Friday, July 3rd

📊 Did You Know?

Creator ad spend is projected to hit $44 billion this year.

(Business Insider, 2026)

🔔 About Cannes Lions 2026

Every June, the entire advertising industry flies to the South of France for Cannes Lions, the world's biggest festival of creativity.

13,000 people from 90 countries. CMOs, agencies, platforms, and the juries that hand out the industry's most prestigious awards: the Lions.

For 73 years, this was an agency event. Big holding companies owned the Croisette.

Not anymore.

This year, 500 creators showed up (up from 400 last year).

TikTok flew in 16 of them. UTA brought over 70.

YouTube built a two-story air-conditioned Creator Club.

Meta threw a beach party packed wall to wall with talent.

One creator called it the "Super Bowl of the Creator Economy" 

And here's the wild part: creators paid to be there!

An average Cannes trip costs a creator around $9,630 (pass, flights, Airbnb, taxis) - according to The Publish Press.

But creators who came with the right strategy reported earning 150x that investment in brand deals. Why? Because as one UTA agent put it, having real access to real decision makers in the room with you is invaluable. The people who approve the campaigns are all in one place, for one week.

Now, let’s take a look at the key trends

📈 7 creator economy trends from Cannes Lions

We read every recap, panel quote, and takeaway so you don't have to.

Here's what the industry's top voices actually said at Cannes 👇️ 

1️⃣ B2B creators are booming

"Creators are on fire on LinkedIn" → Jessica Jensen, CMO, LinkedIn

LinkedIn announced 90% growth in people identifying as creators and launched a Creator Marketplace to connect them with brands. Every major platform is now building creator infrastructure, not just hosting creator content. If you're still treating LinkedIn as a corporate press release channel, you're a year behind.

ℹ️ Read more here

2️⃣ Creators are building a new type of agency

Alex Cooper spent the week pitching CMOs on Unwell Creative Agency, her 8-month-old agency with Google as its first multiyear client.

The difference in one line:

→ a traditional agency sells you ideas

→ Unwell sells you ideas + production + a built-in audience of 100M+ followers. The brand is written into the show from day one, and the campaign launches on channels she already owns.

The speed is the killer argument. When Whitney Leavitt got voted off Dancing with the Stars, Unwell produced and premiered her final dance as a branded show in 48 hours. No traditional agency moves that fast.

She wasn't alone. YouTube star Brandon Baum's Studio B (clients: Meta, Adidas, Lego) hung a banner over the Croisette that read: "Advertising is dead. Entertainment isn't"

ℹ️ Read more here

3️⃣ Creators don't want brand deals anymore. They want equity

"I don't want to be a glorified billboard. I actually want to start building equity in my own creator business" → Cat Goetze (CatGPT), creator

View more on Instagram

Creators at Cannes talked about building media companies, product lines, and production arms, with brands integrated from day one.

And big media is buying in: Fox launched Fox Creator Studios, while Amazon, Netflix and Tubi were all courting creator deals.

One prediction that stuck: creators will soon work like sports sponsorships. Not sponsored posts, but an "official drink" or "official software" of everything they make.

4️⃣ Podcasts are out. Shows are in!

"It's no longer creating a podcast, a series. It's creating a show that is clippable, that has a unique hook, that is yours, that is owned by you." → Jay Shetty, author & podcaster

View more on Instagram

Shetty's advice to creators at Cannes: stop thinking in episodes, start thinking in owned, clippable shows with a unique format.

His example to watch: Friends Keep Secrets with Benny Blanco, Lil Dicky and Kristen. His pitch for it: Friends meets Seinfeld meets livestreaming.

For brands, this changes the buy. You're no longer sponsoring a podcast slot. You're integrating into a format, with dozens of clips per episode feeding every platform.

5️⃣ Expertise beats follower count

Nespresso's CMO Jessica Padula explained the brand now views creators as experts, not influencers, because they understand what content works better than brands do.

Brands even hired creators as consultants at Cannes: YouTube brought creators to advise its clients directly at YouTube Beach.

Reach still matters. But relevance, speed and depth matter more.

ℹ️ Read more here

6️⃣ Trust is the new metric. And creators are how you buy it

"We are truly obsessed with that trust... That's what audiences want right now" → Jill Kramer, Chief Marketing & Communications Officer, Mastercard

Kramer's point at Cannes: winning the next generation of customers is a trust game, and brands can't build that trust alone. Creators can. Gen Z believes a person before it believes a logo.

The data backs her up. Kantar analyzed 15,000 creator assets and found engagement aligned with actual brand-building results only a third of the time.

Just 6% of creator content was both highly engaging AND built brand equity. That's why Cannes organizers dedicated their final-night dinner to a future where followers and views matter less than brand sentiment and audience trust.

7️⃣ AI won't replace creators. But it's everywhere

40% of award entries used AI this year. Yet the jury told a different story: almost every big winner was deliberately handcrafted, human, and impossible to fake.

Heineken's anti-tech campaign urging people to put their phones down won 9 Lions, including the Social & Creator Grand Prix.

The consensus from Meta's Alex Schultz, Qualcomm's Don McGuire and Digitas' Amy Lanzi: the winners will be humans using AI, not AI replacing humans. Or as one CMO put it: "You can't buy aura"

Now let’s look at what it means for brands 👇️ 

💡 What this means for your brand

Strip away the yachts and rosé, and Cannes 2026 sent four clear signals:

→ Creator budgets keep climbing. US brands will spend $44 billion on creators this year, and 61% of marketers plan to increase creator spend. Creators are now a core channel, not a test line in the budget.

→ The bottleneck moved. Finding creators isn't the problem anymore. Finding the right ones is. When only 6% of creator content actually builds your brand, vetting for audience quality, niche authority and real engagement is the whole game.

💡 We showed exactly how to do this in our webinar, How to Find 100 Top Creators in 10 Minutes, if you missed it.

→ Direct relationships win. The CMOs at Cannes were desperate to talk to creators without intermediaries. The brands building direct, long-term creator partnerships will move faster than the ones stuck in email-invoice-deliverables mode.

→ Measure trust, not reach. Followers and views are being retired as the industry's core metrics. Audience credibility, sentiment and real engagement are what's replacing them.

That's exactly why we built Click Analytic the way we did: 400M+ creators searchable by niche and audience quality, with fake-follower detection built in. The industry just confirmed at its biggest event what we've been saying for years: it's not about how many creators you find. It's about finding the ones your audience actually trusts.

🚫 Adam Mosseri says don't delete and repost if something flopped. The short answer is no.

📺 Zuckerberg predicts the end of passive video feeds.

🛠️ Meta brings back Facebook Creator Studio.

👍 YouTube updates reaction options for Shorts with a cleaner player.

🎭 TikTok launches branded microdramas for advertisers.

🕶️ Meta adds custom Instagram Stories features for glasses.

🎙️ Threads adds co-hosts to live chats.

🎛️ Instagram tests more algorithm controls so you pick what the feed shows.

🦁 TikTok introduces new AI-powered creative and commerce tools, with creators as the engine of business growth.

🦁 LinkedIn announces a Creator Marketplace and reports 90% growth in creator profiles.

🦁 YouTube goes deeper into its creator era with new AI-supported services.