*By Jacqueline Corba*
Video games and esports are front and center at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity this week, and they've caught the eye of entrepreneur and digital advertising exec Gary Vaynerchuk.
"I have been lurking in the grass, as they say," VaynerMedia CEO Gary Vaynerchuk told Cheddar CEO Jon Steinberg in an interview Monday, alluding to the uber-popular game Fortnite.
The title dominated conversation at last week's E3, and the broader video game industry is looking to capitalize off that interest at Cannes Lions.
Interactive entertainment company Activision Blizzard [positioned its tent](https://twitter.com/jonsteinberg/status/1008380696052846592) front and center at the festival, an apparent effort to lure more advertisers to the industry.
And Vaynerchuk sees the appeal. He told Cheddar he plans to have 40 of the top 500 players on Twitch's game streaming platform come to his office in three weeks for a jam session.
"I have an enormous Twitch studio right outside my office. I speak to Ninja once a week, if not four times a week," said Vaynerchuck.
Ninja, whose real name is Tyler Blevins, is one of the biggest celebrities in the gaming world, with 8.5 million Twitch followers. In an interview from E3, the Fortnite champion told Cheddar's Alyssa Julya Smith he thinks the game is ready to take the eSports stage.
"They are just consistently updating and upgrading it," [said Ninja.](https://cheddar.com/videos/ninja-on-fortnites-future-in-esports) "No one really does that."
For the full interview, [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/gary-vaynerchuk-launches-one37pm-brand).
Astra aborted the launch for NASA ELaNa 41 Mission out of Cape Canaveral on Monday due to what was described as a minor issue, but the company's stock fell nearly 14 percent following the news. Jim Cantrell, CEO and co-founder of Phantom Space, which builds and launches spacecraft of its own, joined Cheddar to discuss the scrubbed mission. “The last thing you want is for this to go wrong, you're better to err on the side of safety expectations,” Cantrell explained, noting that the mission delay was a normal event.
The Biden Administration is set to revise federal rules to address potential security risks from foreign-owned apps, mainly Tiktok. This comes after the White House opted not to pursue a forced shutdown of the Chinese-owned video sharing platform. Under these new rules, federal oversight would be expanded to explicitly include apps that could be used by foreign adversaries to steal or otherwise obtain data. Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Craig Singleton, joined Cheddar to discuss more.
The metaverse platform Decentraland hosted its first wedding over the weekend. The union was overseen by Rose Law Group, at the firm's virtual property, hosting witnesses including 2,000 guests. The ceremony endured some technical glitches before being completed.
The gaming industry has been under the spotlight so far this year following some big mergers and acquisitions. This week featured earnings of three major gaming companies, but also Meta and for the latter, things are not doing too hot. Joining Cheddar News to break it all down was Kenny Rosenblatt, President and Co-Founder of Arkadium.
While it was a volatile week in tech as Meta experienced the biggest one-day drop in the history of the U.S. stock market, industry giant Amazon reported 40 percent growth — largely on the strength of the cloud. Dan Ives, managing director of equity research at Wedbush Securities, joined Cheddar News to break down how the e-commerce company stock managed to pop despite headwinds against its core retail business. "It's all about cloud because of sum of the parts, you could argue, amazon could be $3,500/$4,000 stock just based on cloud," he said. Ives also addressed the apparent the differing impact of Apple iOS changes on Facebook and Snapchat.
Following Ford's earnings miss, the stock price dropped despite a bullish outlook from the auto giant. Karl Brauer, an executive analyst with ISeeCars.com, joined Cheddar to break down why investors may not be sold on the carmaker because of the ongoing factor of supply constraints. "The product is not an issue. There's really good product coming from them, including the electric vehicle side, and the demand is not an issue. There's plenty of demand, but nobody really has a solid grasp on when we're going to get past the supply chain issue," said Brauer.
