Move Over, Mad Men: How Creators Are Taking Over Cannes Lions 2026
More than 250 creators are descending on the Côte d'Azur this week, and the power dynamic between brands and talent is officially flipping. Here's what the shift means for the $12.4B influencer economy.
By Board of Creators ·
Key takeaways
- 250+ creators are attending Cannes Lions 2026, alongside 13,000+ total festival-goers, with talent now treated as headline act rather than sideshow.
- EMARKETER projects 88.7% of US companies will invest in influencer marketing in 2026, with global brand spend hitting $12.42 billion.
- Power has flipped: Dhar Mann's Palais workshop has marketing execs competing for a $200,000 brand integration on his channel.
- SharkNinja's CMO and Bain's Shweta Bhardwaj say the term "influencer marketing" is dead — replaced by "creator commerce" with creators inside product design.
- Other Cannes 2026 themes: agentic AI scrutiny, a $10.5B World Cup ad surge, and rosé-fuelled M&A speculation after Accenture/Whalar and Publicis/LiveRamp.
- Cannes tightened 2026 awards rules to crack down on unverifiable case studies — a "creative effectiveness" reckoning that applies to creator work too.
For decades, Cannes Lions was the playground of Madison Avenue. This year, it is officially a creator town — and the people who used to wait outside the Palais are now the ones marketers are lining up to meet.
More than 250 creators are expected on the Croisette at Cannes Lions 2026, according to a list compiled by a coalition of marketing firms and reported by Business Insider. They are part of an estimated 13,000+ attendees packing the French Riviera for a week of brand deals, paid speaking gigs, yacht parties, and the kind of "get ready with me" content that now drives more cultural attention than most TV spots.
From Martin Sorrell to Alix Earle
UTA''s Margot Hauer-King put the shift bluntly to Business Insider: a decade ago, the celebrity sighting on the Croisette was former WPP CEO Martin Sorrell. In 2025, it was Alix Earle. In 2026, the lineup includes "Call Her Daddy" host Alex Cooper, "Feed Me" founder Emily Sundberg, makeup creator Cindy Chen, TikTok stars Josh Richards, Golloria and Keith Lee, plus YouTubers Eleanor Neale, Colin & Samir and David Dobrik.
This is not a sideshow. It is the festival reorganising itself around where attention actually lives.
The numbers behind the takeover
EMARKETER — a Business Insider sister company — now projects that 88.7% of established US companies will invest in influencer marketing in 2026, up from less than 40% a decade ago. Global brand spending on the channel is forecast to hit $12.42 billion this year.
SharkNinja chief brand and experience officer Michelle Crossan-Matos told BI the phrase "influencer marketing" itself feels outdated. She prefers "creator commerce" — a label that captures how deeply creators are now embedded in product design, launch, and merchandising, not just promotion.
"The marketing of yesterday was us talking about our brands. The marketing of today is consumers talking about our brands — and our role as CMOs is to enable that conversation as authentically as possible." — Shweta Bhardwaj, partner, Bain & Company (via Business Insider)
The new power dynamic
YouTube creator Dhar Mann, returning to Cannes for his second year, told BI his calendar is jammed with speaking sessions — including a Palais workshop where marketing execs are competing for a $200,000 brand integration on his main channel. The framing alone tells the story: it is the brands pitching the creator now, not the other way around.
"Creators aren''t just showing up to network and learn from brands — now more brands want to know how creators work," Mann said. "We get feedback every day from millions of viewers. We know what makes them care and what makes them share."
His pointed critique of the old model: "The traditional process of working with traditional advertisers takes months — endless decks, meetings back and forth. Brands are learning that in order to survive this new climate, you have to move at the speed of culture. Who can do that? Creators."
What this means for creators
For the 1M+ follower tier — the Sundas Khalids, the Colin & Samirs, the Dhar Manns — Cannes is becoming the single highest-leverage week of the year. Three reasons:
- Direct CMO access. The decision-makers controlling billion-dollar budgets are physically on the same 2km stretch of beach. No agency gatekeepers. No three-month RFP.
- Platform real estate. LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok and Meta are all running rooftop creator studios. LinkedIn''s Hotel Carlton space has one rule, per BI: no swimming in the pool.
- Peer infrastructure. "If there''s one thing about the content creation space, it can be very lonely — I sit in my basement and record most of my videos," Khalid told BI. Cannes is the rare week creators get to compare notes in person.
The other Cannes 2026 storylines
Creators are the headline, but three more themes will dominate Croisette conversations:
- Agentic AI. Every pitch deck will brand its product "agentic." Hightouch CMO Brian Kotlyar''s test, via BI: "When someone says they have an agent, ask them — what can your agent do that Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini cannot?"
- The World Cup. The festival overlaps with final group-stage matches. WARC forecasts the tournament will drive a $10.5 billion surge in global ad spend this year.
- M&A. Expect rosé-fuelled speculation about whether Accenture Song''s acquisition of Whalar and Publicis'' purchase of LiveRamp will trigger copycat deals in the creator and data spaces. Omnicom execs will be quizzed on integrating the $9B IPG merger.
The "creative effectiveness" reckoning
PepsiCo CMO Jane Wakely, on the jury for the Creative Effectiveness Award, told BI she wants this year''s breakthrough trend to be campaigns that can actually prove business impact. Cannes tightened its awards rules for 2026 after several 2025 winners were scrutinised for unverifiable case-study claims.
"Two or three years ago, a lot of the work that was celebrated was not effective; it was stunts," Wakely said. "I think as an industry we were beginning to lose our way."
That message lands hard for the creator side of the room too. The agencies and platforms now treating creators as their lead act will be measured on the same yardstick: did the work actually move the business?
The Board take
Cannes 2026 is the cleanest signal yet that the creator-as-media-channel debate is over. The remaining question is structural: who captures the value created when 250 creators are doing more dealmaking in a week than most agencies do in a quarter? Our bet — and our reporting from the agency breakdown earlier this month — is that the creators who arrive with their own teams, their own data, and their own IP walk away with the biggest checks. Everyone else is still a guest at someone else''s party.
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