The Year Creators Gentrified Cannes Lions

Cannes Lions 2026 will go down as the year that this event penetrated mainstream cultural consciousness, in great part due to the sheer volume of creators and influencers present and the massive amounts of content they produced.

This was for me a tale of two Cannes: as a classically trained agency strategist with a media platform, I was granted access to the traditional world, the world of the platforms, and the new creator world.

Let me tell you: with rare exception, never the twain shall meet.

My hypothesis is that we will look back at Cannes Lions 2026 as the beginning of a massive Creator Bull market.

We can safely say the market has matured, and almost every enterprise marketing leader I spoke to discussed how they were planning to work more with creators moving forward. Not only that, but they were evolving how they sought to work with Creators: the briefcase full of one-off placements - rented reach that resets to zero with every campaign - is giving way to structural, sustained, co-authored collaborations.

Over the next 2 years I expect to see a new surge in rates as Creator marketing begins to unlock the far larger pool of legacy media budgets vs. just creative.

Alongside this, we can start to see some maturing in measurement.

I recommend a full download of the report but my headline insight: Creators function best as long-term brand builders so measure accordingly - engagement rates have almost zero correlation with brand memory. Tracksuit and I track attributed pipeline for our own brand partnership, which we delivered 10x of my retainer on, resulting in an equity partnership for 2026.

Where I think we get ahead of ourselves is when we state Creators are the future of marketing.

Creators are instead the best example of what the future of marketing looks like: more decentralised, always-on, built bottom-up through culture through mediated contexts: creators, curators, gatekeepers, brand partnerships, collaborations, community activations.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s article, media is now the primary challenge in creativity. Distribution is a core function of strategy. Creators serve as an infinite ambient context machine: able to translate a generic mass-message into the hundreds or thousands of niches required for brands to hit mass scale.

This approach was echoed by Unilever’s CMO Leandro Barreto during his own keynote: the brands themselves are custodians of their flame but not authors of every line.

The role of brand leaders is to build a system that can deliver coherence in the aggregate while accepting the personality, style, tone and form of those messages will wildly diverge (and whaddaya know, that is the thesis of my course, The New Fundamentals of Brand, launching its next cohort in September).

Chatting to someone at JT Barnett’s already-infamous Creator house party, I mentioned to someone I was speaking at the Palais the following day. This creator’s response: “What’s the Palais?”

This is somewhat of an existential challenge for Cannes. The Creator pass was their fastest-selling this year, and even more Creators are no doubt planning their trips for next year, lured by the promise of brand deals, networking, a tax-deductible Euro summer trip and yes, content opportunities.

But introducing all this new demand, supply being held more or less equal, is only going to increase the outrageous cost of attending this event.

And this crowds out the other creative production labour force, those with the least money and the least leverage: younger agency creatives.

This is problematic because the Palais serves as a cultural anchor for Cannes: the power of the work they produce radiates out from that basement all through the Croisette, and it’s what stops this event from devolving into White Lotus-themed conference slop.

For Lions, there will need to be a serious think of how to balance all these competing forces. It’s not like they can ban anyone from coming here, renting a villa, and setting up their own sideshow (much like Collins House once did, which is now an event unto itself).

Most creators are not marketers, and they require education that Cannes is more than just its spectacular representations: the yachts, the rose, the villas, the brand dinners, the outfits.

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My own opinion is that there will need to be an expanded set of Creator awards reflecting the significance of the channel (hey, maybe one even for B2B…), and alongside, some way of bringing Creators more into the conversation of the palais, giving more speaking opportunities, finding out ways to have them featured in and amplifying the work - with the goal of showing them they are part of a longer creative lineage.

None of this should be read as an attack on Creators themselves. Just like with gentrification it is rarely the fault of any individual.

This year I met dozens of creators from every sector across the economy, and while my ashamed Commonwealth temperament was a little taken aback by the, shall we say, ‘brazen American spirit,’ I left understanding that ‘Creating’ is seen as the new American dream.

In the absence of structured career mobility for young people it is the accrual of fame that has emerged as the key leverage point for those few who still believe in aspiration. It is this infectious volume of kinetic energy that is driving insatiable demand from brands to work with creators as long term stewards of these multi-billion dollar entities.

And certainly I would not judge anyone who has taken this path - I’ve grown in 2 years what previously would have taken me 10.

But it was the decade prior of brand strategy, lecturing, philosophy and cultural theory education that provided the basis for this turn. Any individual piece of content can be copied as I well know, I hear my words come out of others mouths all the time; you cannot prompt a perspective, and that takes time to develop.

Meanwhile, Cannes Lions needs to find ways to ensure there remains space for both the old and new worlds, and think deeply about how better to connect them. And if you are one of the few smart enough to learn the lessons and language of both, you will find unprecedented opportunities waiting for you.

Take the time to understand what this place really is. Your follower count might get you here, but knowing the work of the Scamans, the Binets, the Sharps, Nelson-Fields and Ritsons, and Romaniuks and Roachs will grant you a seat at the big table.

Maybe it’ll make the difference between the long and short of your career.

If you missed yesterday’s recap of Cannes Lions focus on the infrastructure underpinning creativity, you can read it here.

Cannes Lions Admits It Was Never About Creativity

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Jul 1

But now, it is the shape of the media itself that presents the most significant challenge in creativity. It is only natural that is where the effort of conversations should move. So the platforms take centre stage. And now so too do creators.