TL;DR
Cannes Lions has made creators a permanent fixture of the official festival experience, with a dedicated LIONS Creators programme, a redesigned awards track, and more creator pass holders than ever before.
This year's hottest conversations center on three themes: creator autonomy and full-funnel strategy, the rise of answer engine optimization (AEO) and what it means for creator-brand partnerships, and how brands are finally building the measurement infrastructure to justify serious creator investment.
A roster of high-profile creators, platform leaders, and brand CMOs are confirmed to attend, with Later hosting its own invite-only event series at the Later Lounge, running June 22–24.
Table of Contents
For most of its history, Cannes Lions was the kind of event where the biggest names on the Croisette ran holding companies. The prestige was in the gold Lions, the agency dinners, and the broadcast campaigns that had taken a year to make. Creators, if they showed up at all, were a footnote: interesting, maybe, but not exactly the main conversation.
That has changed in a fundamental way, and 2026 is the year the shift becomes even more solidified.. The creator economy is reshaping what the festival is for, who it's built for, and what kinds of work get celebrated there. This post is a guide to the Cannes 2026 conversations that are going to define influencer marketing strategy for the rest of the year, so you know what to look for, what to listen for, and where you should be while you're on the ground.
How Cannes Lions became a creator economy festival
Cannes Lions spent most of its six-decade history structured around the traditional advertising ecosystem: agencies, holding companies, brand CMOs, and the award categories that reflected their work. Influencer marketing existed at the edges of that world, rarely treated as a discipline that belonged in the same conversation as a Grand Prix.
That started to change in 2024, when Cannes launched LIONS Creators, a dedicated creator economy track, and accelerated in 2025 with the renaming of the Social & Influencer Lions to the Social & Creator Lions and five new award subcategories recognizing individual creator contributions. The message was clear: creators are a creative discipline in their own right, not just a distribution channel.
By 2026, the dedicated creator space on the Croisette has grown exponentially to accommodate demand. Perhaps most tellingly, the tone of the conversations at Cannes has shifted. The old debate ("should we be working with creators at all?") is over. The question now is how to scale creator partnerships in a way that's measurable, sustainable, and integrated into the broader marketing mix. That's a harder, more interesting question, and it's the one that's going to dominate the Croisette this year.
The three conversations worth tracking this year
Every year, a handful of themes emerge at Cannes that end up shaping strategy across the industry for the next 12 months. This year, we’re predicting three topics that marketers should be paying close attention to:
1. Creator autonomy: are brands actually letting go?
The most pressing question in creator marketing right now has shifted. Brands have largely accepted that creator partnerships belong in the mix. The harder, more consequential question is whether they're willing to give creators enough creative control for the work to actually perform.Those are very different questions, and the gap between them is where a lot of campaigns quietly fail.
The content that works tends to come from creators who were brought in early, given real latitude, and treated as creative partners rather than production vendors. Audiences are perceptive enough to feel the difference between a creator who genuinely believes in something and one who's hitting talking points, and the data backs this up.
According to Later's internal research, only 10% of creators feel they have true creative control in brand partnerships, while 53% actively want more freedom. The brands seeing the strongest results are the ones that have moved toward a genuine co-creation model, where the creator's aesthetic, point of view, and relationship with their audience are understood as the actual asset.
Expect this tension to surface across sessions and off-programme conversations throughout the week: how much creative latitude is too much, and how do you structure a partnership that gives creators real freedom while still delivering for the brand?
2. Full-funnel creator strategy: from awareness to conversion
For a long time, creator content lived almost exclusively at the top of the marketing funnel, generating awareness and brand affinity in ways that were real but hard to attribute. That made creator marketing easy to dismiss as a "soft" investment when finance teams wanted hard numbers.
That era is ending. AI is rewriting how content gets discovered, and creators are evolving into commerce infrastructure through storefronts, affiliate programs, and curated product recommendations. Additionally, measurement tooling is finally catching up to the scale of creator investment. The full-funnel opportunity is real, but it requires understanding how consumers actually move through it: our internal survey data shows that 95% of social discoverers still research before buying, which means the brands winning at creator marketing are the ones building programs that show up at every stage of that journey, not just the first scroll.
For marketers at Cannes, the sessions worth prioritizing are the ones that get into the actual mechanics: how brands are attributing creator-driven revenue, how platforms are enabling in-content commerce, and what a genuinely full-funnel creator program looks like when it's working.
3. AEO and the answer era: what it means for creator partnerships
As AI-powered search tools and large language models become a primary way consumers discover products and recommendations, the underlying logic of marketing visibility is shifting. Consumers are increasingly asking an LLM a question and walking away with a recommendation, rather than browsing a search results page and making their own evaluation. That shifts power toward the trusted, authoritative sources that AI models draw from when generating those recommendations, and creators who consistently produce niche-specific, expert-level content are, in effect, becoming answer-engine-optimized by default.
