Beyond Cannes

Advertisers have had a century-long grip on media—and we got what they paid for

I. The Revenue Riviera

It’s 95 degrees with 95% humidity and I’m in a green-walled holding pen called Amazon Port, surrounded by soaked-through T-shirts, discussing the intricacies of affiliate links with a business development guy who is roasting like a chestnut. La Croisette—a famous beachfront promenade in this sultry stretch of southern France—has been transformed into a maze of wooden pavilions, where barmen in straw hats sling margaritas and mocktails for a heavily perspiring blob of ad execs and acolytes who have gathered for the industry’s biggest and booziest networking event of the year.

The Cannes Lions.

On a large stage to my left—just past stalls that tout Prime, Influencers, and Storefront—a mic’d-up MC in a green dress hypes an upcoming presentation to an audience of 12 people on laptops. Just across the street, grand hotels are topped with logos the size of Cessnas declaring that they’re the temporary property of Snapchat and LinkedIn. Tonight, 50 Cent will perform at a beachfront party for precisely 30 minutes.

For more than a decade, the Cannes Lions has held near-mythical status in my imagination. It celebrates the world’s best creative ad work, bringing together the brightest minds in advertising and the media platforms that carry their messages to the masses. It’s a platinum-plated excuse for anyone within spitting distance of an ad exchange to briefly escape their everyday lives and behave like mini Richard Bransons and souped-up Anna Wintours on rented yachts in the pink-skinned party town.

What am I doing here?

Well, I’m doing a few meetings and hosting a dinner for creators and their agents, but mostly I’ve come to bear witness to how far the media world bends towards advertising. And, just quietly, I’m seeing if it’s possible to imagine an alternate universe in which the Cannes Lions might have less of a say in how our media is made.

II. The Great Interruption

I first heard of Cannes about 15 years ago, when I was a freelance journalist living in Baltimore. While I was most interested in writing stories about culture and politics, the meager sums that freelancing commanded weren’t enough to cover rent. So I took on a side gig, writing up the awards entries for advertising agencies. The job was tedious—helping agencies win Cannes Lions for campaigns that sold shampoo—but the market value was, unfortunately, greater than getting stories about life and art published in magazines.

My view of advertising was neutral at best. I appreciated that ad revenue funded the publications that printed my stories, but I also knew that its influence could distort journalistic incentives. When I was a magazine reporter in Hong Kong, for instance, the Chinese tech company Tencent paid to fly me to Beijing for a story heralding its nascent ad business that got it on the cover of the magazine. At a different magazine, the publisher killed our planned cover photo of a rising indie band because the young punks didn’t look glam enough to please the luxury brand that had paid for the back cover. My colleagues wrote glowingly of five-star resorts in the Maldives that neither they nor any other ordinary human could possibly afford, all covered by the hotel chains whose ads appeared alongside the reviews.

Those were the days when magazines could command a steady income from advertising. The rise of social media put an end to that.

In the 2010s, the rivers of ad dollars that once flowed to print media were redirected to a couple of internet giants that would reshape the media landscape. They offered a better deal to the shampoo salesmen. The currents of the ad rivers didn’t slow for a second as they cut a new course.

Today, ad agencies don’t need to seek the favor of editors and publishers. The agencies can just go directly to influencers who know how to play the algorithms.

At Cannes this year, creators were second only to AI as the subject du jour. Social media companies flew them in and put them up at fancy hotels. Endless panels featured them. Media platforms threw parties for them—and they’re smart to do so.

There are many creators who produce great work without sacrificing their integrity for ad revenue, and amazing businesses built. But they still must play the game, even if they do so subconsciously. A podcast episode tends to be an hour long, with spots for ads woven into the narrative. A news story is frequently interrupted by a display unit or a screen takeover. A Reel often directs a viewer to an online store that pays the influencer a kickback from resulting sales. Advertising doesn’t just interrupt the content—it shapes it.

But I sometimes wonder if the greater tragedy is one we can’t see.

Since the advent of the internet, advertising has been the dominant funding mechanism for media. We’ve seen what it can produce—the Mr Beasts, Joe Rogans, Addison Raes, and Charli D’Amelios. We know the bright-lights names, the big numbers, and the flashy showcases. We’ve witnessed an entire industry, with its own supply chain, factories, and sub-economies, sprout from its soil. But we haven’t seen what it obscures. We don’t know what it has prevented from emerging in the first place. We don’t quite know what—and who—it has locked out.

III. Benefactors and Benediction

In the early 1700s, the writer Alexander Pope pioneered direct subscriptions as a way to fund his work, promising to deliver his translation of the Iliad in installments over six years. The new model would give Pope total control over his work, freeing him from subservience to a rich benefactor—the standard model at the time. He ended up attracting about 750 subscribers—dukes, earls, and bishops among them—and made the equivalent of millions of dollars.

