Hey friends,
Welcome back to Creator Etiquette®.
Ed Davidson is the VP and Chief Growth Officer at LIONS, the team behind Cannes Lions, and he is the reason I was in the south of France in the first place. We met three or four years ago through a mutual friend in the creator economy, and since then I have been persistently nudging my way toward Cannes every year. Ed was on the other end of that nudge more than once. This year, it finally happened!
Why Creators Belong at Cannes
Cannes Lions is 70 years old. It was built for creative people doing creative work such as advertising, film, music, design, production. The fact that creators were not central to it for most of those seven decades was a lag. The industry did not yet understand that creators were doing some of the most creatively effective work in the world.
Now, ninety countries are represented at the festival. Brands, platforms, and production companies are all here, and front and center alongside them are creators. Ed's take was that creators belong here. They are not guests. They are not an emerging category that needs to earn its seat. The seat is theirs. What most creators still need to do is show up with the confidence that this is true.
How Creators Found Themselves in the Creative Marketing Ecosystem by Accident
Someone who went through a traditional advertising agency path arrived at the creative marketing ecosystem intentionally. They have years of institutional education about how briefs work, how CMOs think, how budgets get approved and why.
Creators, by contrast, largely found themselves in the same ecosystem by accident. They started making content that resonated and brands started paying them. Suddenly, they are inside one of the most complicated, fast-moving, global marketing ecosystems in the world without anyone having walked them through how it works from the inside.
Ed said that Cannes is one of the only places in the world where you can actually get that education at scale from brand leaders, platform heads, creative directors, and other entrepreneurs who are all moving through the same questions from different angles. The value is not the parties or the brand deals. It is the understanding of the ecosystem you are already operating inside.
What CMOs Actually See When They Look at a Creator Budget
I asked Ed to walk me through what a CMO perspective on creator marketing actually looks like.
A CMO of a major brand is not living the day-to-day of creator marketing. They are looking at a multi-billion dollar budget and trying to understand quickly and clearly why a meaningful portion of that is going to creator partnerships, and what the expected return is. They are not close to the briefs, not close to the deliverables, not close to the conversations the brand manager is having with creators every week. They need a clear, fast case for why the investment makes sense.
This is why the brand manager or head of creator at a company is so important. They are the translator. They are the person who takes the creator relationship and makes it legible upward to a CMO who has too many priorities to deeply understand any single channel.
Creators need to know how to make their value legible at the CMO level, not just at the brand manager level. The person you pitch may love you. The person above them needs to be able to explain to their CFO why the money was well spent. If you cannot help with that translation, you are making the relationship harder than it needs to be.
The Biggest Gap Between Brands and Creators
Ed said that the biggest challenge is business infrastructure. When a brand wants to work with a large number of creators at once, it is genuinely complicated. Making it feel like a good experience for each individual creator while managing that volume on the brand side is something the industry is still working through. It has improved enormously in the last few years, but it remains the unsexy, nuts-and-bolts challenge that sits underneath every creator-brand relationship.
This is worth naming clearly for creators because it reframes something that can feel personal. When a brand is slow to send a contract, late on a payment, or unclear on a brief, it’s not because they do not care about you. It is because the infrastructure behind the relationship is genuinely complicated and still catching up to the scale of what the creator economy now demands.
How to Show Up at a Conference Like a Human and Leave With a Real Relationship
Ed's creator etiquette tips for Cannes was to know who you are and who you are not. Have a clear, confident, non-robotic answer to the question of what you do and what value you bring. Not an elevator pitch, but a clear enough sense of yourself that when someone asks you in passing, you can answer honestly and with conviction.
The second is to be super human. Brands and CMOs at events like Cannes want to talk to creators. They are gaining something from the conversation even if it does not lead immediately to a deal. Walk up. Say hello. Be polite and kind and curious. The confidence to do that is recognition of the position you have actually earned. Creators should feel welcome at these spaces because they are. Showing up like you believe that makes the whole difference.
Ed, thank you for making this year happen and for sitting down with me during one of the busiest weeks of your year. Go follow him on LinkedIn, and if you are a creator thinking seriously about Cannes in 2027, he is the person to have on your radar.
Welcome to Creator Etiquette®. I am so glad you are here.
Xo, Gigi Robinson
Founder, Hosts of Influence® | Creator, Educator, Speaker, Author, Dog Mom 🐾
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