By Joshua John, Senior Director of DSP Strategy, Yahoo
Every year, the industry descends on the Croisette to celebrate creativity, close deals, and absorb the ambient signal of where advertising and media are heading. This year felt different, not because of any single announcement, but because the gap between what people are talking about and what they are actually executing has rarely been this consequential.
What I took away from Cannes wasn’t a highlight reel. It was a countdown. The conversations that dominated the week, around agentic AI, audience value, and outcomes-based buying, aren’t aspirational anymore. They’re the competitive battleground. And the window to establish a real position before Advertising Week is shorter than most players realize.
Here are the three bets I think the industry needs to make in the next 90 days.
The Agentic Head Start Is Over. Now Execution Is the Moat.
For the past 18 months, a handful of platforms and publishers have had the luxury of being early movers on agentic AI. That luxury is gone. Every DSP, every agency holding company, every scaled vendor now has an agentic roadmap. Most are still working through use cases. But that lag won’t last much longer.
The holding companies have made their moves. Marcel, Omni, Blu, WPP Open; these aren’t pilots anymore. Internal organizational changes are already happening to drive adoption at scale. The pattern is predictable: start with audience insights and discovery, move to measurement, then migrate to activation. That arc plays out faster than most agencies’ client conversations can keep up with.
The analogy that keeps sticking with me: the opportunity for DSPs and technology partners isn’t to be a meal delivery service, delivering a commoditized, fee-laden product someone else assembled. It’s to be an at-home meal kit: fresh, nutritious, customized, and with the buyer in control of the final mile. Agentic infrastructure should make buying smarter and simpler, not introduce a new layer of intermediaries taking rent.
There’s also a commercial reality to get comfortable with quickly: agents aren’t going to be free. As non-traditional partners find their way into DSP workflows via agentic integrations, fee conversations will follow. Smart platforms are already getting ahead of that structure. The ones that aren’t will be negotiating from a worse position by Q4.
The implication: thought leadership without product wins is noise. The platforms with real agent-to-agent interoperability and documented use cases, not just a Cannes presentation deck, will own the narrative going into Advertising Week.
First-Party Audiences Are the Most Underutilized Asset in Programmatic
Here’s a pattern worth naming: some of the most valuable capabilities in ad tech suffer from what I’d call internal familiarity discount. You’re so close to a capability that you stop communicating its value and the market assumes parity.
That’s where I think the industry is with first-party audiences. Not just Yahoo’s, but the broader category of scaled, deterministic, consent-based user data that certain DSPs and platforms are sitting on. When buyers who haven’t seen these capabilities up close encounter the actual granularity, the depth of signal, the transparency, the deterministic identity underneath it, the reaction isn’t incremental interest. It’s surprise.
That reaction tells me something important: the market has been underinformed, not underinterested.
The competitive dynamics make this more urgent. Agency first-party data deals are growing. Clean room activations are becoming standard in RFP language. Walled garden comparisons come up in virtually every planning conversation. If a platform has something genuinely differentiated and isn’t actively selling against those narratives, it’s leaving the market to define the category by default.
The short-term play is simple: get this capability in front of decision-makers who haven’t seen it. Not in a case study, but in a live environment where they can see what granularity actually means. The conversation will close itself.
Every Media Dollar is a Performance Dollar Now
If there was one macro theme that ran beneath every Cannes conversation across CTV, retail media, programmatic, measurement, it was this: the era of unmeasured media is effectively over.
CTV publishers know it. FOX/Tubi and Roku are doubling down on audience and outcome data to justify premium CPMs to performance advertisers. NBCU and Netflix are building toward outcomes-based models. The bet isn’t that they can out-target a DSP, it’s that they can tie premium environment to provable business outcomes.
The incrementality picture has matured too. New dynamic models and real-time optimization frameworks are moving beyond budget allocation into direct platform integrations. Algorithms that once required specialized intermediaries to develop and deploy can now be built by advertisers and agencies using natural language interfaces. The BYOA middleman layer, which was more valuable when setup was hard, is being compressed by platforms that make configuration genuinely accessible.
The practical implication for how buyers should be thinking heading into H2: the question is no longer which channels perform but am I set up to prove performance across all of them? Platform interoperability, measurement integration, and the proper configuration of objectives and goals at the campaign level aren’t implementation details. They’re the difference between campaigns that can be defended in a QBR and ones that can’t.
Cannes isn’t the moment you act. It’s the moment you decide what you’re going to act on. The signals this year were unusually clear: agentic execution, audience differentiation, and full-funnel accountability aren’t coming; they’re here, and the competitive positions are forming right now.
The question for the rest of the summer, leading into Advertising Week, is simple: which story do you want to tell?
Joshua John is Senior Director of DSP Strategy at Yahoo, where he focuses on the intersection of programmatic infrastructure, identity, and agentic buying.
