Cannes made it official: creators are marketing’s new talent

UTA threw a dinner for creators, a slot once reserved for CMOs to play belle of the ball. OpenAI’s ads boss Dave Dugan made his way to the Influential villa, not to talk to brands, but to creators. Bose CMO Jim Mollica went as far as comparing them to creative agencies outright. They’re different ways of saying the same thing: the dinners, panels and influence that used to belong exclusively to CMOs are now split with creators.

“The biggest change is that creators have moved from the sidelines to the center of Cannes,” said Alex Buxton, director of global partnerships at creative collective Thinkingbox. “The debate is no longer whether brands should work with creators, but how to integrate them into every stage of the marketing process.”

The reason that’s happening is simple. Cannes Lions isn’t really an advertising event anymore. It’s an entertainment one. Talent agency UTA now had a bigger presence on the beach than the holding companies that once owned it. Hollywood producer Jerry Bruckheimer got the same top billing as the biggest CMOs. Creative agencies talked about building IP the way they used to talk about building brands. All told, the people who really left their mark on the festival this year weren’t the ad execs. They were entertainers. 

In fairness, it’s been oscillating between the two since the start when the festival was founded by cinema advertising contractors who wanted their craft taken as seriously as film. For decades, that bet paid off. Then the platforms ate the audience. Feeds fragmented, algorithms got fickle and the campaigns that used to make brands resonate stopped landing the way they used to. 

Creators are what’s filling that gap: an audience relationship advertising can rent but no longer build on its own. Cannes just gives that shift a stage and a calendar date, forcing the entire industry to reckon with it in one place, all at once. 

Courtney Williams, chief growth officer and partner at The Variable, captured the same idea in miniature, and with more humor. Gerry Graf, global chief creative officer at Joan Creative, pitched a tent called “JOAN House” in the middle of the festival’s activations, a wink at the holdcos pouring millions into beach real estate. It’s a joke, but it’s also a tell: a tent cost a fraction of what Canva, Amazon, UTA, the Female Quotient, Sport Beach, Spotify and Pinterest spent on their own activations, yet it pulled some of the loudest buzz of the week. 

“Conversations about the creator economy, and how Cannes Lions is becoming even more influential than the film festival, were dominating this year,” said Williams. 

But it would be wrong to say that creators took over the festival. What actually happened was a convergence: marketers and creators learning from each other, with creators increasingly acting as media partners and extensions of marketing teams rather than one-off campaign talent. 

“While the parties have been fun, we’re really here to build partnerships,” said creator Brandon Baum, who is the founder and CEO of creative studio StudioB. Since he launched the business six years ago, Baum has built those partnerships on the back of branded content for some of the world’s biggest brands, including Lego, Adidas, Meta and O2. Cannes was a chance to do more.

What that looks like in practice varies, but several conversations in Cannes kept landing on the same shift: brands are no longer hiring a creator to push a single message. They’re hiring creators, or the companies that represent them, to operationalize that influence. Some of that is always-on, six-to-12-month engagements producing episodic content on a rolling schedule. Some of it is still viral shorts but built as IP a brand can own rather than a one-off spike. 

Either way, the creator stops playing supporting cast to a big tentpole campaign and becomes the thing sustaining attention between tentpoles.

“This year’s Cannes felt like the moment the industry moved from talking about change to operationalizing it, ” said Petur Workman, vp of business development at creative agency Movers+Shakers. 

CMOs at some of the world’s biggest, most progressive brands made that point all week, in different words but with the same conviction

“There are half a million people out there who are speaking on behalf of our brand and connecting in every authentic way with the audience,” said Asmita Dubey, L’Oréal’s chief digital and marketing officer on a panel. 

Anyone who thinks that’s just about reach doesn’t understand what’s happening, according to Dubey’s fellow panelist, Kraft Heinz CMO Todd Kaplan. The creator economy can’t be approached like media buying, he said. Brands fixate on follower counts — this person has 20 million — without grasping that the creator is the talent, the creative, the production company, the media outlet and the IP, all in one. CMOs are not renting reach, he continued. They’re borrowing authenticity, and that only works if they give creators clear guardrails on what they can and can’t do with your brand, rather than treating them like another media line.

Unilever’s global CMO for beauty and wellbeing, Leandro Barreto, put a finer point on it. He used his keynote to clear up a misconception about the company’s much-vaunted bet on creators: this isn’t about channels, he said. Neither TV or paid media is dead. “This is about how demand gets created,” he said. Long before platforms or influencers existed, people trusted a friend’s recommendation in a way they never trusted a brand’s pitch. Creators aren’t the same as that friend — the relationship is parasocial, not personal — but they’re an extension of it.

That nuance showed up everywhere this week, not just at the palais. Whether it was on podcasts, in meetings or in villas, CMOs increasingly understand exactly what role creators play in building a brand and exactly where the limits of that role sit. Creators are working out the same question from their side

Take creator Jayde Powell. Getting to Cannes required fronting roughly $5,000 of her own money on flights, lodging and wardrobe, with no brand covering it upfront. Her first partnership covered that cost and left her with $10,000 in profit. She then took on three more deals — $7,000, $4,000 and a $500 per diem — but came home with only about $2,000 in profit overall, once everything washed out. Her rule of thumb for other creators: breaking even on the ground is the realistic goal. The real profit comes later, from whatever relationships get made while you’re there.

“I’m already thinking about my plan for next year on how I can alert brands about my presence using multiple forms of communication, including my newsletter,” said Powell.

Creator Tameka Bazile sums up the catch. Like the advertising business it represents, Cannes is enticing, but without a playbook, it’s also disorienting. Creators aren’t just figuring out which brands are worth prioritizing, Bazile continued. They’re trying to work out where they’ll actually have access, and whether any of it will net out financially, she added.

According to her, the ones who get the most out of it arrive with a plan: who to meet, what to prioritize and what to create, rather than just showing up for the parties. But even then, the payoff isn’t equal. International creators, working in markets with a fraction of the brand activity the U.S. has, get a rare shot at global exposure. U.S. creators, especially ones already embedded in a scene like New York’s, are mostly getting a version of what they can already access at home, said Bazile.

“Ultimately, as a creator, the synopsis I’ve come to realize is that a lot of [us] seem to be sharing is that although Cannes in and of itself is a very luxury-high touch experience, it can be very overwhelming – trying to figure out what brands to prioritize, where they have actually RSVP’d to, and navigating all of that with the additional element of ensuring that they can get a reasonable ROI on the investment of attending.

Bazile, like everyone else figuring out this new order, would do well to remember that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Brands still need familiarity to earn favor, and familiarity still comes from repetition. Creators, and the content they make, are just the latest vehicle for delivering it. 

“One thing that has surprised me is how often the conversation has come back to ‘authenticity’,” said Tommy Johnson, senior director of partnerships at global creator marketing agency Open Influence. “It dominated the industry a few years ago, and it’s clearly making a comeback as AI becomes more embedded in creative work. The consensus isn’t that AI should replace people. It’s that AI should handle repetitive work, leaving more room for human creativity, judgment and connection. That tension has been one of the most interesting debates at Cannes.”