Their work gets cited and surfaced in AI answers because it's trusted and substantive, not because it was engineered to rank. For brands, this creates a compelling reason to invest in long-term creator partnerships: a creator who talks about your product authentically and repeatedly is building a body of third-party signals that feed AI discovery over time.
This conversation will be front and center at the Later Lounge where some of the discussions will focus on how marketers can ensure their long-form content earns citations, builds authority, and drives discovery in the age of AEO.
Who's showing up: notable creators and speakers confirmed
A Cannes Lions guide isn't complete without a sense of who to watch while you're there. Here's a shortlist of the names worth knowing who will be leading some of the most important conversations at the festival:
Mel Robbins, host of The Mel Robbins Podcast and bestselling author, is one of the more interesting figures at this year's festival precisely because of what her career represents. Her presence at LIONS Creators is a signal that the festival is paying attention to the business of creator-built media brands, not just creators as campaign vehicles.
Dhar Mann, founder of Dhar Mann Studios, has built a 145-million-follower media empire on purpose-driven storytelling, and done it on his own terms. He'll be at the Later Lounge on Wednesday for a conversation about what it actually takes to build a creator business with genuine longevity, alongside Shira Lazar, who has been at the center of the creator economy since before it had a name.
David Dobrik, creator and entrepreneur, will be sitting down with our CEO Scott Sutton and Snap's Head of Creator Partnerships, Quincy Kevan in the Later Lounge on Monday, June 22. His session is a good lens on one of the harder questions in creator marketing: what does it actually look like when the relationship between a creator's audience, the platforms they live on, and the brands they partner with is genuinely aligned?
Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram, is always worth tracking at Cannes because his appearances tend to signal where Meta's creator priorities are heading. Platform announcements and partnerships that surface in his Cannes appearances often foreshadow product direction for the rest of the year.
If you're not attending in person but want a ground-level read on what's actually resonating, a few creators are worth following for real-time coverage: Lia Haberman (LinkedIn and Substack, creator economy analyst), Rachel Karten (LinkedIn and Substack, social strategy), Brett Dashevsky (LinkedIn, founder of Creator Economy NYC and co-founder of AI consumer intelligence platform Siftsy), Sarah Whittle (Substack and TikTok, social media strategist and creator behind the Lady Socialdown newsletter), Coco Mocoe (TikTok, lifestyle), and Gabby Beckford (TikTok and Instagram, travel and lifestyle).
Must-know activations and events beyond the Palais
The official Cannes Lions programme is extensive, and it's worth engaging with. But some of the most useful conversations during festival week happen away from the main stage. Here's a curated list of off-programme events worth knowing about this year:
Adobe x LIONS Creators Beach runs all week as the official creator hub on the Croisette, in partnership with Cannes Lions. For anyone attending on a creator pass, it's a natural anchor point and a good place to orient at the start of the week.
Pinterest Manifestival is running all week, bringing creators, brands, and trendmakers together for talks and immersive experiences. Given Pinterest's continued investment in creator commerce and trend-driven content discovery, it's a relevant stop for anyone thinking about how social platforms are evolving their creator ecosystems.
Canva Creative Cabana takes over Vega La Plage for four days, with programming that spans CMO conversations, AI-powered design, and the creator economy. It drew more than 4,000 visitors in 2025 and has tripled its footprint for 2026, which tells you something about where the energy in the creative industry is right now.
Creators&Culture (Tuesday, June 23, Villa Alexandra) is a full-day creator and brand connect event with panels on brand voice in the creator era, measurement frameworks, and (notably) bringing creators into the ideation process earlier rather than later. It's one of the more substantive creator-focused off-programme events of the week, and the measurement panel in particular is worth attending.
The Great Unlearn, hosted by Billion Dollar Boy and FiveTwoNine (Wednesday, June 24), is a curated rooftop session focused on what brands, creators, and platforms are building next, in partnership with Cannes Lions and Patreon. It tends to attract the people who are less interested in defending how things currently work and more interested in what comes next.
The Later Lounge, an invite-only terrace at the heart of the Croisette, where CMOs of leading brands, top creators, and social network leaders can step away from the noise Monday through Wednesday, June 22–24. Each day features intimate lunch conversations and fireside discussions with platform leaders, brand marketers, and creators, in sessions where the room is small enough that the conversation can actually go somewhere. Topics across the week span creator autonomy, full-funnel platform strategy, long-form content and AEO, and what it takes to build a creator business with lasting staying power. The Later Lounge is also available for private meetings with the Later team throughout the week if you want dedicated time with our experts. Reserve your spot here.
See you there
The Cannes Lions festival has a way of setting the agenda for where influencer marketing is heading for the rest of the year. The conversations happening on the Croisette this June will shape how brands structure creator programs, allocate budgets, and think about measurement and discovery through Q3 and Q4, so make sure to keep track whether you're in Cannes or following along from home.
We'll be on the ground all week. Follow us on social for real-time coverage from the Later Lounge and the Croisette, and if you want to talk creator strategy before, during, or after the festival, we'd love to connect.
