Cannes Lions bills itself as the biggest party in the marketing calendar. Evan Shapiro just called it a “f**king schlep” – and he was paid to be there.
The independent television and film producer, known in industry circles as the Media Cartographer, didn’t hold back on the Media Tarts podcast during a conversation with host Wade Kingsley.
The five-day International Festival of Creativity, Shapiro argued, has become a monument to an industry eating its own tail – one where the same companies gutting their workforce are the ones pouring millions into beachfront real estate to show off the technology replacing those very jobs.
“Omnicom laid off thousands of people in the last six to eight months. They’re going to lay off more. They’re closing three legendary agencies right now,” Shapiro said.
“And they built a three-million-dollar structure on the beach on the Mediterranean Sea to demonstrate their AI products that are taking the f**king jobs.”
For Shapiro, the maths simply doesn’t add up.
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“I don’t get it,” he said. “So the cognitive dissonance: while tens of thousands of people are losing their jobs because of AI, because of a lack of vision, and the consolidation crash happening to the whole economic-industrial complex – it’s just f**king bonkers.”
Source: Evan Shapiro’s Substack, Media, War & Peace
It’s a position that comes with a personal cost, and Shapiro knows it.
“I say this at the risk of my own revenue,” he said. “I made a lot of money at Cannes this year. People flew me there to moderate panels and say shit like this on stage to be entertaining. But I am aware that I might not be invited back next year because I’m saying all this s**t.”
You don’t need Cannes to network
Shapiro isn’t arguing the festival is worthless – he’s arguing it’s wildly, expensively unnecessary. Real business, he conceded, does get done on the Croisette. What he can’t square is the price tag attached to doing it there specifically.
“There’s a lot of great networking there. Business actually gets done,” he said. “But it’s the only conference that ever takes place there that spends a hundred-plus million dollars building structures on the beach to house meetings that could take place in New York, London, Los Angeles, or Paris any day of the f**king week.”
The backdrop, as Shapiro frames it, makes the spend harder to defend rather than easier: an industry that has shed 100,000 jobs over the past five years, still finding the budget to build temporary palaces on the sand.
Cannes Lions will no doubt survive the criticism – festivals built on champagne and superyachts tend to.
But Shapiro’s parting shot lingers longer than the rosé: an industry can keep building bigger beach houses, or it can explain to the people it just laid off why it needed to.
The episode is scheduled to go live at around 1pm today.