IAB Europe closed out Cannes Lions 2026 on June 26 with a week that mixed practical AI skepticism, a progress report on connected television standards, and an argument that human relationships still power the advertising industry's most durable deals.

The Brussels-based trade body hosted four main events across the five-day festival, running from June 22 to 26 in Cannes, France. Sessions ranged from an AI and commerce media breakfast co-hosted with Particular Audience on the opening morning to a retail media panel aboard the Criteo HQ Yacht on the final day. According to IAB Europe, the week was unified by a single underlying observation: that technology is changing quickly, but the connections between people remain the mechanism through which the industry actually moves.

The assessment is worth noting in context. Cannes Lions 2026 was dominated by AI product launches, agentic buying announcements, and platform deal-making at a density that PPC Land tracked through the entire week. Against that backdrop, IAB Europe's framing stands apart - not as a rejection of automation, but as a reminder that the industry's standard-setting, policy development, and measurement work depends on practitioners who are willing to sit in a room together and hash out shared definitions.

AI adoption: inconsistent, contested, and already reshaping shopping

The week opened on June 22 with an AI and commerce media breakfast, co-hosted in partnership with Particular Audience. The session brought together brands, retailers, and technology companies to examine where AI stands in practice - not where it is projected to be.

According to IAB Europe, one of the clearest takeaways was that AI adoption remains uneven. Businesses are not moving in unison. The divergence exists not just across different sectors but within individual organisations, where one team may be running automated AI-driven campaigns while another is still working with manual processes. That internal fragmentation is a meaningful operational challenge for enterprise advertisers and agencies trying to build consistent playbooks.

The panel also addressed the shopping journey directly. According to IAB Europe, AI systems are reducing the number of options shown to consumers while making those options more relevant. The implication for marketers is structural. If an AI system presents two or three products rather than a page of twenty, the brands that appear in that shortlist capture the transaction. Those that do not are effectively invisible to the buyer. The filters that determine which brands surface - product metadata, reviews, digital presence, and reputation - therefore become more commercially consequential than they have been in an environment where human shoppers might browse widely.

That argument fits with a wider pattern PPC Land has tracked in the weeks before Cannes. IAB Australia's 2026 agentic AI search report described a purchase funnel collapsing into seconds in an agentic environment. An AI agent handling discovery, comparison, and transaction within a single session compresses what previously required multiple touchpoints. Brands that are not structured in ways those agents can parse are not merely disadvantaged - they are absent from the transaction entirely.

For retailers specifically, according to IAB Europe, the discussion pointed to data as the durable competitive advantage. Retailers with strong foundations across loyalty programmes, customer insights, and retail media will be better positioned to extract value from AI than those without it. And AI's role in retail media is not displacement. According to IAB Europe's report of the session, the consensus was that AI would reshape retail media rather than replace it - creating more personalised and connected experiences where the underlying human relationship between retailer and shopper still anchors the system.

The speakers at that opening session included James Taylor from Particular Audience, Marie-Clare Puffett from IAB Europe, Alice Anson from Nectar 360, Drew Cashmore from Vantage, Nicole Lesinski from Nestle USA, Suzy Knight from Women in Retail Media, Paul Dahill from Koddi, and Rory McDonald from The Warehouse Group.

CTV in Europe: a patchwork of markets and a framework under construction

The second day of the week focused on connected television. IAB Europe hosted a CTV Leaders Breakfast in partnership with Nielsen, opening with a panel featuring Alex Kozlof from IAB UK, Michael Murrins from Nielsen, and Marie-Clare Puffett from IAB Europe.

The central characterisation of the European CTV market, according to IAB Europe, was a patchwork - markets at different levels of maturity, adopting technology and trading infrastructure at different speeds. That fragmentation is simultaneously a complication and a source of opportunity. Markets that are further along can offer a practical model for those still building out their programmatic CTV capabilities.

What the conversation was specifically not about, according to IAB Europe's summary, was standardising the editorial or commercial choices any individual market has made. The framing was around comparability - shared definitions, common measurement references, and consistent standards that make it possible to evaluate results across markets without requiring every market to operate identically.

IAB Europe also shared progress on its CTV Measurement Framework and transparency principles during the session. The framework was developed as part of the organisation's broader CTV Working Group work, which PPC Land has covered in depth since IAB Europe published its Guide to Programmatic for CTV on April 4, 2026. That guide documented 18 CTV-validated consent management platforms and 466 TCF-registered vendors supporting CTV environments, and was developed jointly by IAB Europe's CTV Working Group and Programmatic Working Group.

According to IAB Europe's Cannes debrief, the next step for the framework is adoption - making it meaningful in the actual market rather than leaving it as a document. That distinction matters. The European CTV advertising sector has produced substantial documentation over the past two years, including IAB Spain's harmonisation guide for bid request parameters, Alliance Digitale's technical standards for France, and IAB Europe's own attribution analysis published in March 2026. The challenge is not that definitions are absent but that adoption across platforms, publishers, and measurement vendors remains incomplete.

