 500 brands.

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AI and Automation: Reality vs. Hype

[14:08 - 18:28]

• AI is everywhere in the conversation—yet, for all the hype, it's not (yet) replacing most marketing jobs.
  • Quote (Brian Morrissey, 15:13): "All the talk about AI wiping away marketing jobs seems the same sort of false story that was told about developers... There's still lots of developers being employed out there."
• Actual headcount cuts due to AI have not materialized. For now, AI supplements, not replaces, marketers' work—especially the grunt work.
• There is a "dissonance" between AI's promise and its tangible impact.

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The Vanishing Centrality of Advertising in Culture

[17:27 - 18:28]

• Advertising's cultural cachet has diminished; major creative campaigns are no longer the centerpieces they once were.
  • Quote (Brian Morrissey, 17:27): "It was all about, like, who was gonna win the Grand Prix for film... Now nobody talks about that at all... Culturally, advertising has almost disappeared from the central role that it played."

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The Creator Economy’s Emergence at Cannes

[18:28 - 23:11]

• Creator/influencer marketing is now a major presence. Brands are tapping creators to reach niche audiences and borrow cultural capital.
  • Quote (Brian Morrissey, 19:32): "Yahoo... borrowing the cultural cachet that Emily [Sundberg] has built up with Feed Me… creators have risen..."
• However, the creator economy doesn't scale like Google or Meta. Advertisers seek partnerships for cachet and niche access, not just pure reach.
  • Quote (Brian Morrissey, 22:30): "Advertisers want to reach a lot of people. That is a solved problem... Most of what advertisers are looking to creators for is much more... cultural cache..."
• Creators’ main challenge is monetizing beyond awkward ad networks—this could change as direct relationships grow.

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The Persistent, Changing Tradition of Cannes

[25:34 - 28:54]

• Cannes has changed from a craft-oriented, glamorous event to a more mechanistic, data-driven, and "boring" business gathering.
  • Quote (Brian Morrissey, 26:10): "The biggest change is an industry that's gone from a craft at the heart of it... to something that is much more mechanized... It's more lucrative. It's more boring too."
• Despite automation and remote work, the in-person element—jetting to the French Riviera—remains resilient.
  • Quote (Brian Morrissey, 27:52): "Humans are going to want to congregate in nice locations till the end of time... That's why events are such a hot thing right now... it's the AI hedge."

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Cannes' Evolution:
  "It started as a celebration of creativity... it is now a carnival of capitalism." (Brian Morrissey, 04:31)
• On AI Replacing Marketers:
  "Nobody that I talk to seems to be interested in AI replacing the decisioning that they do. Do they want it to do a lot of the grudge work... in the programmatic ad world? Sure." (Brian Morrissey, 16:19)
• On the Endurance of In-Person Events:
  "You can't move this to Cincinnati and say it's now the Procter and Gamble Can Lion." (Peter Kafka, 28:01)
• On Media Industry Trends:
  "[Media is] like a children's soccer game. Like when the ball moves to one part of the field, the whole clump of kids follows. And that ball right now is in-person events." (Brian Morrissey, 29:22)

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Key Timestamps

• [03:31] – Defining Cannes for insiders and outsiders
• [06:14] – Is real business actually transacted at Cannes?
• [07:36] – OpenAI’s ad strategy and industry reaction
• [09:52] – How tech giants changed ad business scale
• [14:53] – AI and the reality of marketing job losses
• [17:27] – How advertising has lost its cultural prominence
• [18:28] – Rise and role of the creator economy at Cannes
• [26:10] – Cannes today vs. 20 years ago: from craft to mechanization
• [27:52] – The enduring need for in-person events

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Tone & Language

Peter Kafka maintains a wry, investigative style. Brian Morrissey’s tone is candid, world-weary, and sometimes self-deprecating, sharing both industry insight and skepticism about long-held rituals. There’s a sense of nostalgia mingled with pragmatic realism about where advertising and media are going.

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Conclusion

This episode offers a clear-eyed, behind-the-scenes look at the Cannes advertising festival: part business, part spectacle, still an anchor of the ad industry's calendar even as automation and AI reshape the marketing landscape. Listeners will come away understanding why Cannes persists—and how the industry's weirdest tradition is a lens into broader changes hitting media, marketing, and tech.

