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At Cannes Lions, the drinks are flowing and the creator presence keeps growing.
During this year’s festival, which kicks off Monday, creators like Kai Cenat, Amelia Dimoldenberg, and Alix Earle are set to make appearances. The Publicis-owned influencer marketing platform Influential is returning for the third year and hosting Influential Beach, which promises to be “bigger than ever.” (Publicis is also, apparently, trying to make a lion—which happens to be the festival’s mascot—an influencer.) Beyond that, creator programming and discussions at this week’s festival are going to be more integrated than in years past, Becky Owen, global CMO of influencer marketing agency Billion Dollar Boy, told us.
“It’s going to be the biggest for sure,” Owen said of creators and creator marketers’ presence at this year’s festival.
To kick off the week, we looked at some of the big trends to watch for creator marketers.
Lions Creators 2.0
Last year marked the first time that Cannes Lions offered the Creator Pass, which allowed creators to attend the festival and provided them with their own space atop the Palais, along with dedicated Lions Creators programming.
“It was such a breath of fresh air to have this new group of young, creative people who were so excited and experiencing it for the first time and had their own, outside-of-the-advertising-world perspective,” Mae Karwowski, founder and CEO of influencer marketing agency Obviously, told us.
This year, Karwowski said she expects to see more brands incorporating creators into their own programming and anticipates that creators will move beyond the Palais. Owen said that second point could be critical, as one challenge she noticed last year was a “massive lack of information” among some creators about the broader goings-on along the Croisette.
“When I was at the Creator Rooftop, a lot of creators were pointing down at the beaches and being like, ‘Oh, what are those? How do I get access to them?’” Owen said.
This year, Billion Dollar Boy and creator platform FiveTwoNine funded 20 Creator Passes through aCreator Fund grant program, and Owen said the agency helped the 20 recipients of the grant register to secure access to events throughout the week. In addition to increasing awareness about event programming, Owen said the Creator Fund aimed to ensure diversity among attendees this year beyond just the “top 1%” of creators.
“We need the real representatives of the creator economy to be in the mix, because otherwise it tells you that the creator economy is led by these megaceleb creators,” she said. “I want the whole industry to respect and see the power of these true creators that are living and breathing and holding up the economy.”
VidCon-flict?
Unlike in recent years, the timing of Cannes Lions is in direct competition with another creator-centric event this year: VidCon, which is held annually in Anaheim, California. Creator marketers, though, aren’t particularly worried about a potential conflict or its effect on attendance.
“We haven’t felt any concern around it at all,” Owen said.
Karwowski agreed: “My money’s on [Cannes Lions] being even bigger and better this year and VidCon taking the hit.”
The reason? Beside being in the south of France, Karwowski said that Cannes Lions feels new to creators while presenting an opportunity to rub elbows with potential brand partners that VidCon doesn’t traditionally attract, especially for mid- to macro-level creators.
“At VidCon, they couldn’t DM a brand and say, ‘Let’s go for coffee,’” Owen said. “At Cannes, they can.”
For an event like Cannes Lions that has just recently begun to embrace creators, the challenge may be less about competing with other events and more about general awareness. Owen said one of Billion Dollar Boy’s initial challenges in creating its Creator Fund was that many creators simply didn’t know about Cannes Lions or its potential benefits.
“It doesn't have this kind of fame outside of the core advertising world,” she said. “I do think there is still, on the whole, a lack of information on how to crack Cannes, but we’ve been working really hard with our 20 [creators] to educate them on that.”
Sip and chat
Karwowski said that, this year, her team at Obviously has focused on setting up more private conversations between brands and creators. “The most important part of Cannes isn’t the awards,” she said. “It’s the networking, it’s the connections, it’s the business being done.”
In addition to securing talent, Karwowski said brands are “looking to meet more creators…to understand creator culture from creators themselves, not just hearing it filtered through advertising companies.”
Unlike previous years, it seems that creator strategy meetings will be more welcome simply because the value of creator marketing is better understood. “Last year was still the era of ‘why,’ explaining to marketers why this is important,” Jonah Minton, principal at MediaLink, recently told Ad Age. “And now, we’re in the ‘how.’”
Throughout the week, Owen expects to hear discussions centered on how creators are “building brands and transitioning off the phone screen,” as well as how creators on platforms like TikTok are disrupting linear programming.
“Creators are everywhere, and they are, for the first time, mixed in with all the other conversations that are happening,” Owen said. “Whether they still are going to be treated with the same level of respect and honor as other types of advertising, I don’t know. That’s always the problem with Cannes.”