• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, June 21, 2023

CANNES -- "Cannes is back!," Jon Bond proclaimed in an Instagram post this week showing a photo of the ad industry packed "20 deep" outside the Gutter Bar.

His post optimized the leap from three years of remote/hybrid transitioning back to full-blown, in-real-life, up-close-and-personal contact at the ad industry's biggest annual gathering.

I was struck by just how close up attendees and speakers were getting while watching McCann chief Daryl Lee's kissy-kissy greetings this morning while moderating a conversation with actress and L'Oreal spokesperson Eva Longoria, followed by a panel discussion that also included McCann's Laura Simpson and L'Oreal's Blacna Juti (see photos below).

Or the visuals of the packed audiences inside the Palais' auditoriums, making me think that Cannes is indeed back (see below).

My dirty little secret is that I'm not actually among them, even though I've been posting with a "Cannes" dateline on my coverage this week, which has been entirely remote thanks to the Lions festival organizers' improvements in their streaming capabilities over recent years.

The truth is, Cannes was never a very good live reporting experience for me personally, as I spent much of my time shvitzing up and down the Croisette, juggling meetings at The Carlton, somewhere up in the hinterlands of the city's hills, or somewhere near the Palais.

And the truth is that my most productive coverage came while sitting in a big comfy lounge chair watching most of the presentations via closed-circuit feed inside the festival's pressroom.

And while I do miss the spontaneous pop-up press conferences from celebrities just showing up after their presentations, I'm finding the fully remote version of covering Cannes to be incredibly productive, because -- among other things -- I can still cover other things going on in the world of advertising and media while Cannes occupies the center of its universe for a week.

Interestingly, I did have an opportunity to travel to the conference virtually this week, not via a remote streaming feed, but via a virtual reality app developed by Virbela for PwC.

The virtual rendering, which can be experienced via a downloadable application, via VR headset tech, or simply via a web-based experience, was pretty cool, enabling me to explore the French Riviera via my web browser and personalized avatar (mine is the non-binary, dread-locked POC in the image below).

The virtual experience still isn't up to the IRL version, and not just because of the lack of rosé, but because VR still feels like an artifice to me, and instead of enhancing what you can do in person, it's just an inferior replica of it. At least so far.

Don't get me wrong, Virbela's technology is great. The fact that you can do it simply via browser, and that there's virtually no latency, are vast improvements over earlier versions, but I have to wonder why a year after the metaverse was the ad industry rage (replaced this year, by AI, of course), they spent the time and resources to develop a virtual Lions festival experience?