Transcript

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[Peter Kafka]

From the Vox Media podcast network. This is Channels with Peter Kafka. That is me. I'm also chief correspondent at Business Insider. Today we are talking about ads and also France and why those two things are in the same sentence every year around this time. It's the annual can. I don't actually know the formal name of it. It's the can advertising convention show mashup where most of the ad world flocks every June to work. Also they look at yachts. Also there are a lot of parties but they swear they are there for work. I am not in Cannes this year. God bless if you are. But I wanted to get a sense of what people are talking about there, how people feel about OpenAI's ad push. And yeah, I wanted to know why this thing still exists. So I called up Brian Morrissey, the Guy I always call up when I want to know how the ad world works. Brian is in can. He has been covering this business for many years. His first can was nearly two decades ago. He now runs the Rebooting, a newsletter podcast operation you should 100% be reading and listening to if you listen to this podcast. But don't go anywhere first, come listen to me. Talk to Brian Morrissey. Brian Morrissey, CEO of the Rebooting and probably five other things that I'm forgetting to name. How are you?

[Brian Morrissey]

Good. How are you, Peter?

[Peter Kafka]

Good. You seem well. I was hoping since you are in Cannes, that there'd be some dramatic background, but it looks like there's a microwave behind you.

[Brian Morrissey]

Yeah. Not that glamorous little kitchenette here in Juwan Le Pen.

[Peter Kafka]

They.

[Brian Morrissey]

I don't want to, like, ever have. You know, we butcher French pronunciations, but the fact that they pronounce Juan as Juwan says that we can, we can, we can do what we want.

[Peter Kafka]

Before we get to your geography, we'll just do some table setting. Many people who listen to this show understand that there are two. When you say you're going to can, there's two things you can mean. One is you're going to the glamorous film festival, and the other one is the much less glamorous advertising trade show slash Open Air Bazaar. And you're at that one.

[Brian Morrissey]

It's a little insulting, Peter, but no,

[Peter Kafka]

no, I just want to be clear.

[Brian Morrissey]

That's what I like consulting.

[Peter Kafka]

I've had this where you say, I'm going to can. People go, oh, very exciting. And then you go, well, it's for the ad.

[Brian Morrissey]

No, there's three cans. There's. There's the one for the film festival, there's the porn, and then there's this one. I don't know which the ranking is. I'll leave that to others.

[Peter Kafka]

Let me know about the porn one. It's important for you to be here. You cover the ad business. You're in the ad business. Why is everyone at Cannes? Why do people go to Cannes? What happens there? What is the business purpose for going?

[Brian Morrissey]

You know, I first went to Cannes in 2007 and I was horrified, of course. And the first thing that I said since as journalists was, oh, my God, why does this exist? It is so pointless. And now in 2026, I'm still asking kind of the same question. Look, this started as a celebration of creativity. Advertising creativity was a festival of creativity, as they called, is now a carnival of capitalism. And it's all of these different worlds coming together. Technology. Because technology comes first, as we know. Advertising, the CMOs are the celebrities here in Cannes because.

[Peter Kafka]

And explain why, if you're. Yeah, explain why if you're not in the ad business, why. The CMOs are the people being wined and dined and fetted constantly because they

[Brian Morrissey]

decide where their budgets are going to go.

[Peter Kafka]

They're the buyers.

[Brian Morrissey]

They are the buyers. And everybody good event is matching up a buy and a sell side. And the buyers are increasingly the, you know, they are the marketers. They fund, for the most part, the entire circus.

[Peter Kafka]

So I went, I went for my first time. I've only gone once a couple years ago, and everyone who was there told me that there were many fewer people coming from their group or agency than had gone in the past. And things were very serious now. And they were really there to do business. They were not there to screw around and see the chain smokers on Yahoo beach or whatever the event was that night. Is there actual business transpiring? I keep hearing that that is happening. Are people actually flying to France to buy and sell advertising?

