{"id":924274,"date":"2026-08-02T09:14:58","date_gmt":"2026-08-02T14:14:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/08\/02\/media-buying-briefing-how-sport-beach-became-a-big-cannes-lions-destination-and-a-business\/"},"modified":"2026-08-02T09:14:58","modified_gmt":"2026-08-02T14:14:58","slug":"media-buying-briefing-how-sport-beach-became-a-big-cannes-lions-destination-and-a-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/08\/02\/media-buying-briefing-how-sport-beach-became-a-big-cannes-lions-destination-and-a-business\/","title":{"rendered":"Media Buying Briefing: How Sport Beach became a big Cannes Lions destination \u2014 and a business"},"content":{"rendered":"

Digiday covers the latest from marketing and media at the annual Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. More from the series \u2192<\/a><\/p>\n

Sport Beach kicked off as Stagwell\u2019s beachside activation at the 2023 Cannes Lions festival but has since grown into a standalone business unit<\/a> in the challenger holding company as its popularity at Cannes Lions surged each year.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Beth Sidhu, CEO of Sport Beach, and one of its earliest architects, recalled in an interview with Digiday that the idea of Sport Beach originated from a slide sent to her in the summer of 2022 by Evin Shutt, the Stagwell agency 72andSunny\u2019s longtime CEO and partner, outlining a concept the agency\u2019s founder Glenn Cole and chief growth officer Damaune Journey had worked up.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cRegan [Considine, Stagwell\u2019s vp of brand] and I then spent all of the fall of 2022 turning it from one slide into a real idea, and getting the buy-in from the CEOs at Stagwell, and getting support and buy-in from [holdco CEO] Mark Penn, and, of course getting our Lions friends on board as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

Convincing various other stakeholders wasn\u2019t the easiest job, Sidhu acknowledged. \u201cMany people had raised eyebrows about the idea of Sport Beach from the start \u2026 There was a lot of skepticism, and a lot of me running around promising people it wasn\u2019t going to be Fyre Festival<\/a> 2.0.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Monday morning June 19, 2023 at 7 am, Sport Beach opened, to held breath. \u201cI think we knew we had a hit on our hands by 11 am,\u201d said Sidhu, observing the lines to get in.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember looking across the beach and locking eyes with Beth and being like, so this worked \u2014 the unspoken \u2018So this is a thing,\u2019\u201d recalled Considine. \u201cIt was very clear from hour four that we had built something.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sidhu credits Lauren Phillips, currently vp of athlete partnerships at Sport Beach the business, for bringing Olympic track-and-field star Allyson Felix to the Beach that first year, who was a standout even though some 30 athletes made appearances.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cNone of us had ever been to Cannes Lion before,\u201d said Phillips, who accompanied Felix. \u201cWe did a sponsored run, and we were definitely surprised by the amount of people and energy and excitement \u2026 And then Allyson spoke on stage, and the whole entire beach was pretty packed.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

In many ways it\u2019s the athlete celebrities, from annual regular Carmelo Anthony (basketball hero and wine connoisseur) to Felix to tennis stars Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova to WNBA legend Sue Bird, and the NFL\u2019s Kelce brothers that drew in the crowds year after year. \u201cAll of those people are still in the Sport Beach family in some way, shape, or form,\u201d said Sidhu, who declined to mention which ones were more high maintenance. \u201cAre there some athletes who are more delightful than others? Sure, as is the case for all things.\u201d<\/p>\n

And yet, according to Considine, it\u2019s the athletes who see themselves as more than just that who end up having the positive experience from coming to Sport Beach. \u201cThat\u2019s really where we find success, when we give them opportunities to come helmets off and be business people, and spokespeople, and creators, and storytellers, and all of those things,\u201d she explained. \u201cThose tend to be the athletes that have the best experience, like Allyson\u201d who\u2019s arguably not the same kind of household name as a Tom Brady or LeBron James.<\/p>\n

In successive years, the Beach has added basketball and pickleball courts, played golf, hockey and added clubs for running and swimming. And all of this has been quite the draw for attendees, like last year when track and field star Noah Lyles (who Sidhu reminded is the fastest man on the planet) played hoops with Pepsi CMO Mark Kirkham \u2014 a favorite memory for Sport Beach\u2019s organizers. This year\u2019s feature: turf on the beach, in honor of the World Cup soccer tournament happening across North America at the moment.<\/p>\n