Pope’s model was later adopted by newspapers and magazines, which paired subscriptions with advertising to fund generations of great journalism. Now we’re beginning to see how powerful that model can be when paired with the internet—and placed in the hands of individuals. Each year, billions of dollars flow directly to artists and creators. On Substack alone, there are more than 5 million paid subscriptions. More than 50 Substack creators make over $1 million a year.

We’re still in the early days of this new economy, however. For more than 20 years, most online media was free and monetized with advertising. It wasn’t until the 2010s, with the arrival of Netflix, Spotify, and Patreon, that we started to pay for online content at scale.

When audiences directly support the creators they most love and trust, new kinds of media businesses can thrive, and new works that don’t fit comfortably with the ad model can flourish.

Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History, a dramatically narrated show with six-hour episodes on obscure historical topics, wouldn’t have gotten off the ground had he relied only on advertisers. His main source of revenue comes from paywalled episodes.

Science education channel Kurzgesagt spends hundreds of hours on each of its animated educational videos. Ad revenue alone can’t sustain that kind of work, so the channel relies on tens of thousands of Patreon supporters.

The British lifestyle writer

Emma Gannon

had a career in traditional media before she discovered she can support herself through audience subscriptions on Substack. She’s now free to write what she wants, on her own schedule. (Gannon has said of her editorial freedom, quoting Bill Cunningham, “If you don’t take their money, they can’t tell you what to do, kid.”)

Even those who have been successful with the ad model are discovering new riches. Violet Witchel, a young chef who creates recipes that have a tendency to go viral, turned her large social media following into lucrative brand deals, but she has since found that Substack subscriptions bring in much more—and more consistent—revenue.

Then there’s the longer tail: a creator middle class succeeding in ways the ad model never allowed. There are the local news operations, sports team specialists, niche experts, and passion projects that may never reach ad-friendly scale but cover their subjects with real depth. There are those who spend hours crafting the perfect sentences, and take literature so seriously that they devote days to well-informed reviews, publish their own fiction serially, and dissect the state of pop culture with the careful attention otherwise reserved only for the academy. And then there are the wild romantics, spiritual nonconformists, dogged reporters, and edgy anthropologists who will always be many things, but only very seldomly “brand safe.”

How many more great minds have been missed by the constraints of the ad model? How many life-changing creations were never conceived?

Advertising had little to do with helping these voices come to life. It is energy that was previously hidden. Indeed, under the ad-focused model that has shaped media for generations, many of these creators would never have considered trying to make a living from this work. Now they can look at ad revenue in a different light—as an option rather than a master.

We’ve spent two decades exploring what advertising can do for online media. Some of the results inspire awe: trillion-dollar companies, individuals with audiences larger than countries, and some of the most entertaining content ever made. But that world, represented by the early summer swarms on Cannes’s rocky beaches, has limitations. It concentrates power in the hands of a few platform rulers, puts the audience’s needs below the advertiser’s, and strips creators of ownership.

In any case, that world is starting to look old, and a new world is emerging. While it will have its own imperfections, it offers so much promise. What will it look like when we’ve spent two decades exploring what direct payments can do for art and media?

There are millions of new voices waiting to be discovered, and incredible new works about to be revealed. New supply chains, factories, and sub-economies are starting to come online. And if you zoom in for a close-up, you’ll see, in undeniable detail, the birth of a new cultural economy—this one in service of creators and their audiences.

IV. Beautiful Shores

The sun has sunk low and slipped behind a cloud, accompanied by a faint breeze, as black-tied waiters at the Hôtel Belles Rives pour rosé from magnums into our glasses. Ten of us are seated around a circular table on the hotel’s deck with an enchanting view of the bay, the lights of Cannes sparkling on the headland across the water. It’s the first night of the festival—but the last for me—and we’re hosting a quiet dinner for creators and agents who are interested in Substack but don’t yet know it deeply. At the end of a day of relentless heat, loud music, and hardcore networking, we’re all finally appreciating a moment of calm.

“Wow, we can actually have a real conversation here,” says a creator whose TikTok audience tops a million.

About 100 years ago, F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, briefly lived in a villa that became this hotel. During that tumultuous period of his life—marked by his alcoholism and her madness—he started writing the tortured romance Tender Is the Night, one of his great novels. We’ve put a copy of the book at everyone’s seat.

As the host, it’s my job to propose a toast. I raise my glass and speak of how media power changes when creators own their audience relationships. “Instead of working for the algorithms,” I say, “the algorithms can work for you.”

We clink glasses, we drink, we eat. Twilight turns to night.

I now know what I’m doing here. Next time we come back, I promise myself, we’ll host more dinners.