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By Nat Ives and Adrià Calatayud 

The owner of the Cannes Lions advertising festival in France has canceled the event, saying the coronavirus pandemic had made it impossible to go forward.

Ascential PLC had already postponed the festival to October from June. The next edition is now slated to run in June 2021.

The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is the most prominent event in advertising and marketing each year. Although it is built around an awards program, many attendees pay more attention to networking on the French Riviera. Media companies and tech giants such as Alphabet Inc.'s Google and Facebook Inc. set up spaces to promote themselves. Bytedance Inc.'s TikTok attended last year to raise its profile among advertisers and ad agencies.

But the pandemic has made companies deeply uncertain about how the year ahead will play out. Economies around the world have entered hibernation as countries try social distancing to slow the spread of the coronavirus, and millions of people have been thrown into unemployment.

The world's four largest ad groups -- WPP PLC, Publicis Groupe SA, Omnicom Group Inc. and Interpublic Group of Cos. -- have all either warned of coronavirus hits or withdrawn their guidance for 2020.

WPP, the world's largest advertising company, said on March 31 that it was steeling itself against the crisis through steps like ending discretionary spending, including travel and hotels and the costs of award shows.

"We realize that the creative community has other challenges to face, and simply isn't in a position to put forward the work that will set the benchmark," said Philip Thomas, chairman of Cannes Lions. "The marketing and creative industries, in common with so many others, are currently in turmoil, and it's clear that we can play our small part by removing all speculation about the Festival this year."

Analysts at brokerage firm Peel Hunt said the decision didn't come as a surprise given that attendance had in recent days been called into question.

"Cannes Lions is important to a buoyant industry. However, in these very straitened times it is clearly proving to be a discretionary event," Peel Hunt wrote.

Organizers have canceled or delayed many other events so far this year, often aiming for new dates by which they hope the crisis will have subsided. The Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee is being pushed back to mid-August from July, for example, and Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival was postponed to October from April.

Broadcast TV networks have converted their annual upfront presentations to advertisers in May from in-person stage shows and parties into online-only affairs.

But some events, such as the South by Southwest festival, have been called off entirely for the year. And the Tokyo 2020 Olympics are now scheduled to begin in July, 2021.

Cannes Lions said entries for its 2020 awards will be judged at the 2021 festival, which will have a two-year eligibility window for work.

Write to Nat Ives at nat.ives@wsj.com and Adrià Calatayud at adria.calatayud@dowjones.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 03, 2020 08:49 ET (12:49 GMT)

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