[Brian Morrissey]

I mean, I would say it depends. Like everything in media attribution is very fuzzy, right? So I asked this exact question. I have this little text can back channel that I'm doing and one executive and everyone here is in sales, right? Like whether they're officially in sales or not in sales. They're in sales. Said, last year I spent $50,000 all in here. I got $500,000 in deals. Now would he have gotten those $500,000 without coming to Cannes? I don't know. We'll never know. So in the meantime, enjoy the.

[Peter Kafka]

One of the big themes every year is, hey, there's a big new tech company that has decided they're interested in advertising and they're using can as they're coming out. Party member Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat did this this year that, that, that role is filled by open AI, which a couple of years ago Sam Altman was saying, oh, advertising is gross. And then at the beginning of this year said, advertising is great, we'd like to do it. We're going to hire people and start selling ads. And so apparently on Monday was there the sort of coming out party and they made their pitch to, to the ad world. What's your sense of how that went over, how it's going?

[Brian Morrissey]

Look, I mean everyone, all the marketers are looking for some kind of like, like every company, they need some kind of AI story to tell, right? And you know, that's why we're seeing a lot of this waste when it comes to token maxing and whatnot within companies. So OpenAI has an advantage, right, when they come to the market with ChatGPT ads in that every single marketer is going to be intrigued. They're going to take the meeting and they're going to test it out.

[Peter Kafka]

Now you're going to throw some money at OpenAI.

[Brian Morrissey]

100%. They will absolutely get that money. Now, standing up an advertising business takes time and it's difficult. They have very ambitious goals for this ad business. And look at Snap. I remember here, Snap was the bell of the ball at some point. Right. Snap's business is in the toilet now and that's because they didn't do all the things needed to build a really performant, to use the terms here, ad business. And they couldn't rival the scale of Google and Facebook. And so OpenAI will absolutely be successful in advertising, but success at their level with the amount of money they have raised is quite a bit different. They have very, you know, they're ambitious and so they will be given every opportunity to perform.

[Peter Kafka]

Does it matter to the ad world that they launched this ad business and then basically a week or two later said, the real focus for us going forward is going to be because initially the thing with the ad business was we have a ton of users. Most of them don't pay us any money and we'll put ads in front of them and our lowest cost users. And then really almost as soon as they launched, they said, our new focus is on paid users and we're going to really, we're going to push everything into one app. We're really going to focus on Codex, which is the rival to Anthropic's coding platform. And that's our big push. Does that dissonance register in the ad world or they just go, it's a big ad company, we're going to play with it?

[Brian Morrissey]

No, I don't think it really matters. But also it's important to realize that standing up an ad business these days is completely different, particularly as a technology platform than it used to be.

[Odoo Sponsor Voice]

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[Brian Morrissey]

Because can attracts the Fortune 500 marketers. P& G is here. I did a panel yesterday with a P and G marketing executive. They probably have hundreds here. And the real money in advertising now isn't really in the, yes, there's money in the can world, but the real money for platforms is in every business on earth that is not in can and that is 99% of businesses. Because what Google and Then Meta confirmed what they proved was that it's better to have an ad business that has hundreds of thousands and then millions of customers, then, you know, 400 or 500 customers that traditional media would have.

[Peter Kafka]

Yeah, Twitter had Twitter, until Elon came in, had the brand business. They didn't have the scale to do the sort of smaller advertiser business.

[Brian Morrissey]

Yeah, but performance. So I guess, you know, the ad. The ad world has always been divided between brand advertising, which is the kind of image advertising that you do, magazine ads, TV ads, et cetera. And then what we used to call direct marketing. That's like direct mail, email marketing. The more. The less sexy stuff, let's just say. And guess what? That's the stuff that marketers really like. Because they put a dollar in, they get $3 back, they'll keep spending that dollar until it stops working. And so what's happened in the advertising world, particularly as in digital data is so important, is that it's shifted from. And that's why you see it, this event. It's shifted from the creativity of advertising to can you amass enough data or can you apply data to enrich a media impression to the point where you trace it back to a sale or some kind of action. Cause that's what marketers, they love that they don't. You know, a CFO doesn't want to spend on advertising. A CFO wants to buy distribution.

[Peter Kafka]

I'll be right back with Brian Morrissey. But first, a word from a sponsor.

[Geico Customer]

When I scraped my car in that parking garage, I was worried that it could be a long process to take care of it. Like a landscaper's first day trimming a hedge maze.

