AI platforms quietly court advertisers at Cannes Lions 2025

AI platforms made their first quiet moves into advertising at Cannes Lions 2025, with companies like Perplexity and Anthropic sending ad executives to the festival for early-stage conversations with agencies and brands. The stealth approach signals AI platforms’ inevitable shift toward advertising revenue as their high infrastructure costs demand sustainable monetization strategies.

What you should know: Major AI platforms are laying the groundwork for advertising businesses despite maintaining low public profiles at the industry’s biggest marketing event.

• Perplexity sent Taz Patel, its head of advertising and shopping, to meet with agency and brand leads about the company’s current ad capabilities and future plans.
• Anthropic dispatched a team of ad executives to Cannes for the first time, including Lexie Barnhom, its head of influencer marketing.
• These conversations mirror the early outreach strategies Meta, Google, and Twitter used during their pre-advertising phases in the late 2000s.

Why this matters: The economics of AI platforms create inevitable pressure toward advertising monetization despite current user experience concerns.

• The specialized computer chips (GPUs), cloud computing, data storage systems, and top-tier engineering talent create unsustainable costs for AI companies.
• Advertising remains the only revenue stream large enough to support these massive infrastructure investments at scale.
• “People are moving from the single most monetized space across the web to a space that, at least in theory, would be much harder to monetize,” said Matthew Dacey, chief marketing officer at TripAdvisor, a travel booking platform.

The big picture: Marketing executives expect AI platforms’ advertising integration to accelerate rapidly, following the same playbook as previous tech giants.

• Client councils, advertising agency partnerships, and brand advisory groups are likely the next steps in AI platforms’ advertising courtship.
• “I would not be surprised if that was the play,” said Jim Mollica, chief marketing officer and president of luxury audio at Bose, who observed similar patterns during his time at Disney.
• “What always seems to happen in these moments is before they start taking ad dollars, they start having conversations to get information from people,” Mollica noted.

Key challenges ahead: Integrating advertising into AI platforms presents unique technical and user experience obstacles.

• Generative AI infrastructure costs remain crushing compared to traditional digital advertising platforms.
• Ad inventory doesn’t scale effectively yet, and most user queries are exploratory rather than commercial.
• Platforms must balance revenue generation with maintaining the utility, speed, and trust that attracted users initially.

What they’re saying: Industry leaders acknowledge both the inevitability and complexity of AI advertising integration.

• “If they don’t figure out how to get ads in there then they’re going to have big problems,” Dacey emphasized about AI platforms’ monetization challenges.
• “Whatever happens I think context becomes more significant because what they [AI platforms] know about the user allows them to surface ads in a far more relevant way than what happens today,” he added.
• One anonymous ad executive predicted increased AI platform presence: “As more of these solutions from those companies come out, we’re going to see more of them here.”

The bottom line: While AI platforms made their soft entry into advertising conversations at Cannes, converting curiosity into actual ad spending will require solving fundamental challenges around measurability, targeting, and brand safety that traditional buyers demand.