The broader context is quantified by the numbers. According to data cited across multiple industry reports tracked by PPC Land, CTV's share of total media budgets reached 26% in 2026, up three percentage points year-over-year. More than half of marketers expect over 60% of their CTV buys to occur programmatically this year. Yet 70% of advertisers in IAB Europe's January 2026 survey reported frustration with performance measurement. A channel can be growing rapidly in budget allocation while the tools for evaluating that spending lag substantially behind.

Platform power, AI, and the macro picture

IAB Europe's Chief Economist, Daniel Knapp, appeared on board the VIA Netherlands Clipper to present a session titled "Who Controls Growth? Platform Power, AI and Europe's Advertising Economy." The session offered a macro-level reading of the market - not a product briefing but an independent economic analysis of how platform dominance, AI investment, and regulatory pressure are reshaping where money flows in European digital advertising.

Knapp's role at IAB Europe has included compiling the spending figures that underpin the organisation's key market assessments. He produced the data behind the finding that European retail media spending reached 13.7 billion euros in 2024, representing 21.1% growth, published by PPC Land in October 2025. The projection at the time called for the market to reach 20.8 billion euros in 2026 and 28.8 billion euros by 2028.

IAB Europe's Data and Innovation Strategist, Dimitris Beis, also presented during the week at Campaign House on AI and its implications for advertising innovation. Beis has been central to IAB Europe's work explaining agentic advertising infrastructure - PPC Land covered his March 2026 explainer video on what scaling agentic advertising actually requires, from individual agents through multi-agent coordination and up to full ecosystem deployment.

Cloud Conversation and the value of candid exchange

Among the week's more informal moments, IAB Europe co-hosted a lunch session with new member AUDIENCES. Rob McLaughlin, Founder and CEO of AUDIENCES, hosted what IAB Europe's report described as a "Cloud Conversation" - a structured but candid discussion around the systems powering modern media and marketing.

The session fits a broader pattern at Cannes, where some of the most substantive exchanges happen not in formal panels but in settings that allow participants to speak freely. IAB Europe's observation - that some of the most valuable moments at Cannes happen when people have space to speak openly - reflects a recurring tension at an event that has become simultaneously the advertising industry's most important annual gathering and one of its most heavily staged.

Retail media on the Criteo yacht: maturity, metrics, and what comes next

IAB Europe closed the week on June 26 with a breakfast session aboard the Criteo HQ Yacht focused on what the organisation called the "new rules of retail media." The session featured Marie-Clare Puffett, Alice Anson from Nectar 360, Justin Sandee from bol.com, Alex Crowe from Criteo, and Angela Myers from Goodway Group.

The discussion addressed retail media at a particular moment in its development. European retail media spending has passed the point of being a projectable opportunity and become a measurable budget line. IAB Europe's work on the sector - including retail media best practice guides published in July 2025 - has been building standardised frameworks for how buyers and networks evaluate campaign performance.

According to IAB Europe, one clear takeaway from the yacht session was that the right technology stack is a prerequisite for retail media's next phase. Alex Crowe from Criteo argued that having the right infrastructure in place is fundamental to unlocking more scalable opportunities with AI. That argument arrives in a specific context for Criteo. The Paris-based company has been navigating a difficult stretch - as documented at PPC Land since the client situation first emerged in May 2025 - where two retail media clients significantly reduced their scope of services, creating a headwind of approximately 75 million dollars across the first ten months of 2026. Despite that, its Q1 2026 media spend crossed 1 billion dollars in a single quarter for the first time.

The session also surfaced a broader debate about what retail media is actually being asked to prove. According to IAB Europe, the industry is moving beyond ROAS - return on ad spend - as the primary benchmark. Retail media can contribute at points in the customer journey that do not resolve into an immediate purchase. Capturing that contribution requires different metrics: incrementality measurement, upper-funnel attribution, and cross-channel reporting that connects a retail media impression to a sale that may happen days later through a different channel.

That measurement problem is not new. IAB Europe opened public comment on updated Commerce Media Measurement Standards in October 2025, specifically to address a situation where 78% of stakeholders identified media measurement as requiring industry alignment and 69% cited attribution standardisation. The standards attempted to define incrementality, establish refined measurement funnels with distinct definitions for gross and net sales, and expand coverage to quick commerce for the first time.

What the Cannes conversation added was the dimension of collaboration. According to IAB Europe, shared understanding between brands, retailers, and technology partners - and clearer measurement frameworks that all sides can interpret consistently - is the mechanism through which retail media proves its value as investment scales.

