3 Takeaways from Cannes 2025: From Performance to Relevance

Last month, Silverpush team kicked off the #SummerOfContext in a big way at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 2025. To start off the week, we launched a brand new contextual targeting solution for TikTok to help brands with brand safety and higher relevance. We also announced our continued expansion into Europe, where Silverpush is growing more than 200% year-over-year and now operates out of seven different countries.

At Cannes, the Silverpush team met with agencies, brands, platforms, and partners to plan for the future of context together. We believe that, in a fragmented attention economy, context is everything - and, with contextual intelligence, advertisers can save money, get higher engagement, and drive better results.

There was a lot to unpack across Cannes, but one thing stood out: with a collaboration-first ecosystem, increasing automation, and advanced attribution, there is a new layer of efficiency and creativity unfolding. AI might just make advertising more human, after all - but we’ll see.

Here’s what the Silverpush team saw as the top three trends at Cannes 2025:-

1. The Era of Performance CTV is Here.

At a panel about CTV on the DoubleVerify yacht, Julie Triolo, SVP of Product Marketing at Fox, explained that convergence is key when thinking about understanding the current measurement maze.

With the right partners, advertisers can start to think about CTV as a full-funnel channel, tracking all the way down to performance. But that doesn’t happen without the right partners. As the CTV ecosystem matures, there’s a proliferation of inventory types like channels, apps, and operating systems that still make transparency difficult. Specific curation and contextual segments, according to the panel, can help with both measurement and targeting.

Want to read more about CTV+curation? Read about Silverpush Pre-Bid CTV Segments.

2. Relevance = Results.

At Cannes, the Silverpush team met up with a lot of brand leaders trying to navigate a fragmented media landscape. One brand leader in charge of a leading candy company explained that the company’s audience was literally “everyone with a mouth.”

After all, just about everyone might be interested in candy at some point in their life. But their individual context - at the moment - is what determines that they’ll be interested. Call it a seasonality of the mood. Especially if you have specific products for specific moments, like chocolate eggs during Easter. The more relevant your ad is to the audience’s current experience, the more likely they are to engage.

Kelly Williams, the Head of Commercial for ITV, said something similar. “About 95% of your audience is not in the market for what you are selling or advertising.”

The solution is relevance.

3. Branding is Making a Comeback.

Despite all the hope that everything that can be measured will be measured, there were also discussions about whether we might have reached the era of peak performance. For many companies, the brand has taken a backseat to the funnel. That might be changing.

“A lot of conversations at Cannes were about how so many marketers seem laser-focused on conversions, but their brands aren’t connecting with consumers,” Jeff Rich, SVP of Americas, says. “When brands take a myopic approach to transaction metrics, they tend to neglect the need for brand building and positioning. But I think the pendulum is swinging back and strategies are becoming better balanced.”

If branding is making a comeback, the other big conversation at Cannes was all about ad creative. As technology converges and allows companies to connect every dot, there’s a chance that the most important thing might become the story itself and telling it the right way, however your audience hears it.

The Silverpush team was thrilled to be on the ground last week to learn and work with everyone else in the industry and to celebrate the #SummerOfContext. Thank you to all the partners and clients who spent time with us last week, and we can’t wait to unveil what’s next for context!