Cannes Lions is about drinking rosé, networking on yachts, and, increasingly, sports.

For the third year in a row, the company Stagwell is hosting Sport Beach at the annual festival of advertising creativity, where athletes and marketers will gather for the majority of the week to discuss sports and its role in culture.

Stagwell isn’t the only company offering sports-oriented programming this year: Deep Blue Sport + Entertainment, which is focused on driving more commercial investment into women’s sports, is back for its second year, upgrading from a house to a yacht club, while AI fan intelligence company Sports Innovation Lab is hosting an event about fan data with LiveRamp.

This year, though, Stagwell has received the title of “official Lions sport partner,” which festival organizers said is aimed at “bringing more sport to the festival than ever before.”

“That’s the first time the designation has existed, and we think that is a reflection of how important sport is,” Stagwell Chief Brand Officer Beth Sidhu told Marketing Brew. “We are focused on being the premier and premium home for all sports [at Cannes]...We want world-class athletes connected with world-class brand marketers on stage, on the court, to do business together, to talk about the power of sport, and to celebrate this incredible global universe.”

Ahead of marketers’ descent on the French Riviera this week, we spoke to Sidhu about what Sport Beach has in store in terms of its roster of athletes, brand partners, and activities. For those who can’t make it, heed the following warning: you may experience FOMO.

Continue reading here.—AM

If you’re in the south of France this week for Cannes Lions, be sure to say hi to Alyssa Meyers, our very own senior reporter who will be filing dispatches from there all week. If you’re not in the south of France, you can always say “Merci beaucoup!” at the coffee shop before reading this.

Hello! Or rather, bonjour! I don’t actually speak any French, but hopefully I’ll learn fast, because I’m officially on the ground in Cannes. It’s not helping that I’m running on exactly zero hours of sleep after a red-eye flight. If you saw me falling asleep in the audience at a panel, no you didn’t.

Unsurprisingly, my first stop of the day was at Stagwell’s Sport Beach, where I listened to a panel about how sports leagues and organizations like the NBA, International Olympic Committee, and International Cricket Council use AI for a variety of tasks like translating broadcasts into different languages and improving fan experiences.

This afternoon, I’m looking forward to a couple of meetings around the Croisette, and in the evening, I’ll be having dinner on the beach with the folks at Deep Blue Sports + Entertainment. I’ve also RSVPed to approximately 1 million concerts and welcome parties, but TBD how long I’ll be able to fight the jet lag. If you do catch me out and about, though, please don’t hesitate to say hi!

I’ll be spending the week running up and down the Croisette—quite literally, in the case of my morning jogs, and also as I try to make it to all the meetings and panels I’m eager to attend.

MVP of the day: Stagwell, for providing me with my first and much-needed iced coffee of the day. (Fine, I had two.)

Least valuable player: My airplane seatmate, who slept through the entire flight. I’m jealous.—AM

Automated clips and trailers powering content recommendation on a streaming service? Stranger things have happened.

Netflix has received a patent for technology that automatically extracts “compelling portions” of shows and movies and collates clips designed to encourage viewers to check out more programming, according to a patent published by the United States Patent and Trademark Office last month.

The application notes something that is probably obvious to most TV and movie fans, which is that clips can be a useful way to entice viewers to check out additional programming. Typically, a member of an editorial team at a streamer works on compiling clips that showcase the most eye-catching scenes, according to the application, but it notes that such work can be laborious and time-consuming, especially as a platform’s content library grows.

Beyond that, the humans tasked with identifying clips could bring their subjective viewpoints to the task, a “drawback” that could muddle the selection process, the application reads.

“If the editorial assistant watching the media content item has an aversion to the main actor in the media content item, then the editorial assistant may subconsciously avoid selecting compelling sequences of events that feature the main actor,” the patent notes. “As a result, the resulting clips can have sub-optimal effectiveness.”

Netflix’s patented tech is designed to automate that work. The tool is a “clip application” that seeks to identify “compelling” content based on certain criteria (like when specific characters appear onscreen) and cluster shot sequences from that content to build clips, according to the patent.

Read more here.—JS

Executive moves across the industry.

• Peloton appointed its fourth CMO in five years: Megan Imbres, formerly of Apple, Netflix, and Amazon Ads.
• Indeed, the online jobs listing platform, hired tech marketer James Whitemore as CMO.
• Warner Bros. Discovery brought on Guy Griggs, a former New York Times ad sales exec, to serve as SVP, CNN ad sales and client partnerships.
• Reddit’s VP of communications, Anna Soellner, is exiting the company, she announced in a post on LinkedIn.