Dozens of influencers are filming “Get Ready With Me” videos, recording podcast episodes and sharing photos of themselves clad in glamorous cocktail dresses from the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity this week. And with mega-influencers such as Alix Earle, Harry Jowsey, Jackie Aina and Tefi Pessoa among the group of creators simultaneously pumping out Cannes-centric social content, social media users largely unfamiliar with the ad festival are now taking note. 

“I’m seeing Alix Earle, Tefi, podcasters like Jared Freid and more influencers flying into Cannes at the same time,” one user wrote in the “NYC Influencer Snark” subreddit on Sunday. “Have any of them mentioned why? It can’t be a coincidence.”

Of course, the influx of creators at Cannes this year is far from coincidental. Their omnipresence across the festival—from speaking on panels to rubbing elbows with marketing executives over rosé—is the result of a concerted effort by social platforms, influencer agencies, brands and Cannes Lions itself to bring the creator economy to the forefront of this year’s festival. 

“You definitely feel the social media in the air when you’re out at restaurants or you’re walking around,” Joe Gagliese, co-founder and co-CEO at social media and influencer agency Viral Nation, told Ad Age. “Folks are creating content all over the place.”

The explosion of creators walking the Croisette this year mirrors advertisers’ surging investment in the creator economy, which Cannes Lions CEO Simon Cook cited as a “crucial” factor behind the festival’s decision to “play a role in bringing together the platforms, the brands, the creators and the agencies” in an April press release announcing the launch of “Lions Creators,” Cannes’ first-ever programming track revolving around the creator economy. 

Goldman Sachs analysts estimated the creator economy was worth roughly $250 billion in April 2023, and they project the industry’s value to nearly double by 2027. The influencer marketing industry, which falls under the larger creator economy umbrella, is on track to grow from just over $21 billion in 2023 to roughly $24 billion by the end of 2024, according to recent estimates from Influencer Marketing Hub. 

In just the first two days of the festival, multiple CMOs and marketing execs approached Gagliese, whose agency partnered with Cannes Lions to develop the Lions Creators program, asking him to evaluate their current influencer marketing strategies and offer suggestions for how to uplevel them, he said. “There's a genuine interest from brands, every time I talk to them, to really understand that they're getting this right and to be doing it even better.”

Influencer marketing agency Billion Dollar Boy, too, has seen a boost in outreach from potential new clients at this year’s festival, said Becky Owen, the agency’s chief marketing officer. “The number of people that have reached out to us or tracked us down and said, ‘Can we speak? Can we grab half an hour?’ has significantly changed [from] last year to this year,” she said, adding that the agency met with about a dozen potential clients between Monday and Wednesday. 

“Brands have been pretty forthcoming in saying, ‘[Influencer marketing] is a major focus area for us,’” Gagliese said of his discussions in Cannes. “It’s no longer, ‘Is this something we should do?’ It’s a lot of, ‘We need to expand this channel.’”

The creator POV

Creators aren’t completely new to Cannes. Several prominent influencers, including Emma Chamberlain and Alex Cooper, have previously spoken on panels at the festival. But this year, social media and creators feel more intertwined with Cannes than ever before, from Paris Hilton playing the TikTok-viral “Man in Finance” song by creator Megan Boni during a DJ set, to pop culture news site Pop Crave writing about Spotify Beach in the same way it would a music festival or other mainstream event. 

Social media platforms, influencer and talent agencies and a handful of brands also expanded their partnerships with creators at Cannes this year. TikTok flew out a group of creators with a collective online following in the tens of millions, including comedian and creator Leo González, TikTok stars Josh Richards and Markell Washington and the previously mentioned Jackie Aina and Tefi Pessoa. 

Snapchat invited creators including Nikki Lilly, Tinx (aka Christina Najjar) and Savannah Demers to speak on various panels, while Meta turned the mic over to Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry, co-hosts of the “Colin and Samir Show”; Nadya Okamoto, a content creator and co-founder of period care brand August; and Grace Wells, a creator who films and edits commercials for brands on social media. 

Tinx also spoke on an Ad Age panel with VaynerX on Monday, where she slammed brands' use of AI and said she believes AI is “coming for [creators'] jobs.”

“I’ve ended up in this kind of weird hybrid between the creator world and the advertising world, and I’ve been dreaming of going to Cannes Lions for years,” Wells told Ad Age. “So, it’s really exciting to see this sort of convergence of social media marketing and traditional marketing. It opens up so much room for collaboration between brands, production companies and creators … and I feel like Cannes welcoming creators with open arms is just further legitimization of the creator space.”

United Talent Agency, meanwhile, more than tripled the number of creators it brought to Cannes this year compared to last year’s festival. Alix Earle, Jake Shane, Noah Miller and Robyn DelMonte, aka GirlBossTown, are among its roster of creator attendees. 

