CANNES — Why hire one yacht at Cannes Lions when you can hire two? Daily Mail’s MailOnline is surging – the site is a behemoth in traffic terms, fuelled mostly by advertising.

That’s why MailOnline moored its yachts in the harbour during the advertising festival this month, to meet and greet brand partners.

But MailOnline chief operating officer Rich Caccappolo had a specific aim for his trip – to find inspiration for offering advertisers more creative ways to tell stories using programmatic advertising technologies.

“That plumbing has come in to place – we can buy, sell and transact in a way that used to be very manual,” he says. “We’re hoping the creative ideas can come to bear and people can make an emotional connection. We’re all looking for great examples … where we can say, ‘Oh, okay, I get it now’.”

For anyone outside its native UK , where it is know as a tabloid newspaper,  MailOnline is the populist online news outlet best known for its “sidebar of shame”, celebrity gossip and an incredibly long homepage.

“The secret to MailOnline is, the majority of our traffic comes direct,” Caccappolo adds. “We don’t rely on other partners for our audience.”

This video part of “Beyond the Pre-Roll: the Transformation of Video Advertising,” a series produced at Cannes Lion 2016, sponsored by ConvertMedia.  For more videos from the series, please visit this page.