By Jordan P. Kelley, Editor-in-Chief & General Manager, Aivanta
Coming out of Cannes Lions last week, the narrative is clear and it is loud: creators have arrived, again. The difference is that this time, they’re being received by institutions who have recognized the market creators built for themselves and adjusted their approach accordingly. An estimated 500 creators were working the Croisette, with LIONS Creators integrated directly into the main festival footprint at the Palais Beach for the first time. There, the industry’s biggest brands, platforms, and production companies were all pitching the same vision: a streamlined, scalable pipeline where creator partnerships and brand-funded entertainment are no longer two separate conversations, but one.
It’s a compelling vision, and the buy-in is real. The ambition is right, the intention is genuine, and the capital is following. Creators are operating as fully realized media companies now, and their audiences, in many cases, are larger than prime time. Even the smaller creators are being seen more fully for their immense potential to earn the trust of their small but deeply loyal audiences. It’s here.
But ambition, intention, and capital can only go so far. Without it, the infrastructure being celebrated on the Croisette becomes a pipeline for content that doesn’t land. The brands, creators, and partners who figure out how to bring that rigor into the development process, before production begins, will be the ones who make this era worth what everyone just spent in Cannes. Here is what that looks like, and where the gap still lives.
First, the objective gets set wrong.
Brands, even the ones that say with clear eyes and the best intentions that they want to invest in entertainment, still often enter the process with a marketing mindset. They want content that drives awareness, purchase intent, and brand recall; the same metrics they apply to a 30-second spot or a paid social campaign. In their defense, marketing leaders are accountable to those metrics, and bringing those frameworks into a new context is a natural instinct.
The challenge is that entertainment doesn’t work that way. Audiences don’t watch their favorite creators, channels, series, or films because it might make them feel good about a brand. They watch because the work earns their attention on its own terms. The objective of effective brand-funded entertainment isn’t to sell. It’s to shift perception. To make an audience feel something about a brand that traditional advertising is increasingly unable to manufacture. That’s a fundamentally different brief, and getting it right requires someone at the table who can help translate brand business objectives into a creative mandate that audiences will actually respond to.
Then, the wrong instincts take over.
Because the objective is sometimes unclear, the creative process can inherit marketing’s control mechanisms. Scripts get reviewed for messaging compliance, legal flags anything that strays too far from approved territory, and executives who greenlight campaigns start greenlighting stories, applying familiar filters to an unfamiliar form. Brands are built on consistency and control, and those instincts have served them well everywhere else.
The interesting wrinkle in the creator context is that brands now have a new operational pressure that can reinforce this tendency: scale. If you’re signing creators to long-term partnership models and building content pipelines around their IP, you need governance frameworks. You need brand voice consistency across dozens of active relationships. That’s a serious challenge. But the most successful version of that governance starts with shared creative alignment established before the structure gets built, rather than more brand control baked into the structure upfront. A script or story that feels like it was written to make a brand look good will be recognized as exactly that, by audiences and by the creator’s existing community. The brands getting this right are the ones investing in the alignment work early, not the approval process late.
Finally, there’s a translation gap in the room.
The deepest structural challenge in brand-creator entertainment is a gap in the development process. On one side of the table: brand marketers and agency creatives who understand the brand’s objectives deeply, but whose instincts were built for marketing, not for entertainment development. On the other side: creators and production companies who understand storytelling and audience but may not be fluent in brand safety or sponsor value. In the middle: often nobody whose job it is to translate between those two languages before the project gets too far down the road to course-correct.
What Cannes made clear is that the industry is investing heavily in the infrastructure around this gap. Platforms, talent managers, and creator studios are building the pipelines. What will complete the picture is the development layer that makes what flows through those pipelines worth making. That means someone, or a team, that can ask the right questions early: does this concept have genuine audience potential? Is the brand’s presence earned by the story or bolted onto it? Are the creative and brand objectives truly compatible, or are we heading toward a compromise that serves neither side as well as it should?
The brands and partners getting this right aren’t doing anything radical. They’re working with better development alignment. The creators they’re partnering with are thriving not because the deal terms are better, but because the creative brief was better. The content is landing because someone did the strategic work before production began, making sure the story was worth telling on terms both the brand and the audience could believe in.
Here is something worth sitting with as the industry structures this next wave: creators are often exceptionally good at this work themselves. The best of them have built audiences by understanding, instinctively and precisely, how to earn attention and trust. That skill, applied to a brand partnership, is exactly what brands are paying for. The biggest mistake brands will make in the coming wave is trying to fence that skill and expertise in rather than strategically embrace it. The brands who win with creators will be the ones who adjust where brand safety genuinely demands it, but make a skillful, concerted effort to allow for frictionless, seamless creative contribution from the creator. That is how brand cache gets transferred. And that outcome is achieved with skilled listeners and partners doing the work in pre-production, before the structure hardens and the creative window closes.
That’s the work the industry is ready for. Cannes made that clear. The question now is who is doing the development work that makes all of it worth it? That’s the next gap worth closing.
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