Each year the advertising industry gathers on the beaches of Cannes, France to give each other awards and max out their expense accounts on poolside rosé.

Cannes Lions the Super Bowl for the marketing industry and, like the big game, the most interesting thing that emerges is not any one individual ad or campaign, it’s how the overall theme changes from year to year.

Through the late 2010s, the uproar at Cannes was how Big Tech had taken over. The incumbent party hosts were the global ad agencies, but all of a sudden the stages and parties were being hosted by Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other software companies that had been gobbling up advertising budgets.

The industry declared the death of the ad agency, which of course didn’t exactly happen, but it did signal a massive shift towards digital advertising spend.

In recent years, those discussions have been dominated by AI. OpenAI, Anthropic, and a myriad of other AI-based companies declared that they were the next big marketing revolution. Whether or not AI has taken over marketing is a topic for another time.

This year had a decidedly different theme. Meta, Google, and others were still there, and so were the AI giants, but the main focus shifted towards content creators.

Over 600 individual creators were invited to give talks, host parties, and do what they do best: post videos. Amazon even used their yacht to launch what they’re calling Fire TV Creator Hub, which is a new section of Fire TV that shows YouTube and TikTok videos.

Meanwhile, Instagram used the occasion to announce that they’re adding widescreen mode so people can watch Instagram on their TVs.

Creator deals are the new media deals

This year, US-based brands alone will spend north of $43 billion on creator partnerships, up from $37 billion last year.

The best news for those of us with more modest budgets is that the most effective partnerships are the smallest. According to multiple studies of creator-driven content, the lower the follower count, the better the results, so it makes sense that creators are taking over both Cannes, and our media budgets.

So What?

We can learn from the big brands that have already adapted to this shift. Rather than one-off creator partnerships, they’re looking at content creators as a major marketing channel right next to Google, Instagram, and TikTok, and we can all do the same.

Start by building creator budgets into your annual plan, then use those to get the same strategic results that you had previously relied on paid media for: views, traffic and conversions.

Plus, because you’re probably not trying to sign MrBeast or a Kardashian, the people you reach out to are going to be much easier to work with, more likely to collaborate on something that’s genuinely interesting, and ultimately more likely to drive better results for your investment.