Axios Event: Media leaders share how AI is transforming the industry

CANNES, France – Publishers are thinking strategically about deals, infrastructure and brand identity to keep up with AI's rapidly increasing influence, speakers said at an Axios event at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

Why it matters: In an industry in which content is king, publishers are harnessing AI to their advantage while navigating new challenges for intellectual property and monetization.

Axios' Sara Fischer spoke with Time magazine CEO Jessica Sibley, Vox Media co-founder, chair and CEO Jim Bankoff, Adweek CEO Will Lee and Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince at the June 19 event, sponsored by HumanVC.

What they're saying: Time's AI strategy is centered on three guiding principles, Sibley said: infrastructure to protect its intellectual property, partnerships around content and distribution, and monetization.

• "Don't let AI happen to you, let AI happen for you," Sibley said. She adds that Time has doubled down on what it calls "capital J journalism," and AI can't replace that.
• "For us, it's about productivity, it's about helping the consumer experience," said Bankoff. "Not through content creation, not by having AI voices of our podcasters or things like that. We're not trying to directly replace the creation process. What we are trying to do, though, is create a better audience experience by helping with discovery."

State of play: Publishers are facing concerns about the effects of declining search traffic on advertising revenue, posing an existential threat to the industry.

• AI has transformed search, Prince said. "The future of the web is going to be more and more like AI, and that means that people are going to be reading the summaries of your content, not the original content," he said.
• "When you see Google referrals go down like 30% in a matter of a couple of months, or two or three months, that's going to hurt a lot," Lee said.
• Brands can navigate this by offering unique value. "In 2025, if the brand of your media business doesn't have a super clear point of differentiation, I think you're really screwed," he said.

Content from the sponsored segments:

In View From the Top conversations, VuePlanner CEO and co-founder John Cobb named YouTube as a hub for marketers to hone in on as the largest streaming platform and the second-largest search engine behind Google.

• "If you look at it, it's TV, it's radio, it's social, it's retail media, it's creator commerce, it's a number of different things," Cobb said. "And so the way I like to look at it is really the cultural engine of this generation, and slowly becoming all generations. .
• "I think the biggest challenge that marketers really need to ask themselves is, how do I show up across these experiences that people are doing on YouTube across the screens, the formats … really the content that matters."

In a separate conversation, Adelaide CEO and co-founder Marc Guldimann said AI will make it easier for advertisers to create any type of video content they want.

• "That's going to drive choice to user experience, which is effectively what's the ad load," Guldimann said. "When people choose the content they consume based on ad load, it's going to have downward pressure on supply, which is going to mean cost is going to go up."