Marketing is becoming entertainment. Creators are its stars.
Cannes didn’t so much reveal that shift as rubber-stamp it. The ad industry’s annual gathering in the south of France felt unfamiliar in ways it hasn’t in years.
UTA threw a dinner for creators, a slot once reserved for CMOs to play belle of the ball. OpenAI’s ads boss Dave Dugan made his way to the Influential villa, not to talk to brands, but to creators. Bose CMO Jim Mollica went as far as comparing them to creative agencies outright. They’re different ways of saying the same thing: the dinners, panels and influence that used to belong exclusively to CMOs are now split with creators.
“The biggest change is that creators have moved from the sidelines to the center of Cannes,” said Alex Buxton, director of global partnerships at creative collective Thinkingbox. “The debate is no longer whether brands should work with creators, but how to integrate them into every stage of the marketing process.”
The reason that’s happening is simple. Cannes Lions isn’t really an advertising event anymore. It’s an entertainment one. Talent agency UTA now had a bigger presence on the beach than the holding companies that once owned it. Hollywood producer Jerry Bruckheimer got the same top billing as the biggest CMOs. Creative agencies talked about building IP the way they used to talk about building brands. All told, the people who really left their mark on the festival this year weren’t the ad execs. They were entertainers.
In fairness, it’s been oscillating between the two since the start when the festival was founded by cinema advertising contractors who wanted their craft taken as seriously as film. For decades, that bet paid off. Then the platforms ate the audience. Feeds fragmented, algorithms got fickle and the campaigns that used to make brands resonate stopped landing the way they used to.
Creators are what’s filling that gap: an audience relationship advertising can rent but no longer build on its own. Cannes just gives that shift a stage and a calendar date, forcing the entire industry to reckon with it in one place, all at once.
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