Biggest Lesson for Brands and Agencies from Cannes? Better Start Building Creator-Friendly Brands

Creators were the topic du jour at Cannes this year. It was everywhere. But in my mind, it’s a conversation that left out a glaring opportunity for brands and agencies.

Naturally, there was no shortage of hot takes. But before I hot-take-the-hot-takes, a couple of numbers are worth remembering.

As the global marketing and advertising industry approaches $1 trillion, creators have already captured roughly 3% of that spend. Three percent doesn't sound like much until you realise it's $30 billion.

Another stat we've been using in our own pitch decks for the past few years: the top 100 creators collectively command more engagement – and in many cases bigger audiences – than the top 100 brands.

So it's no surprise there were upwards of 500 Creators roaming the Croisette this year.

With that came a steady river of opinions.

One that caught my attention started from a perfectly reasonable place: Creators should better understand the advertising business. They shouldn't operate in a silo. Someone even suggested Cannes should host panels or workshops explaining how agencies work, how marketing organisations are structured, and how brands make decisions.

Fair enough.

But then the argument became misguided, in my opinion.

The suggestion became that creators should spend time downstairs in the Palais studying award-winning work, learning the craft of advertising, and maybe even learning how to read a Cannes case study.

My initial reaction went something like, 'Uh, why?'

The Creator share of the creative/media pie isn’t growing exponentially because they're great at making ads.

Their influence is growing because they're really good at building communities, understanding platforms, creating engagement, and developing a voice that people actually choose to spend time with.

People don't wake up hoping to watch advertising. Sure, sometimes they’ll allow great advertising to interrupt their favourite travel creator content. But, the majority of ads are dismissed as interruption.

If anyone has homework to do, it's brands and agencies.

For decades, agencies have perfected the art of crafting incredibly precise brand narratives. We obsess over every word, every tagline – the tighter and more “ownable” the expression of the idea is, the better. We build brands that are so tightly controlled there's almost no room left for interpretation.

And therein lies the problem.

This isn't about teaching creators how to express OUR ideas.

It's about learning how to build ideas that other people can express.

In other words, we need to build Creator-friendly brands.

I think of it this way:

If your brand idea is a life ring, it needs handles.

It has to be easy for someone else to grab onto without losing what makes it distinctive.

We had the chance to build a new Scotts lawn care brand from the ground up, and we intentionally designed the strategy this way. There isn't a precious tagline everyone has to repeat. Instead, there's a very ownable definition of who the brand is for.

That single idea has worked equally well with action sports athletes, comedians, DIY creators, mom influencers, and backyard enthusiasts. None of them sound the same. None of them deliver the same content. Yet they're all unmistakably reinforcing the same brand idea.

It’s harder to do. But that's the goal.

As creative agencies, we will never own every execution.

Our superpower is figuring out what a brand should say and do.

Increasingly, how that gets expressed is shared with creators, sponsorships, communities, platforms, and experiences we don't fully control.

With $30 billion flowing into the Creator economy, the biggest risk isn't that agencies lose work.

The biggest risk is that brands simply rent Creator audiences through shallow collaborations, awkward product placements, and content that feels bolted on.

The best Creator marketing happens when there's genuine overlap between what a Creator naturally does and what a brand genuinely stands for.

That overlap shouldn’t happen by accident.

It happens when we stop building brands around perfectly crafted taglines and start building ideas with enough room in the margins for other people to make them their own.