What Cannes Lions confirmed about where creator marketing is headed

TL;DR

• Brands at Cannes have stopped asking whether creator marketing works. Now they’re scrambling to build the infrastructure to scale it before their competitors do.

• The most candid conversations happened off the panels, in breakfasts and lunches where brand leaders and creators dropped a script.

• Creator marketing is finally measurable, down to the dollar. The brands embracing that rigor are pulling ahead of the ones that aren’t.

I just got back from Cannes Lions, and I'm still sorting through everything we covered across a week of fireside chats, panels, breakfasts, and conversations with some of the top creators, platforms, and brands in the industry.

This year felt different from prior years at Cannes. The creator economy has its own gravity now, the kind that pulls every other conversation toward it. Brand leaders are asking how fast they can build the systems to treat creator marketing as its own marketing channel.

That shift showed up in every room we were in.

Here’s what stood out.

Marketers are finally getting the measurement they’ve been missing

During an interview with Ryan Arpel with Morning Brew at Cannes, we talked about how for years, influencer marketing has leaned on CPM and a version of CPE, because that’s the language display advertising taught us to speak. Calling this a case of marketers sleeping on ROAS misses the real issue. They haven’t had a real way to measure it in the creator space until now.

That’s changing. 

We can now tell a brand exactly which post drove which purchase, who saw it, who clicked, what they bought, and at what price, fully attributed back to the dollar. When you don’t have that level of transparency, every decision becomes a negotiation between a CMO and a CFO who speak different languages. Closing that attribution gap is the single biggest unlock happening in this industry right now, and it’s why we’re seeing creator marketing graduate from a test budget to a core line item in annual planning.

The brands underestimating smaller creators are leaving real connection on the table

We opened the week with a fireside chat alongside top creator David Dobrik and  Quincy Kevan, Head of Creator Partnerships at Snap. The conversation landed on something I think most brand strategy discussions tend to gloss over: the value of genuine intimacy between a creator and their audience.

David put it directly: “Brands get more out of integrating and supporting smaller creators than they realize. Snapchat gives audiences a unique, unfiltered POV into a creator’s life, and that deeper access is what drives real connection.”

That framing matters for how brands build creator programs. A creator with a smaller, tightly engaged audience on a platform built for close-range connection can outperform a much larger creator on a broadcast-oriented platform, depending on what you’re trying to accomplish. The kind of trust David is describing is harder to quantify than reach, but it’s what actually moves people from attention to action.

The best brand and creator partnerships start before the brief

The conversation that stuck with me most was a lunch-and-learn discussion with Dhar Mann and Shira Lazar, two creators who have built real infrastructure around the creator economy, rather than just a following.

Dhar built a 200-person studio without taking a single brand partner for the first five years. That gave him the leverage to say no to deals that didn’t fit, and he still does. What came up again and again in that conversation is that the strongest partnerships rarely start with a rate card. They start with a shared point of view, something closer to a creative collaboration than a media buy.

Shira’s perspective added something brands in that room hadn’t fully connected yet. Creator sustainability and partnership quality aren’t separate issues. A creator who is burned out or financially unstable cannot show up consistently for a brand, no matter how good the campaign brief is. Brands that treat creator wellbeing as someone else’s problem are quietly shortening the runway on their own creative supply chain.

Brands still hold on to creative control they don’t need

This is a theme I keep coming back to, and the fireside chat I participated in with Keiko Mori, TikTok’s Head of Creative Product Marketing and Commercial Partnerships, Sabrina Callahan from Southwest Airlines, and comedian, creator and podcast host Connor Wood put it in sharper focus than any brief or strategy doc ever could.

Sabrina is Southwest’s first Chief Digital and Marketing Officer, and her team is using creator marketing to bring customers along on real change, including some of the more contentious product shifts the airline has made this year. 

That only works if the brand trusts creators enough to let the content feel native to the platform rather than approved by committee. Connor put it simply: the moment comedy feels forced, it’s dead. The brands getting real performance out of TikTok have figured out that the platform rewards content built for the feed it lives in, with the creator’s own voice still fully intact.

Keiko made a point that’s stuck with me since. TikTok has moved well past its reputation as a pure awareness platform. Discovery, consideration, and conversion are happening in the same scroll now. That collapses the old model where a brand would treat TikTok as top-of-funnel and measure success somewhere else entirely. The brands that have adjusted are building content that can carry someone from a first impression to a purchase decision without ever leaving the platform, and they have the data to prove it’s working.

Creators understand your brand better than your internal team does

I’ll say this plainly: A creator who has spent years talking to your core audience every single day understands how your brand is actually perceived in a way that data reports and marketing analyses never will.

I told a marketer a version of this story again this week. You can believe your product is the best in its category. The market already has its own opinion, and your audience knows what that opinion is, even if it’s not the one you’d choose. A creator who has that audience’s trust can tell you exactly where the gap is between how you see your brand and how the world actually sees it. The marketers who lean into that information move faster and spend smarter than the ones who treat it as a threat to brand control.

The advice I keep giving CMOs who are still hesitant here hasn’t changed. Give creators the strategic direction they need, then get out of the way and let them execute.

Creator content is becoming the raw material for how brands show up in AI search

This is a newer thread, and it came up in nearly every conversation we had this week at the Later Lounge and beyond.

The numbers behind this shift are harder to ignore than most marketers realize. According to McKinsey, brand-owned sites make up just 5 to 10 percent of what AI search actually references. The other 90 to 95 percent comes from third-party content: creator posts, community discussions, long-form video, and product reviews. 

The platforms driving the most LLM citations are the same ones creator programs already touch: long-form YouTube, Reddit, Substack, and niche communities. YouTube alone is now cited in roughly 16 percent of LLM answers, and Reddit accounts for around 40 percent of citations across major models. 

The brands moving fastest on AI search infrastructure understand that being good enough to rank for search engine results isn’t good enough anymore.

Cannes confirmed a model that was already taking shape

Every conversation this week, whether it was over coffee with Pinterest, on stage with TikTok and Southwest, or at a lunch table with Dhar and Shira, came back to the same idea from a different angle. Creator marketing has crossed fully into core marketing infrastructure, and the brands that have accepted that are already building for it.

As H2 planning ramps up for brands, the conversation has shifted from whether to work with creators to how to weave creator content into every part of the funnel, from awareness through conversion, into product pages, into paid social, into the places AI assistants are pulling answers from.

The brands doing this well are seeing it show up in growth and efficiency at the same time, and that combination is what convinces a CFO this isn’t a marketing experiment anymore. 

Cannes confirmed how fast this shift is arriving and gave us the proof to back it up. These are the conversations I'm most energized by right now. If you're building in this space, let's talk.