The heat in Cannes this year was the kind people will be telling stories about. But the bigger story was who took over the Croisette. Our team was there (well-hydrated, fans in hand) to capture what we heard and what it means. 

The Creators Are Rewriting the Playbook, Again

Creators were everywhere, and the thing that stood out wasn’t how organized they’ve become. It’s how differently they define organized. The prevailing operating model, as far as we could tell, is that a creator doesn’t work from a strategy deck. But that does not mean they are operating without discipline. Their discipline looks different: A creator has a manager and an instinct for capturing moments. They are less bound by a content calendar and campaign architecture than you’d expect, but they are capturing everything as it happens and shaping it after. One creator said with real pride that he has no strategy at all. He meant it as a flex, and in his world it likely is one.

This runs against the tidy version of the creator story the industry has been focused on, where creators have matured into business infrastructure and brands are building creator ecosystems. Some of that is real at the top end. But a lot of what we saw was looser and more instinctive, personality-led, and less interested in the kind of content discipline agencies spent the last decade building. The mistake is assuming that makes it less sophisticated. It may simply mean the operating system is different.

A comparison from the CEO of an influencer firm stuck with us: this looks a lot like the wave of independent lifestyle bloggers who came up in the late aughts. At the time, the industry didn’t know quite what to make of them. They went on to quietly reshape the whole relationship between brands, consumers, and publishers, and a lot of the influencer playbook everyone takes for granted now traces straight back to them. It’s worth remembering that before the next group gets underestimated in the same way. The plan was never the point. It was always more about audience, and the democratization of influence that comes with it.

AI is Drowning Us All in Sameness

On the adtech side, the mood was different. Cautiously optimistic, and notably un-panicked about AI. Nobody we talked to thinks AI is going to make their business disappear. The working consensus is that AI makes the tools you already have sharper rather than replacing the people running them. 

The real worry sits one level down. When everyone reaches for the same models, the output starts converging on the same place. You can prompt your way to some difference, but only so far before the work all rhymes. That’s the anxiety underneath the optimism, not “AI will take my job” but “AI will make my work look exactly like everyone else’s.” Which puts the value back on the inputs, the signal, the judgment, the things that don’t come out of a prompt. Creativity and craft were the two words that kept surfacing, and that’s why. In an AI-saturated market, proprietary data, differentiated inventory, audience signal, and human judgment become more important, not less.

Brand vs Performance is Mostly a Dichotomy We’ve Constructed 

The last thing worth flagging is something both the brand people and the performance people seemed to agree on: the wall between brand and performance is less distinct than we tend to make it. Every marketer wants media that performs. A brand marketer measures performance in lift, recall, and consideration. A direct-response marketer measures it in a click or a conversion. The expectation underneath is identical, which is media that does its job and proves it. After years of the pendulum swinging hard toward one definition of that, it’s settling back toward the middle.

The market is not choosing between brand and performance as cleanly as the industry vocabulary suggests. It is asking for media that can create demand, capture demand, and show evidence of both.

The clearest example of this wasn’t said on a stage. It was a performance-first media company, historically built entirely on direct response, that came to Cannes for the very first time this year. Their read was that the money is starting to move toward brand advertisers, and they’re reorganizing around that bet, building out the holdco relationships and agency ties to be ready for it. When the direct-response natives start showing up to the brand party, that tells you more about where things are heading than any panel does.

That was Cannes. Hot, loud, a little chaotic, and underneath all of it, an industry renegotiating who holds the power and what actually counts as good work. The advantage now goes to companies that can pair cultural relevance with measurable signal, and prove that the work actually moved something.