[Peter Kafka]

I have definitely already been here. Now, was it left right or right left? Well, maybe I'll cut a path out and find my way back later.

[Geico Customer]

But it wasn't like that. I filed a claim in under two minutes on the Geico, apparently. And they handled it from there. It was taken care of almost as quickly as it happened.

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[Peter Kafka]

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[Brian Morrissey]

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[Peter Kafka]

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[Peter Kafka]

And we're back. You were sort of walking me there about sort of. The ad world is increasingly automated and we can come back to sort of what that means and why there's a can if everything is automated. But. And then AI comes and says, we're going to fundamentally change two things. We're going to change the media world that you guys are used to interacting with. And you know, there's a question about is there going to be such a thing as a website in a couple years? Because you're just going to use chat or whomever it is, your sort of portal, the Internet, but it's also going to reshape the actual advertising business. Correct. Are people, have they come to grips with that? Are they telling themselves stories about how it's not really going to affect their business because what they do can't be replicated by a computer.

[Brian Morrissey]

I mean, you know, Cannes is a place, you use the word dissonance. This is a place with lots of dissonance. Right. And you walk around, you know, the main road here is called the Croisset and there's agentic this, agentic that we're going to do agentic, agentic, agentic. And then you're left with, but why are all these people here if the agents are going to be doing this? And then you talk with marketers and they will say that, yes, AI is a wonderful opportunity. We're Using it to be more efficient. I was talking to a marketer earlier. I said, how many people are in your marketing organization? This person said, 1,000. I said, are you having fewer of those? And he's like, no, no, but we're more efficient. And there's just complete dissonance. Like, what are. I don't quite understand how that works now. Most of the people I talk to just like it has not shown up in the numbers. All the talk about AI wiping away marketing jobs seems the same sort of false story that was told about developers. Cause developers. There's still lots of developers being employed out there. The unemployment rate is not skyrocketing. And so what I end up wondering, and I'll leave it to the economists, is then what are they? Cause it seems like the pitch when they were trying to raise all this money, whether they said it publicly or not, and anthropic did more, was we're gonna replace expensive humans who get sick, et cetera.

[Peter Kafka]

Yeah. That's why we're so valuable.

[Ad Sponsor Voice]

Yeah.

[Brian Morrissey]

What is that the TAM they like to talk about? TAMs. Elon Musk claims he has a $26 trillion TAM. Why not? Sure. You know, the TAM of like the global labor force is quite a bit, particularly in white collar jobs. It doesn't seem like that story is resonating with marketers. There are a lot of marketers here and nobody that I talk to seems to be interested in AI replacing the decisioning that they do. Do they want it to do a lot of the grudge work and the gobbledygook that is the programmatic ad world?

[Odoo Sponsor Voice]

Sure.

[Ad Sponsor Voice]

Right.

[Peter Kafka]

Cause we. I mean, from the outside, you still think about. You might still think about advertising as like thinking up a pitch and putting together a commercial, but it's a ton of. It is just moving bits around. Not to mention the back end of it, Right. Where there's tons and tons of work that AI should be really good at because it's moving paperwork around.

[Brian Morrissey]

But I do think, you know this. I think that one of the things that struck me, and it's like an obvious one, but is just how this is like symbolic of how media has become these, like. It was called shards of glass to me. It's just been completely fractured. And. And that's why when I first started coming here, it was all about like, who was gonna win the Grand Prix for film, which is a very European term for TV commercials. And now nobody talks about that at all. And I can't, honestly. I used to write about advertising. I mean, I cover it cause it affects the media world. It drives it. But like, culturally, advertising has, you know, almost disappeared from what the central role that had played. Like we can't remember.

[Peter Kafka]

I remember watching the best commercials of the year on television. That would be a TV program that you could watch. I know, yeah.

[Brian Morrissey]

With commercials. Yeah. There were so many good hustles back then.

[Peter Kafka]

A great way to double dip back to current times. The creator economy is something that I feel terrible even saying. I feel terrible using those words out loud. It is not a new idea. When I was a can a couple of years ago, you would definitely see like peloton people being portrayed as influencers. It seems like they are having a moment, at least in terms of sort of public profile. I was flipping through my Instagram this morning. Emily Sundberg, who's been on this show and is everyone's favorite influencer, was doing a collaboration with Yahoo.

