The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, which began in 1954 as a gathering of cinema advertising contractors who wanted their work taken as seriously as film, has spent seven decades oscillating between those two identities. This year, the entertainment side appears to have won.

The annual gathering on the French Riviera, long the advertising industry's most prestigious convocation, felt different in ways that executives who have been attending for years said they could not ignore. United Talent Agency, the Hollywood talent agency, threw a dinner for creators — a slot that in previous years would have been reserved for chief marketing officers. The OpenAI executive in charge of advertising made his way to a villa not to speak with brands, but with the people who make content for them. A chief marketing officer from Bose compared creators to creative agencies outright.

"The biggest change is that creators have moved from the sidelines to the center of Cannes," said Alex Buxton, director of global partnerships at Thinkingbox, a creative collective. "The debate is no longer whether brands should work with creators, but how to integrate them into every stage of the marketing process."

The shift is not entirely new — the platforms began fragmenting audiences years ago, and the campaigns that once made brands resonate stopped landing the way they used to — but Cannes gives such shifts a stage and a calendar date, forcing the entire industry to reckon with them in one place, all at once. (Whether the industry enjoys being forced to reckon with things is another matter.)

What emerged this year was less a takeover than a convergence. Marketers and creators appeared to be learning from each other, with creators increasingly acting as extensions of marketing teams rather than one-off campaign talent. Leandro Barreto, the global chief marketing officer for beauty and wellbeing at Unilever, used his keynote to clarify his company's much-discussed bet on creators. "This is about how demand gets created," Mr. Barreto said. Television and paid media are not dead, he noted, but long before platforms or influencers existed, people trusted a friend's recommendation in a way they never trusted a brand's pitch.

Creators, of course, are not actually friends — the relationship is parasocial, not personal — but they are, apparently, close enough.

Original story published in Digiday: "Cannes made it official: creators are marketing's new talent", by Seb Joseph, Alyssa Mercante