Digiday covers the latest from marketing and media at the annual Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. More from the series →
Bose CMO Jim Mollica hasn’t used a creative agency in four or five years, he told Digiday. One CPG CMO, overheard at a dinner this week, said they no longer believe in agencies of record. They want ideas to come from anywhere — a creative agency, a creator, even AI. Creator-owned StudioB founder Olly Lewis met with several CMOs this week who want creator-made shows, not TV ads, as the baseline for their advertising.
These are small examples but they point to something bigger. For the first time, a growing number of CMOs are thinking about creative more broadly than creative agencies. Those businesses don’t have a monopoly on it anymore.
“What we see from our own agency partners when we collaborate from the same starting point are more relevant campaigns that enhance the consumers’ in-the-moment experience — faster iteration, sharper formats, and work that adapts as audiences do,” said Corey Rados, head of global creative studio at Uber Advertising. “When AI is optimizing placements against real-time behaviors in milliseconds, brands need to build campaigns that can move fluidly with those signals. This makes closer collaboration across creative and media necessary.”
That’s a polite way of describing a much blunter shift: the standalone ad is losing its footing as the unit advertising gets built. It’s happening for two reasons, and they compound each other.
The first is cadence. Mass moments big enough to justify one hero ad — a World Cup or a Super Bowl — are rarer simply because attention has fragmented past the point where anything else can reach that many people at once. Everywhere else, search, content, and creator work are collapsing into one continuous funnel: an ongoing flow of assets reacting to real signals, not a single placement to optimize.
The second is discovery breaking down. People increasingly find things through conversations with LLMs rather than search, fed largely by creator content the platforms never pay for or attribute.
Both shifts are pushing CMOs toward the same kind of partner: one that can move as fast as the data and stay close to culture at the same time. That’s a different axis of judgment than “who makes the best ad,” and it’s pulling in expertise that never used to be in the room for this kind of brief.
“The landscape shift is making every brand builder a direct to consumer founder with their hands right on the creative wheel,” said P&G’s chief brand officer Marc Pritchard on stage earlier this week.
For his agencies, it’s no longer a one-stop shop, he continued. It’s a more modular one, where partners work in tandem and leverage each other’s superpowers. “We find the most valuable creative partners, or what we call MVPs, with the best skills and experiences and desire,” said Pritchard. “These MVPs flow to the work, and they’re indispensable in creating big brand ideas like Real laundry magic and sprinting with us and with our in-house team to generate the volume and variety of assets that we need to win.”
That doesn’t mean CMOs are turning their backs on creative agencies entirely. Mother and Uncommon, among others, continue to do great work for brands like Anthropic and Electronic Arts. But so do creator agencies, production studios, hell, even AI. Because brilliant ideas and distribution increasingly come from different places, not just the agency holding the AOR contract.
“The key message has been that creators are no longer just a part of the media plan; they are creative partners who can support brands in creating a sustained momentum using always-on storytelling,” said Olly Lewis, the commercial boss of StudioB, the creative studio owned by creator Brandon Baum. “There hasn’t been a panel or session that I’ve seen this week that hasn’t come back to creators — and that really says something.”
What it says is the definition of creativity is changing. Creativity is arguably the only job left in knowledge work that can’t be automated away. Anyone can generate content from a prompt now. The brands that break through will be the ones who out-think the noise, not out-produce it.
“What we’re hearing consistently this week is that marketers aren’t just raising the bar on what creative looks like, they’re fundamentally rethinking who they want to build with and how they want to build,” said Johnny Rohrbach, co-founder of global partnerships and operations at Silverside AI.
The agencies that understand that will be the ones that adjust their whole business model accordingly. Pricing built on guessing a client’s budget rather than scoping real costs is a bad foundation for any relationship and fixed deliverables can’t survive a marketing cycle that now moves week to week. CMOs increasingly show up with their own scripts and ideas already worked out, not a blank brief. The old agency posture — disappear for three weeks, come back with three options — doesn’t fit how clients want to work anymore. What’s needed is a re-set on both sides: cmos more open to handing over a rough idea instead of a finished script, agencies more willing to collaborate rather than disappear and present.
“CMOs today are showing up with a clear initial vision,” said Rohrbach. “They know the direction they want to go. What they need now is a partner who can run alongside them, help refine and enhance that vision, and build from that starting point together, not an agency that retreats into a black box and comes back as the sole arbiter of the idea.”
Granted, he’s got skin in the game. After all, his company helps some of the biggest brands produce ads with generative AI in minutes. But there’s truth in it regardless, backed up by what plenty of others have said this week.
“We’re going back to the origin of the advertising industry,” said Joe Maglio CEO Cheil Agency Network. “Things that will separate agencies are: Creativity and Trust.”
Podcasting has a new address: Cannes
Cannes used to send podcasters to the beach tents. Now it’s building them studios.
Take UTA, for instance. It built its own podcast studio and creator lounge this year, the first time it’s done either. Shelby Schenkman, who heads UTA’s creator representation, says roughly 70 creator clients are on the ground, a meaningful chunk of them podcasters. Sarah Matthews, who runs brand partnerships for UTA’s creator business, puts it bluntly: “It’s not just a niche medium anymore.”
The talent is sitting at “a real nexus of culture and conversation,” she said, with the kind of sticky audience relationships brands now want a piece of. And it’s showing up in interesting and fascinating ways like how creators covering the industry are now part of its content slate but also making the event part of their own too.
“We’ve even got, you know, some clients doing, or invited to a live podcast kind of panel discussion, where it’s through the lens of a podcast,” said Matthews.
Take Mel Robbins. She’s barely picked up a mic at Cannes, and she had one of the best argument for why podcasters are here.
She came for three reasons, by her own count: Sirius XM, her ad sales partner, asked her to; Cannes in June is when chief marketing, brand and media officers lock in next year’s budgets, putting every decision-maker in one place at once; and she’s watched how a single high-visibility appearance, like her Golden Globe nomination, can generate press attention her show doesn’t usually get from breaking news or celebrity bookings. Cannes, for her, is less about taping content than about going direct to the people who decide where the money goes, before it splinters across separate media, content and production budgets.
Spotify frames the point in broader terms. Roman Wasenmüller, global head of podcasts told Digiday podcasting has stopped being a niche conversation track at Cannes and become part of the main one, with every advertiser now asking how to integrate authentically rather than whether to bother. Spotify’s pitch is sponsorship formats stitched natively into the video file itself, plus a memberships product letting creators set their own price, on top of audio’s existing free-and-ad and premium tiers. The math behind it, per the exec, is simple: an advertising business trades at a 2-3x multiple, a subscription business at 6-8x, and creators want exposure to both.
“Cannes Lions is one of the most productive weeks for creators because we get to meet with platforms, brands, and other creators in the same place,” said Samir Chaudry, one half of the Colin and Samir creator duo. “When we’re at Cannes, we’re executing with our brand partners. We’re making plans for the future. And we’re learning about everyone’s priorities and how brands and creators are working together.”
Voices from the Croisette
“Cannes is the festival everyone hates to love and loves to hate, but it remains a conference centered on creativity and advertising in a world where defining advertising feels harder and harder. This year my headline is creators are not influencers. They are marketing and they are media, and that fundamental shift is not going anywhere. We’re seeing the shift of brands thinking beyond running a single campaign with a creator and truly think about them as media partners and extensions of their marketing teams. Whether that is Claude investing in a multi month partnership withCatGPT that includes content and IRL events, or partners embedding into theBreaking and Entering live show at COLLINS House.” — Sarah Teich, head of marketing, Smooth Media
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