[Brian Morrissey]

Yeah, I went by. I didn't. I didn't go to the dinner portion, but I stopped by for the.

[Peter Kafka]

It seemed fabulous. It seems like can should be perfect for the Create. For the creator economy, influencer world in that and that it's the kind of thing that if you're an agency that wants. If you're an advertiser that wants to separate yourself from the pack, you say you do it at an Emily Sundberg deal. And again, if you're the Emily Sunburst of the world, you may not have the ability to reach these folks unless you show up at a can. Am I getting that right?

[Brian Morrissey]

Yeah, I mean, I think so. I think it's funny you brought that up because I had like, gone by. I had. I had put on a different dinner last night. And then I went by to Emily's dinner and I was just walking up. It was very striking. Maybe it's just from being around a long time to see like, Feed Me and Yahoo, I'm like, okay, like, you know, like a newsletter and Yahoo. Like that is pretty striking because it was Yahoo. You know, almost like borrowing the cultural cachet that Emily has built up with Feed Me, you know, to have this, you know, I just saw the extremely long table with lots of other, you know, creators there. And I think that's telling with how, you know, creators have risen and like you mentioned, like, it was a couple years ago, but brands are always like a couple years behind. And so this is a time for, I believe for like, particularly creators that, that can, you know, really touch on, like, business areas. I think that they're. They're doing really well. I'VE seen a lot of creators here.

[Peter Kafka]

I know that if you're a creator that you could do a brand deal, which really means video. I have a lot of people on my show who have are in the substack and podcast world. Those seem harder for an individual creator to sort of monetize directly. It seems like they're sort of reliant on sort of not very good ad buying networks. Is that going to change? Will other Emily Sundberg's be able to get their hands on Yahoo money?

[Brian Morrissey]

I mean, I don't see why not. I mean, look, everyone wants to go direct as a business. I mean there were many cardinal sins of media in the last generation, but I think one of them is just losing a direct contact with their customers, both their audience and their customers. If you think about it, the last generation of media was being intermediated by Google or by Facebook on the audience side. And then programmatic advertising intermediated publishers from their customer relationships. You think about other markets not having a direct connection with your customers is a strange way to go about things. I mean there's lots of reasons with how the Internet is structured that that took place. But you know, for creators it's, it's about developing those direct relationships, those programmatic.

[Peter Kafka]

I guess, I guess what I'm getting, I mean, because the advertisers still want to reach lots and lots of people, right? Let's say Emily Sundberg reaches 100,000 people, whatever the number is. Right. They want to reach way more people. And yes, they want to be associated with a special, with something special like Emily. Right. But they also just want to put a lot of money to work to reach a lot of people. It seems like there's, there's something won't match up there and they'll have to sort of figure out some way to collectively buy placement there.

[Brian Morrissey]

I would say yes and no. Right. So yes, advertisers want to reach a lot of people. That is a solved problem. I mean just go onto Google or to Meta's ad system and you can reach a ton of people like Infinite, like just. And so. And you can target, you know, them pretty fine. Targeting. Right. So most of what advertisers are looking to creators for is much more. I mean they're looking for entree into niches to have some kind of cultural cache basically to get the right people in the room. I mean this is something which has

[Peter Kafka]

always been the case, that's not a new idea and that still appeals to them.

[Brian Morrissey]

And institutional brands used to be an entree into getting the right people in a room. And now creators are, you know, they're like celebrity adjacent, I suppose.

[Peter Kafka]

I'll be right back, but first, a word from a sponsor.

[Ad Sponsor Voice]

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[Peter Kafka]

You are a celebrity yourself. You hold your own. You hold your own Alternative can. It's the one place I've met a person who worked at Russia Today if you if you want to oh no, you're hanging out yeah, yeah, he said, he said, he said he was very nice about it. Well, we all have different jobs, right? And I said, okay, yeah, I do

[Brian Morrissey]

have a big ten. I guess I didn't.

[Peter Kafka]

Yeah, you got it.

[Brian Morrissey]

It was great.

