KitKat launched its “The Heist” campaign at this year’s Cannes Lions, which 115 other brands took over within ten days. The campaign was powered by creators Kai Cenat and IShowSpeed on Twitch.
The campaign from VML London collected 31% share of voice across 93 markets and $224 million in earned media, and took home the PR Grand Prix as well as gold Lions in the Media, Social and Creator categories.
The festival, which for a long time measured creativity through agency work, this year moved creators from a media channel into the role of campaign authors. According to the netinfluencer overview, more than a thousand creators came to the venue, and more than 250 appeared across the programme. The dedicated LIONS Creators track, which Cannes prepared with Adobe, moved to the main site at Palais Beach. The number of competition entries fell by roughly a quarter year on year. According to a URLgenius survey cited by netinfluencer, creator content now makes up 44% of all paid advertising creative.
Lions for campaigns where creators led the creative
Alongside KitKat, the Vaseline brand also collected awards. The Vaseline Originals campaign by Ogilvy Singapore, built on creators such as Jen Chae and Lauren Luke, outsold Vaseline Jelly by 466% and won gold and silver Lions across PR, Social, Creator and Creative B2B.
The same logic applies to the NBA Take-Two Media project, which attracted more than 110,000 players of the NBA 2K game. On stage, Mike Minton, Chief Product Officer at Twitch, named the shared mechanic. “The internet used to be about distribution. Increasingly it’s about participation,” said, according to Forbes. The awards therefore went to brands that gave creators creative control.
Institutional capital in the creator business
Cannes 2026 also framed creators as assets that can be bought. The agency CAA and its capital partner TPG, through Integrated Media Company, set up the $250 million holding company Compound Creative Holdings to acquire creator businesses, led by managing partner Tucker Brown. Variety described the move as a shift from commission to ownership.
This was not an isolated step. According to the netinfluencer overview, the consultancy Accenture announced the acquisition of the influencer group Whalar. Tobias Hoss of TopFan summed up the consolidation. “Hollywood stopped competing with creators and started acquiring them,” said, according to netinfluencer.
Capital is moving towards companies with their own audience base and growing professionalisation. According to a URLgenius survey, 70% of US creators describe themselves as full-time professionals. Brian Klais of URLgenius summed up this change of status in the netinfluencer overview. “Creators are not a media line item. They are strategic partners shaping product narratives.” Christoph Becker of Whalar Group added that “Creators have evolved far beyond a marketing channel”.
AI as a tool and infrastructure
Last year the festival sold AI as the creative itself, while this year it framed it as a tool and infrastructure. Ben Moore of BeReal named the shift. “Last year Cannes sold AI as the creative. This year it admitted AI is the tool,” said, according to netinfluencer.
OpenAI made its Cannes debut, and its Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser, speaking on the panel “Advertising in the Age of AI”, described a shift from awareness to an economy built on AI. Amazon presented Alexa+ Agentic Ads, a format that takes the customer from watching an ad all the way to completing a purchase within the conversation. “Alexa+ Agentic Ads close the gap between intent and action,” said Charlotte Maines, Alexa’s vice president of content and advertising, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Adobe opened the festival by announcing a partnership for agentic AI.
Adoption of AI among creators is widespread. According to the URLgenius survey, 47% use it daily and 79% at least weekly, while 40% see AI influencers as a growing competitor. Kate Fleming of PartnerCentric pointed to the contradiction. “The festival that tightened rules to crack down on AI deception is now hosting its largest-ever celebration of AI creative tools,” said, according to the netinfluencer overview.
Emily McDonnell, an adviser on creator partnerships who previously worked at Snap, Bumble and Google, described creators and AI as the festival’s two main threads. “Creators weren’t a side conversation anymore, they were at the centre of almost every conversation. Alongside AI, they became one of the defining themes of Cannes,” she wrote on LinkedIn.
The European framework and Article 50
The contradiction that Fleming pointed to has a concrete date in Europe. Article 50 of the EU AI Act introduces transparency obligations for generative systems, meaning that AI outputs must be recognisable as artificially created and deepfakes must be labelled. These provisions start to apply on 2 August 2026.
The UN also underlined the urgency. Charlotte Scaddan, an information integrity adviser at the UN, warned, according to The Hollywood Reporter, that “Mis- and disinformation is a top global vulnerability”. Rupen Desai, marketing director at Una Terra, added on stage that attention is becoming an addiction. “We are actually in the addiction economy,” he said, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Cannes 2026 confirmed creators as a separate category with a competition track, institutional capital and top prizes. AI remains a tool that in Europe is newly subject to binding rules.
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