We bring this week’s #MediaSnack from Cannes in the South of France where David and Tom are attending the annual Festival of Creativity, which gathers some of the world’s leading marketers and executives from the world’s leading agencies and vendors. It was historically an advertising festival but in the last decade has been overrun somewhat by big spending media and technology companies. We broadcast from the beachside Cabana of the International Advertising Association (IAA), the sun is shining and the dark clouds that had been gathering over the media industry recently have definitely been left at home. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pREKAnwlqoThis allows for more positive, collaborative and unguarded conversations on the sensitive issues facing the industry. We highlight the important role Cannes plays to bring together the industry to celebrate good work (for only around 10% of the time) and engage in meaningful and different conversation with many different people you don’t typically get to talk with in the same way. We had the opportunity to talk with many senior client, agency and vendor leaders about the challenges and opportunities for the global media industry. #RebateGate was being talked about a lot, but the tone of the conversations has changed in most cases (thanks to Cannes), becoming less emotional and more open, sensible and rational. We announce the publication of the ID Comms 2016 Global Media Talent Report and talk to agency leader Toby Jenner, Global Chief Operating Officer of Mediacom about his agency’s approach to identifying, motivating and retaining the best industry talent. We discuss some of the findings and consider the current state of advertisers’ media capabilities and how that might need to evolve over time. http://idcomms.com/global-media-talent-report/ Finally we discuss the launch of the largest UK media review of the year. Communications groups BT and EE merged in early 2016 and currently split their media planning and buying across two GroupM companies (Maxus and MEC respectively). The combined account is worth £160m in billings and will be a big prize for the winner. We understand giants WPP, Publicis and Omnicom have been invited to fight it out.