MediaLink has spent years owning the art of wining and dining CMOs at Cannes. This year, it turned that same playbook on creators.
UTA, its owner, hosted an invite-only dinner for more than 70 creators spanning sports, fashion, food, lifestyle and news. Expected guests included Olandria Carthen, Brittany Broski, David Dobrik, Keith Lee, LaurDIY, Colin & Samir, Joanna Teplin and Clea Shearer. At a festival where one company’s absence from a patch of sand can be read a dozen different ways, Cannes’ resident molehill-mountaineers will find plenty to chew on over that guestlist.
Anyway, here’s our molehill.
That dinner, like so many other things here, is reflective of how far creators have come. Brands still want their reach. Increasingly, they want their judgment too. Which means Cannes for creators of a certain vintage is starting to look like Cannes for CMOs always has: less a victory lap, more a working week of deals, positioning and pilots that need to scale.
Mel Robbins, the bestselling author and host of her namesake podcast, put it plainly: “I’m excited that brands, in particular, are recognizing the cultural dominance and impact of this format.”
Like so many other creators here, this was her first Cannes. And like so many of them, she showed up with her own questions for marketers, and a sharper pitch on what a real partnership should look like.
“There is an incredibly authentic, appreciative, grateful connection to our brand partners because it’s through their support that we are able to do this work that’s making a really big impact,” said Robbins, who spoke to Digiday from SiriusXFM Media’s spot on the Croisette.
It’s a level of gratitude that, on its surface, reads like old-fashioned brand deference. Underneath it is something closer to a creator who knows exactly how ad dollars work for her, and is making sure marketers know it too.
The same goes for one of Europe’s most-watched creators Brandon Baum, who has 28 million followers and 18 billion views. He sent Olly Lewis, the commercial boss of his creative studio Studio B, to the south of France for the first time to scope out the market for how he grows the marketing practice, which is focused on building co-authored, always-on storytelling for brands rather than one-off campaigns or placements.
“The executives that I have met this week have been incredibly senior, from CEOs and CMOs to vps and other global leads, who are all wanting to hear more about the creator-native approach to brand building,” said Lewis. “Brands are looking to build more sustained co-authored collaborations, whether that’s building new IP or building scripted, episodic content and franchises.”
Slowly but surely, creators are getting better at articulating why they’re not just a media buy to optimize, but creative partners who can support brands in building sustained momentum.
That came through loud and clear to Jamie Gutfreund, founder of creator marketing firm Creator Vision in the conversations she’s had over the first three days of the festival. They’re talking about media, she added, but what brands are really asking is how to operationalize their business like a media company, not run it like a sponsorship.
Put the shift this way: this year consultants and talent managers are walking CMOs straight from meetings with AI-search vendors into sit-downs with creators, and that pairing, not the parties, is where the real work of Cannes is happening. Brands aren’t here just to buy reach anymore so much as to find long-term partners who can help them figure out distribution itself.
Brands say they’re done renting creators. Now comes the hard part.
If creators arrived at Cannes pitching judgment over reach, brands showed up asking who can actually be trusted with it.
“Anything that we do with these communities and the creators, we’re in it for the long term,” said Leandro Barreto, CMO for Unilever’s Beauty & Wellbeing Business Group. This isn’t ‘Oh, we’re going to do this because it’s the cool thing at the moment.’ This is where we want to build our brands in partnership, in collaboration with these amazing communities.”
At previous Cannes, a comment like this would’ve stood out. Few senior marketers spoke about creators in those terms. This year, it felt more like consensus: the same line, in different words, from CMO after CMO across the Croisette.
Bose’s CMO Jim Mollica got more specific about why. Renting an audience through paid media, he argued, isn’t a sustainable proposition once you account for rising prices and shrinking attention. The bet his team is making instead is on building equity that compounds, content and creator partnerships that belong to Bose outright rather than borrowed reach that resets with every campaign.
P&G’s chief brand officer Marc Pritchard, presenting on stage, put creators inside a broader framework: brand building runs on three voices, the brand’s own, an “expert” voice that groups creators with influencers, celebrities and affiliates, and the consumer’s voice. All three matter, he said, because they’re “fundamentally human.”
Where Barreto and Mollica talked about creators as long-term partners in their own right, Pritchard’s model folds them into a wider system, one input feeding a bigger machine. Underneath both versions sits the same operational shift. Marketers are restructuring internally to handle creator relationships properly, rather than bolting them onto whatever team happens to be free. Functions that used to sit in separate silos, insights and analytics, paid media, social and influencer management, are collapsing into single points of contact, because brands have learned the hard way that a creator relationship can’t be owned by, say, the PR team’s “influencer person” while the budget sits with someone else entirely. That mismatch, where the person a creator actually talks to doesn’t control the money, is one of the more common breakdowns happening right now.
The harder part, several marketers said, is proving it works at scale, not just in spirit.
“We talk about desire and scale, right? It’s a bit of a paradox, because you need to drive desire, but you need to scale it,” said Barreto. “And to scale, we need to codify. If it works, [it] works because of what? So it’s not a blank answer of ROI, but we have a lot of conviction in the data we see that it’s the right direction.”
LinkedIn’s vp of marketing Davang Shah pointed to a similar shift, just framed around where buyers themselves are headed rather than how brands organize around it.
“I think there’s the technological change that’s happened where influence is driven, people are recognizing it lives with creators, where that next generation of buyers are. Imagine all three of those concentric circles coming together, and it means creators are at the heart of what the future of commerce is going to look like.”
Voices from the Croisette
“The entire media industry is based on borderline fraud, and everyone’s completely full of shit and extracting money out of the biggest brands in the world. It’s scoring your homework backward to justify telling it.”
— Gary Vaynerchuk, CEO, Vayner Media, during a panel on AI and creativity in the Vayner activation space on the Croisette