The pickleball court even attracted renowned chef Jose Andres to spontaneously show up because he saw the court from his hotel room \u2014 according to Sidhu he\u2019s no slouch on the court.<\/p>\n

So has Sport Beach outgrown its Cannes Lions origins? Yes and no, explained Sidhu who took the helm as CEO of the business in January 2026. \u201cCannes is certainly our Super Bowl, and I don\u2019t see that changing anytime soon,\u201d she said. And yet, \u201cSport Beach really has moved past Cannes as a company. We do live events around the world and around the calendar. We do content and community on an ongoing basis. So we love being in Cannes, and it is an incredibly special place. But when we say Sport Beach, we mean the company.\u201d<\/p>\n

Report from Vivatech, the serious side of European industry events<\/h2>\n

These days, Publicis Groupe wants to be seen not just as an agency holding company, but as a tech services provider. That ambition isn\u2019t just visible in its recent M&A strategy<\/a> but in the way it presents itself to prospective clients \u2013 something clear to see at VivaTech, the tech conference founded a decade ago by the French holdco and chairman emeritus Maurice L\u00e9vy.<\/p>\n

Though there\u2019s less glamour than South By Southwest \u2013 instead of the indie filmmakers, it\u2019s got the European Commission \u2013 the Paris event aims to provide a similar fulcrum for the European tech and business scene. This year, speakers featured Jeff Bezos \u2013 talking about rockets, trajectory and lunar bases, rather than Amazon\u2019s adtech ambitions \u2013 sharing a set list with Tim Berners-Lee and former Meta comms chief and British deputy prime minister Nick Clegg.<\/p>\n

Some marketing execs use the event as a warm-up before Cannes Lions, but it\u2019s a very different milieu. Alongside dozens of startups and scaleup companies from across the Continent, Publicis was the only marketing services group with an exhibit, set up near similar conference camps brought by Adobe and Microsoft. The execs on the floor were, inevitably, using it as a stage to tout the Groupe\u2019s AI expertise to an audience keen to find corporate talismans on this side of the Atlantic.<\/p>\n

Europe is short on tech talismans for a reason, however, even as its governments move to diverge from U.S. dominance (France\u2019s domestic intelligence service ditched Palantir for a French company and the U.K. is preparing to ban access to social media apps for under-16s). L\u00e9vy asked Clegg whether European companies might ever catchup with American market leaders. \u201cEurope is not going to close the gap. We don\u2019t have the capital, we don\u2019t have the scale,\u201d he said. Reinvention is possible, as Bezos\u2019 second life in the space industry proves. But if Publicis wants to benefit from tech\u2019s aura, it\u2019ll have to find ways to escape the European gravity well.<\/p>\n

Might that escape velocity be provided by Possible Europe, whose 2027 premiere in Lisbon on Oct. 12-14 will be enabled by Cannes Lions veteran Gabrielle Perez \u2014 she was named vp of Possible Europe last week. Let the competition begin. \u2014 Sam Bradley<\/em><\/p>\n

Color by numbers<\/h2>\n

There\u2019s a reason sports is leading the way in this year\u2019s upfront negotiations \u2014 ratings for major events have been through the proverbial roof of late. Look no further than the NBA Finals, which saw the New York Knicks claim their first title in 53 years, and attracted an average of more than 20 million viewers<\/strong> over the five-game series. Last time that was accomplished was 1998 when Michael Jordan was still playing. The series also generated a record 15 billion views (and still growing) on social media<\/strong>, the most ever for an NBA Finals and nearly triple the previous record set in 2025. (Oh, and the parade along New York City\u2019s Canyon of Heroes attracted more than 2 million fans on June 18, according to the NYPD.)<\/p>\n

Likewise, the World Cup is beating both English-language and Spanish-language ratings records, with team USA drawing a combined 27.5 million viewers<\/strong> across Fox, Telemundo and Tubi in its first group stage match against Paraguay on June 12.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Takeoff & landing <\/h2>\n