Gap arrived at Cannes Lions with growth that turns creators into a distribution network. In two years its creator network grew from zero, and the “Better in Denim” campaign with the group Katseye gathered a billion impressions in its first week.
Gap’s marketing director, Fabiola Torres, summed it up in one sentence on a panel: “They need to be in the conversation, and they need to love you.” This is the third report from Cannes. The first days belonged to creators, who this year received their own Lions category and support infrastructure for the first time. Now it is the turn of the brands, and from the main stages comes the message that the relationship with creators and audiences is changing from an addition to the media plan into a core discipline.
Big brands count creators in their revenue
Alongside Gap, Unilever also spoke about the same shift. Its partnership with Netflix around the series Bridgerton worked the Dove brand into the storyline, and Unilever’s marketing director Leandro Barreto anchored it in the streaming service’s standing: “When you think about culture, it’s very difficult to not think about Netflix because it’s really the epicenter of culture.”
The collaboration brought the Dove brand an increase of almost 60% in new customers. Both brands presented these figures as a direct route to sales.
Coach and Spotify combine fashion and music
The most visible new deal of the week is a global cultural partnership that Coach and Spotify presented at the festival and that targets Gen Z. Coach’s marketing director Joon Silverstein described it on Spotify Beach as a combination of two languages of self-expression. “At Coach, self-expression lives in style. At Spotify, it lives in music. Together, we’re going to be building something that goes beyond both.”
Bridget Evans, Global Head of Ads Business Marketing at Spotify, completed the logic of the deal. “Both of our brands have been fortunate enough to earn a role in the daily lives of Gen Z already.” Spotify framed its whole presence at Cannes around fandom. According to its newsroom, “fans come to Spotify with intent, actively discovering, sharing, and building identity around what they love.” A panel on the new rules of brand loyalty seated singer Troye Sivan next to Silverstein.
Meta presents AI advertising tools to brands
While brands on the stages explained why creators are needed, Meta showed tools meant to make that work cheaper. At the festival it introduced several AI-powered advertising tools. A new end-to-end creative feature in Ads Manager is meant to let brands create, test and optimise a campaign in their own style, while an additional Brand Memory learns from a brand’s historical advertising identity and tone, so that generated content keeps a consistent look.
Creators are directly affected by the Meta Creator Marketing Hub, which merges the existing Creator Marketplace and Partnership Ads Hub into one place for finding creators, and is due to launch by the end of the year. The return Meta attributes to these tools, however, rests on its own data.
Measurement as the new argument for brands
From the festival, creators take away their own awards and programme, while brands take away a metric and the tools to work with creators. Gap, Unilever and Coach all show that connecting with audiences through creators and platforms is now measured in money. The festival closes on Friday 26 June.
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