[Peter Kafka]

Yeah. God bless. It was one of my highlights of my trip there. You've been doing this for 20 years. What's changed in 20 years? What's the biggest change?

[Brian Morrissey]

Biggest change of can or the biggest change? I mean, can is like a representative of it. I mean the biggest change is a industry that's gone from a craft at the heart of it and the craft of advertising and the craft of media to something that is much more mechanized, so something that is much more financialized and something that's not. It's more lucrative. It's more boring too. I mean, can is more boring and I think media as a business in many ways has become a lot more boring. And look, in some ways that's good. I know the CFOs love that. Right. But it's lost some of its. And maybe I'm just like an old guy complaining, saying this was better when I was younger.

[Peter Kafka]

Yeah.

[Brian Morrissey]

This is our Scattered Waldorf act.

[Peter Kafka]

What? What? Okay, so to bring this all the way back, it is getting. It is sort of the, the fun is getting sort of sanded off. The CFOs are happier because their money is being sport spent more efficiently. They are still sending plane loads of people who work in New York to the south of France to work with people who work in New York. Yeah, I know we say this to

[Brian Morrissey]

do meetings with people who, who live in New York.

[Peter Kafka]

Okay, that's smart. So we say this every year. It's like there's lots of things like, like the upfronts that those should be going away, but they are still here in some form.

[Brian Morrissey]

Yeah.

[Peter Kafka]

How much longer does can have? Or is this just going to be perpetual? They will continue to send human beings to do deals that really are. Should be done with computers.

[Brian Morrissey]

Man. Humans are going to want to congregate and nice locations till the end of time. I do just believe that. I don't think that you can't move.

[Peter Kafka]

You can't move this to Cincinnati and say it's now the Procter and Gamble can lion.

[Brian Morrissey]

No, there was like one point where Martin Sorrel, when he was running wpp said that can was too brash and it shouldn't be in France and all of that. I understand that. Like as you know, just a logical point considering how expensive everything is here. At the same time, I Don't know. People are always going to want to congregate with each other. And that's why events are such a hot thing right now, irl, experiential, whatever you want to call it, because it's the AI hedge. And the bet is that as everything becomes more automated and as our agents go out and do everything for us and everything we're going to need to have that human connection.

[Peter Kafka]

And so Brian, everyone who comes on my show now says this. So either that can be true because we've all decided that that is the true thing and we're going to say it, or it's just a, it's a, it's a way for us to get through the next five minutes or the next six months. That, that my answer to all the, the, all of the problems in the world is. Oh, it's, it's if you're a media executive, that my answer to all the problems bearing down on us is in, in person events.

[Brian Morrissey]

Well, yeah, I mean, look, that doesn't mean, I don't mean to say that there's not like an oversupply of it and that it won't eventually go into compression like the rest of media. I mean, that kind of is the story of media, right? Like I describe it as like a children's soccer game. Like when the ball moves to one part of the field, the whole clump of kids follows. And that ball right now is in person events. And so look, There was an F1 before Cannes. It's like a traveling circus behind like high net worth individuals. For a lot of these media brands, they're just going around the globe, following around the super rich people and putting on parties. I mean, parties are very important. I'm having one actually this evening. All right.

[Peter Kafka]

If you're hearing this podcast, it is too late to get to Cannes and visit Brian's party. But you should go next year. Who knows what kind of rep Scallion you might meet.

[Brian Morrissey]

I don't know what the RT is apparently.

[Peter Kafka]

Brian Morrissey, thank you for coming on. Thank you for braving can for all of us.

[Brian Morrissey]

Hey, I do it for the people, Peter. You know that.

[Peter Kafka]

Thanks, Brian. Thanks. Thanks again to Brian Morrissey. Thanks to my producer, Charlotte Silver. She is awesome. Thanks to our advertisers. Also awesome. You know who else is awesome? You guys. Everyone is awesome. Have a great week. Enjoy the holiday. If you are a person who enjoys holidays. See you soon.

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[Brian Morrissey]

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[Brian Morrissey]

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[Brian Morrissey]

Did this parking lot have a waterfall?

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[Peter Kafka]

It feels good to find what you're looking for. It feels good to Geico hey there,

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