Cannes briefing creativity moves beyond agencies

Bose CMO Jim Mollica hasn’t used a creative agency in four or five years, he told the outlet at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity this week. One CPG CMO, overheard at a dinner, 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’s 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.

Why the standalone ad is losing its footing

“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.”

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 them 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.

P&G’s modular approach to creative partners

“The environment 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 they 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.

Creators are now creative partners, not just media placements

“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 companies 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 firms 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. Marketers 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.

“Marketers 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. His company helps some of the biggest companies 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 of Cheil Agency Network. “Things that will separate agencies are: Creativity and Trust.”

Podcasting has a new address at Cannes

The festival used to send podcasters to the beach tents. Now it’s building them studios. UTA 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 companies now want a piece of.

Take Mel Robbins. She’s barely picked up a mic at the festival, and she had one of the best arguments for why podcasters are here. She came for three reasons: Sirius XM, her ad sales partner, asked her to; the festival in June is when chief marketing, brand and media officers lock in next year’s budgets; and she’s watched how a single high-visibility appearance can generate press attention her show doesn’t usually get.

Spotify frames the point in broader terms. Roman Wasenmüller, global head of podcasts, said podcasting has stopped being a niche conversation track at the festival and become part of the main one, with every advertiser now asking how to integrate authentically rather than whether to bother.

“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 duo. “When we’re at the festival, we’re executing with our brand partners. We’re making plans for the future.”

Sarah Teich, head of marketing at Smooth Media, summed up the broader shift: “This year my headline is creators are not influencers. They are marketing and they are media, and that fundamental shift is not going anywhere.”