The industry still runs on people

IAB Europe closed its Cannes summary with an observation that sits at an angle to most of the week's announcements. After five days of AI product launches, agentic infrastructure discussions, and platform deal-making, the organisation argued that the industry is still powered by the exchanges that happen in person - the conversations over breakfast, the ideas shared in roundtables, the partnerships formed at the margin of formal sessions.

That argument is not a rejection of automation. IAB Europe has been among the most active producers of agentic advertising documentation in Europe, having published its agentic scaling explainer in March 2026 and its Guide to Programmatic for CTV in April 2026. The point is a narrower one: that the standard-setting and policy work those documents represent requires human coordination of a kind that does not yet have an automated substitute.

Whether that remains true as agentic systems mature is one of the live questions in the industry. For now, the evidence from Cannes Lions 2026 is that the Croisette still draws the people who make decisions about where hundreds of billions of euros in advertising spending go - and that IAB Europe's sessions contributed substantively to the conversations those people are having.

Timeline

  • July 8, 2025 - IAB Europe holds its Virtual Programmatic Day H1 2025, documenting first-half European programmatic momentum and identifying retail media and CTV as key growth areas (PPC Land)
  • July 15, 2025 - IAB Europe publishes updated 101 Guide to Retail and Commerce Media and best practice guides for buyers and networks across 31 European markets (PPC Land)
  • October 7-14, 2025 - IAB Europe releases retail media statistics showing European spending at 13.7 billion euros with 21.1% growth and updates its Pan-European Retail and Commerce Media Landscape Map (PPC Land)
  • October 9, 2025 - IAB Europe opens public comment on updated Commerce Media Measurement Standards V2 and flexible ad format guidelines, with 78% of stakeholders citing measurement alignment as a priority (PPC Land)
  • January 2026 - IAB Europe's inaugural Attitudes to Digital Advertising Report finds nearly 70% of respondents identify CTV as a top opportunity while 70% report frustration with performance measurement across 27 European markets
  • March 12, 2026 - IAB Europe publishes agentic advertising explainer covering single-agent and multi-agent architectures, with Dimitris Beis laying out scaling conditions and risks (PPC Land)
  • March 11-14, 2026 - IAB Europe's CTV Working Group publishes Q&A on measurement and attribution challenges, finding CTV constrained by fragmented identifiers and the absence of a universal cross-screen measurement framework (PPC Land)
  • April 4, 2026 - IAB Europe publishes Guide to Programmatic for CTV, documenting 18 validated CTV consent management platforms and 466 TCF-registered vendors, developed jointly by the CTV and Programmatic Working Groups (PPC Land)
  • April 30, 2026 - IAB Europe holds its Virtual Programmatic Day 2026 at Google's London offices, with panels on CTV measurement and the growth algorithm of programmatic advertising (PPC Land)
  • June 22, 2026 - Cannes Lions 2026 opens; IAB Europe launches the week with an AI and Commerce Media Breakfast co-hosted with Particular Audience, covering AI adoption gaps, shopping journey compression, and data as competitive moat for retailers
  • June 23, 2026 - IAB Europe hosts CTV Leaders Breakfast in partnership with Nielsen; shares progress on CTV Measurement Framework; Daniel Knapp presents on platform power and the macro-economics of European advertising
  • June 24, 2026 - IAB Europe co-hosts Cloud Conversation lunch with new member AUDIENCES, hosted by Founder and CEO Rob McLaughlin
  • June 26, 2026 - IAB Europe closes Cannes Lions week aboard the Criteo HQ Yacht with a breakfast discussion on retail media maturity, measurement beyond ROAS, and the role of collaboration in proving channel value

Summary

Who: IAB Europe, the Brussels-based trade association representing the European digital marketing and advertising ecosystem, along with partner organisations Particular Audience, Nielsen, and AUDIENCES, and speakers from Nectar 360, Vantage, Nestle USA, Women in Retail Media, Koddi, The Warehouse Group, IAB UK, bol.com, Criteo, and Goodway Group.

What: IAB Europe hosted four main sessions during Cannes Lions 2026 - an AI and commerce media breakfast, a CTV leaders breakfast, a macro-economic presentation on platform power in European advertising, and a closing retail media discussion aboard the Criteo HQ Yacht. The sessions covered AI adoption inconsistency across businesses, the current state of CTV measurement framework adoption in Europe, and the maturation of retail media from a ROAS-focused channel to a broader full-funnel one.

When: The sessions took place between June 22 and June 26, 2026, during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. IAB Europe published its debrief on June 26, 2026.

Where: Cannes, France, specifically on the Croisette and at various festival venues including a VIA Netherlands Clipper, the Criteo HQ Yacht, and the Campaign House.

Why: Cannes Lions is the advertising industry's principal annual gathering for senior marketing and media decision-makers, making it the highest-concentration moment for IAB Europe to advance conversations on CTV measurement adoption, retail media standardisation, and AI's practical role in commerce - all areas where the organisation has active working groups and published frameworks that require industry buy-in to become operational.