“Last year, it really felt like we were there more so as listeners, and it feels like we're there this year as real participants and real speakers,” said Ali Berman, partner and co-head of UTA Creators. DelMonte echoed Berman’s sentiment, saying, “I was in a lot of rooms and listening to a lot of panels last year about the creator economy, and there was a component missing, which was the creator POV. So, sending more creators and allowing them to speak from a perspective of like, they're not just ad space, but they're marketers and they're creatives, I think is really important.” 

UTA Marketing’s Next Gen practice also spotlighted a slew of largely Gen Z creators at its “ZCannes” event, a play on the name of the Gen-Z-focused marketing conference, ZCon, it held in August 2023. Brands such as eos and PopSockets, along with TikTok, Pinterest and Snapchat, are sponsoring ZCannes. 

Brands and agencies leverage creators

Brands and marketers such as Amazon and eos also dramatically increased their influencer partnerships at Cannes for this year’s festival. Amazon’s influencer program teamed up with a dozen creators in Cannes, including Harry Jowsey, Monet McMichael and Carter Gregory—several of whom posted Amazon-sponsored Instagram stories as part of the Cannes collaboration. And eos worked with UTA Next Gen to host six creators in Cannes as the skincare brand’s first-ever influencer trip.

“Cannes is sort of like the epicenter of marketing trends and the future of what's happening in commerce,” Lara Cohen, senior VP of creators and community at Linktree, which activated at Cannes for the first time this year with a creator breakfast and panel featuring creator Soo Youn Lee. “I think it makes a lot of sense that Cannes is leaning so heavily into creators, because so many brands have identified creators as sort of the ‘storefronts of the future.’”

The presence of influencer agencies, too, feels larger this year than ever before, said Keith Bendes, VP of marketing, strategy & growth at influencer marketing agency Linqia. Influential doubled its beach space at Cannes; Captiv8, an influencer marketing platform, chartered a private jet to Cannes for roughly 50 CMOs and 10 creators, including Peloton instructor Ally Love and comedian Adam Waheed; and creator company Whalar programmed a schedule of 30 panels for its “Whalar House” activation that include over a dozen creators.

“Creators are really excited to meet brand marketers and agency creatives face-to-face, to learn more about their world [and] to understand more about the way they think and how the wider advertising ecosystem works,” Neil Waller, Whalar co-founder and co-CEO, wrote in an email. “Being a creator has become a true career path—in fact, it's become an entrepreneurial business path—and so the thirst for more knowledge is huge.” 

The desire among creators to immerse themselves in the traditional advertising landscape through Cannes comes as brands and agencies are increasingly collaborating with creators beyond sponsored posts on social media. Wells, for instance, has had several of the videos she produced for social media turned into ads for both broadcast channels, such as NBC, and streaming platforms such as Hulu and Peacock. But Wells typically only gets to interface with the social media and influencer teams at the brands she partners with, she said.

“I don’t think people are thinking of [influencer marketing] as just wall posting by the creators anymore,” Bendes said. “That’s just the beginning of the equation. A lot of people are instead thinking about, ‘How does a creator become the center of the campaign, and how does that creative get used in every location and every place, and how do the partnerships get deeper, so [creators] are coming to events [and] they’re on billboards?’”

Creator pain points

The Lions Creators program, in particular, has opened the door for creators to vent about pain points they often encounter when working with brands at this year’s festival, said Jamie Gutfreund, founder of influencer marketing consultancy Creator Vision. Many of the panels and events in the program are “geared toward helping [creators] as business owners” and touch on topics such as contract negotiations with brands and best practices for brand partnerships, she said. 

Creators participating in the programming have pointed out issues such as the long delays in their payments from brands—with many creators not receiving their paychecks until 120 days after posting their sponsored content—and name-dropped brands, social platforms and agencies that have been unpleasant to work with or have skimped on payments, Gutfreund said

Billion Dollar Boy’s Owen highlighted a disconnect between what creators’ discussions at Cannes have focused on versus those led by brands and agencies. Creators are largely talking about wanting more “humane” and “empathetic” treatment from their brand partners (such as being paid in a timely manner), while brands are concentrating on innovation in influencer marketing and “wanting to be more peer-to-peer with creators” before having laid a foundation for strong relationships with influencers in the first place, she said. 

“I think it’s being acknowledged [at Cannes] for the first time right now that creators are not just fun, willy-nilly videographers, they are businesses, and they should be treated as such—down to pay equity [and] down to even just the timing of when they receive their money,” said Halle Ihenacho, an in-house content creator and social strategist at Stagwell agency Gale, who is participating in the Lions Creators program

For brands, it’s important to remember that “that creators are not 100-year-old agencies with 1,000 plus people—they’re humans, and they’re humans that are following their passion and really taking a bet on themselves,” Ihenacho said. “So, if you bet on them and you've decided to partner with them, you need to understand what you're getting into.” 

Ihenacho is using her experience in Cannes as an opportunity to show other creators (specifically creators of color) how they can leverage their social media and content creation skills for roles in the ad industry rather than full-time content creation, which many creators believe is the only career path available to them, she said. “There’s so many spaces opening up for creators in the advertising industry to be in-house creators. I think it's really important to be able to showcase that.”