U of Digital Newsletter - 6/18/25 (free)

June 12th-June 17th

Below is a roundup of last week’s notable industry news, with summaries and our opinions. Cannes we partner?

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Top Story 👁️

What’s Happening At Cannes?
Source: Multiple

Summary: The Cannes Lions International Festival of Digital Advertising Creativity kicked off Monday in the South of France, and we're seeing all kinds of interesting hookups:

• Amazon and Roku Unite to Target 80M Authenticated Households🔒: Beginning in Q4, advertisers will be able to use Amazon’s demand-side platform (DSP) to combine user data from the Fire TV and Roku operating systems and Prime Video and The Roku Channel streaming apps. In testing, the shared data set boosted unique reach by 40% and reduced ad over-frequency by 30%. 

• Disney Advertising And Amazon Ads Join Forces To Give Streaming Buyers New Options: Amazon is also partnering with Disney. Disney's Real-Time Ad Exchange (DRAX) will be integrated with Amazon's DSP to give advertisers direct access to premium inventory across Disney+, ESPN, and Hulu while combining data from both companies for more precise targeting.

• Omnicom strikes partnerships at Cannes Lions with Disney and Walmart around harnessing live🔒: The Disney deal focuses on live sports, using Disney's "Magic Words" tool and The Trade Desk to trigger ads during key plays like touchdowns or lead changes. The Walmart partnership will match the retailer's purchase data to influencers' followers to identify influencers who can drive sales.

• Advertisers Can Soon Target CVS Shoppers on Reddit🔒: CVS and Reddit will combine data from CVS's 90M loyalty program members with Reddit's 108M daily active users in a clean room partnership launching in Q4. Advertisers will be able to target CVS shoppers on Reddit and track any resulting conversions. 

• Netflix, Yahoo in Pact to Expand Programmatic Ad Sales: Netflix is adding Yahoo DSP as a new DSP partner, joining The Trade Desk, DV360, and Microsoft in enabling programmatic access to Netflix's ad inventory and audience data. The partnership will go live later this year across all 12 of Netflix's ad-supported countries.

Opinion: Turns out that a little rosé and sunshine get the partnership juices flowing!

The deals announced at Cannes represent a fundamental strategy shift away from companies wanting to build walled gardens and towards companies wanting to forge strategic partnerships. This shift is being driven by three trends: 

1. Marketers have Google fatigue

   Non-transparent walled gardens are not cool right now. Also, no company wants to end up in antitrust court.

2. Privacy is no longer a legitimate reason to put up walls

   For years, the walled gardens built moats by hoarding data behind their walls, often using privacy as cover. But the privacy movement in advertising seems to have run its course (long live cookies), at least for now.

3. Everyone wants AI, and AI wants as much data as possible

   AI is changing the ad game entirely—success now depends on accessing the largest possible data sets to train AI.

Amazon seems particularly leaned in to partnerships with their frenemies. It’s obvious that Amazon wants to be the next dominant player in the industry (à la Google), but it seems like they want to do so in more of a “hedged garden” way. Hence the partnerships with major competitors like Disney and Roku. When large rivals start sharing their crown jewels, it signals a tipping point where data collaboration beats data hoarding.

This shift is great for advertisers and the industry at large. It means no one company has so much leverage that it can shut partners out and ignore customer demands while continuing to amass market share. It means antitrust is (kind of) working. It means competition is healthy, which breeds partnerships, which creates more openness, which helps marketers, which lifts all boats. 

That these announcements dominated Cannes—a creativity festival—tells us everything about industry priorities. We're entering the “partnerships era”; where technical integration and data scale enables true marketing creativity.

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That’s It For This Week 👋

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