TL;DR
On TikTok, discovery, consideration, and purchase now happen in the same piece of content.
The brands driving real sales on TikTok have one thing in common: they found creators who already believed in the product.
The brands that have turned TikTok into a serious revenue channel got there by treating creative decisions and commerce decisions as part of the same conversation.
Cannes is known for its mainstage moments, but some of the most useful conversations happen in the smaller rooms, where people with genuinely different vantage points sit close enough to push back on each other, and actually do.
The Later Lounge hosted a series of sessions throughout the week, from lunch and learns to fireside chats with some of the sharpest minds in marketing. One of those conversations centered on a question we’ve been sitting with at Later: what does it actually take to turn TikTok into a performance channel?
A fireside chat moderated by our CEO, Scott Sutton, brought together three people who experience TikTok from completely different sides of the same ecosystem: Keiko Mori, head of North America creative product marketing and ops at TikTok, Sabrina Callahan, chief digital and marketing officer at Southwest Airlines; and comedian, creator and podcast host Connor Wood.
What came out of that conversation was less a playbook and more a reality check on where creator marketing actually stands in 2026, and what it takes to do it well.
Here’s what we took away.
TikTok is a full-funnel channel but most brands aren’t using it that way
Keiko Mori opened this thread with a story she’d told a few people in Cannes that week. She’d bought a setting spray on TikTok Shop, not because she’d been searching for one, but because she happened to see a creator review late one night and couldn’t look away. She didn’t know the brand. She hadn’t been in the market. Forty seconds later, she’d purchased it.
When she described the experience, the speed of it was the point: “In 30 seconds I went through: awareness, I didn’t know this existed; consideration, okay, I need to buy this; and I bought it,” she said.
It was a dynamic Scott said he had been tracking all week at Cannes. "[Previously,] a lot of people viewed TikTok as 'this is where I go to get views, eyeballs,' and now it's 'this is where I go to build real business," he told the panel.
That’s the shift that has quietly reorganized how TikTok actually functions. The platform compresses the entire funnel into a single piece of content, which means the brands still planning their TikTok investment as a top-of-funnel awareness play are optimizing for a consumer behavior that no longer matches how the platform works.
For the ones that have internalized this shift, it changes everything about how they write briefs, structure creator programs, and measure outcomes.
The practical consequence is that the creative requirements change significantly. Content that has to carry awareness, consideration, and conversion in the same scroll can’t be built by committee or run through a five-step approval chain. It has to feel immediate.
That’s precisely why the relationship between a brand and a creator matters so much, and why the creative trust that relationship enables is what makes the content feel real.
Authentic creator content starts before the brief
The panel returned to this point from a few different angles, and it kept coming back to the same idea that the brands generating the most resonant creator content started by finding the right person, long before a brief was ever written.
Sabrina Callahan described Southwest’s approach in straightforward terms. The brand looks for creators who are already flyers, people who already have a genuine relationship with the product before any partnership conversation starts. “We always look for someone who’s already in travel, already flies Southwest, so they love it. Then it doesn’t feel forced, it feels natural for the audience, and natural for the creator to just create the content they were going to create regardless,” she said.
One story from the session illustrated this better than any framework could. Southwest had put a creator on a plane for a live music activation, and it turned out that creator had opened for the same band more than a decade earlier. His reaction was completely genuine, and the content practically created itself. Getting to that kind of serendipity requires doing the work upfront and finding someone for whom the partnership is actually true.
Scott put it well: "Marketers who are great understand they're historians. They understand what led to the success, and they're able to channel that and bring it into a new era in a new way, but not lose that core, that ethos."
Connor echoed this from the creator side. His nine-year partnership with Doritos works because the brand gives him real creative latitude — including a Super Bowl campaign that went through with no notes at all. "They trust us so much — it makes me call them my family," he said. When an audience can feel that a creator genuinely means it, the content does things that no media buy can replicate.
Connor put it simply when asked how he balances his creative work across stand-up, podcasting, and brand partnerships: "I don't compartmentalize. I think everything feeds off of each other. I use TikTok as a sounding board: something works really well, that's a stand-up bit." For creators who live on the platform, there's no separation between the work and the instinct, and that's exactly what makes them so effective at capturing moments brands can't manufacture.
Speed of execution is its own creative strategy
Southwest’s most compelling case study from the session wasn’t a planned campaign. A wedding happened spontaneously on one of their flights. The moment went organically viral. The internet immediately started tagging Madison Humphrey, a creator who’d built her community of 1.5 million followers by recreating real weddings. Within 48 hours, Southwest had Humphrey on a plane, same route, same flight attendants, recreating the whole thing. It was completely unplanned, and it became exactly the kind of content that no production budget can manufacture. “That story shows me the power of creator, brand, platform, support team, all in one, coming together around a really cool idea,” Sabrina said.
Later was part of that coalition, and the speed of the whole operation was the point. This is a capability that doesn’t get talked about enough in creator marketing strategy. Consistently generating organic cultural moments is less a function of budget than of organizational readiness. The brands that do it well are the ones where marketing and digital leadership speak the same language, where decision-making isn’t bottlenecked by organizational silos, and where creator relationships are warm enough to activate quickly. Sabrina’s role at Southwest, which deliberately combines marketing and digital into a single function, exists precisely to close that gap. The brief and the measurement framework have to live in the same room, or the speed advantage disappears.
Measurement has to connect all the way to purchase
The conversation closed on measurement, and the challenge Sabrina raised is one most brand marketers are still navigating. Airline travel has a long purchase cycle, since most people fly about three times a year or less. This means creator-influenced awareness rarely converts within a standard attribution window. Her answer was to invest in the connective tissue between creator content, consideration signals, and eventual conversion across the full length of that journey. "The brands that figure out the full connective tissue are the ones who are going to work the best," she said.
Keiko added an important dimension from TikTok's side: strong creative work is necessary but far from sufficient. Product, price, promotion, and repeat purchase behavior all factor into whether content actually converts, which means brands optimizing only for engagement are measuring a proxy for the outcome they actually want. The brands that have made TikTok Shop a serious revenue channel got there by treating creative and commerce as part of the same conversation. For most marketing organizations, however, that integration is still a work in progress.
What this actually adds up to
Three different perspectives, one consistent conclusion: what separates the brands that have figured out creator marketing is less about volume of activity and more about what they’ve built underneath it: the right creator relationships, the organizational alignment to move quickly, and the measurement infrastructure to connect content to outcomes.
None of that is particularly new as an idea. What the Cannes conversation made clear is that the execution gap between knowing it and doing it is still significant. The brands that close it will have a durable advantage over the ones still treating creator marketing as a campaign tactic.
Want to go deeper on building a creator program that connects all the way from discovery to conversion? Explore Later’s influencer marketing services.
