Every June, some of the most distracted people on earth gather on a strip of French coastline and quietly decide what the rest of us will watch, buy, and hum for the next year. An extremely honest field report on why Cannes works — and why we created a monster.
There is a stretch of road in the south of France, maybe two kilometers long, where, for one week in June, the global economy of attention compresses into one huge, sweaty, rosé-drinking meetup area. The Croisette.
On paper, it is a film festival, an advertising festival, a little secret gathering of music executives, platform founders, and tech people who all swear they are only here "for meetings."
Yes, it is a place where you finally find ads about ads — agencies making ads to win awards for ads, brands buying out the seafront to impress the very people who make seafront stands. It is completely ridiculous, and yet it is also so perfect.
Ofc it does get better once you find yourself at a villa party overlooking Cannes, together with people who imagine the thing, people who make the thing, people who pay for the thing, and people who smuggle in the people who distribute the thing. The world suddenly makes sense in a very weird way.
In the end, everything comes down to two things: the willingness to create stories, and the fact that people with ADHD simply connect faster and more intensely. As the bar to create stories for people working in the creative industry is very low, you find yourself in an entire city of like-minded people who fly across oceans just to end up at Martinez, not wanting the thing to stop.
You do not shake hands, you hug. You do not only take prebooked meetings — you float, and you run into each other as if you attract each other naturally. You also don't do big talk, because it feels like you've known each other for ages and you go straight to talking about world domination.
It is a safe bet to say that Cannes will become the epicenter of doing business for the years to come.
Ultimately, we created a monster: our villa parties, our stories, our business opportunities are now told extremely publicly and with gigantic pride — leaving anyone who loves doing business from home watching all of this with unbearable FOMO.
Super proud to see that we are so far beyond any payout infra out there, and we can't wait to solve all of your most gnarly accounting and payout problems until we meet again next year at Martinez.
