What brands keep getting wrong about creators.
Watch the session
The setup
Most agencies now have a creator line item. Few have changed anything about how they buy it. The brief still describes a category of person rather than a person. The contract still runs one campaign. The scorecard still counts impressions. And the creative feedback still arrives as a list of talking points that must be said, in order, on camera, by someone whose entire business is not sounding like that.
The result is a category of work that underperforms for reasons everyone involved can name and nobody has fixed. Brands blame the creator for weak numbers. Creators blame the brand for gutting the idea. The agency in the middle passes notes in both directions and absorbs the damage from both.
This session put three people who live inside that transaction on a stage and asked them to describe the failure points precisely. One runs a talent and opportunity business between Africa and Europe. One is a former agency creative who became the creator on the other side of the brief. One works in pharmaceutical marketing, where the compliance apparatus makes every problem the others describe roughly four times worse.
40 minutes, no slides, and a closing stretch in which the moderator explicitly invited them to vent. That last part is where the most useful material is.
Who was on stage, and why they're worth listening to
Part One — A creator is not a media placement
The panel's foundational disagreement with the industry is a definitional one, and Ashley stated it in the session's first substantive answer. Inside an agency, working with a creator gets processed through the only mental model available: it becomes a buy.
"When you're in the advertising world, you see working with a creator or any type of ad as just a media buy. Like, you pick your audience, you pick where and when and how it's going to go out."
The thing that model omits is the entire asset being purchased.
"My audience trusts me. They care what I think. I've talked to them for years and years, some of them. So anything that I put out there is not just an ad. It's me saying: I trust this brand, I'm recommending it to you on good faith."
That is the whole argument compressed into four sentences. What the brand is renting is a relationship it did not build and cannot repair. Every downstream fight in this session — over scripts, over contracts, over metrics — traces back to a buyer who thinks they are purchasing distribution when they are borrowing credit against someone else's credibility.
Kofi approaches the same problem from the commissioning end, and his tell is the brief itself. He can read intent off the document before a single conversation happens.
"Sometimes it's very easy to tell when it's supposed to be just a tick on the box, or whether a brand or an agency is ready to invest in that idea that comes."
He is specific about what he is reading for: whether the brief contemplates investing back into the community, which creators it names and why, how it plans to tell the story, and — the giveaway — whether anything in it survives past the campaign end date. He also dates the pattern. The tick-the-box era peaked when diversity targets became internal quotas to satisfy, and a lot of companies never got past satisfying them.
The institutional friction is a related problem with a different shape. Two months before Cannes, My Runway Group produced an evening for African creators and talent at the British Museum, including fashion shows staged on the museum staircase.
"The first question a lot of people were asking was, how did y'all get the British Museum to agree to all of this?"
His answer to how is not a technique. It is trust plus persistence.
"We're quite stubborn. So we just keep pushing, trying to get our way, and we just take every inch we get."
He puts the hit rate at roughly eight in 10, and credits the method to a first meeting where everyone states plainly what they intend to do. His concession to the institutions is real, and worth noting because it is the opposite of the posture this kind of panel usually strikes: sometimes the client's resistance is legitimate, a new direction does alienate a core audience, and the right move is to adapt rather than push. He said it and then immediately said he keeps pushing anyway.
Katie added the most useful process observation in this stretch, from her own experience rather than a panelist's. She had once been annoyed by a brand's objection to a story — a consumer campaign built around a mock headquarters that had not been labeled as fictional — until the person on the other end explained that the company was quietly relocating and hiring, and the campaign had created a disclosure problem for them. Her point was that the operational reason behind an objection is invisible until you ask for it, and it is almost never the reason stated.
Ashley extended it into a general rule about brand feedback that any account person should have taped to a monitor.
"Brands are also really terrible at articulating feedback. So it takes, on both sides, pushing and asking questions and clarifying, because they might not even understand why they have a certain feeling or reaction to something. You have to kind of pull it out of them and help them articulate it."
Part Two — Where the creative dies
Katie asked the question directly: who kills the creative energy first, the agency middleman overcorrecting, or the brand's fear of letting go of the script? Ashley works both ways — direct with brands, and through agencies — and her answer exonerates the middle.
"I feel like the brands are the ones killing things ahead of time. The agencies, just by nature of working at an agency, have a little bit more sense of the creativity and are a little bit more willing to try things. A lot of times they don't change anything."
What the brand brings instead is a checklist.
"They have these three talking points — that's like a wish, but it's usually ten. Is she saying them, yes or no? And that's kind of all they care about."
Then the anecdote that will travel furthest from this session. A brand sent notes asking her to remove the fluff from a script.
"The fluff was jokes and fun stuff that made their talking points matter. And engaging. I pushed back as much as I could. I had to take out ninety percent of the fluff."
Nobody in that approval chain believed they were damaging the work. They believed they were tightening it. The fluff was the delivery mechanism, and stripping it left the payload with nothing to ride on.
She told them so in advance, which is the part worth stealing.
"I was very honest and I said, this will not perform well if I do it the way you want me to do it."
They gave her a little room, the video performed reasonably, and the brand ran it as paid media. She is still thinking about the version that did not get made, and intends to go back and ask them to run it. That is the actual cost of the fluff note: not one weak video, but a permanent gap between what the brand got and what was available.
There is a floor under that negotiation, and she was explicit about where it sits.
"I'm not gonna put out shit just because a brand wants me to. I would sooner cancel a contract with a brand than put out something that I do not like."
That is the leverage the media-buy model does not price in. A placement cannot walk away from the campaign it is carrying. A creator can, because the audience is the asset and she is the one who has to face it the next morning.
For Shamekka, the same dynamic operates with a regulator behind it, which changes what is negotiable. Pharmaceutical work requires talent who have the condition — and then rewrites how they talk about having it.
"They want someone that actually has the condition or relates to the condition, but then they edit their story. There's things that you can say, there's things that you can't say."
She described prepping an athlete the day before a shoot: 1 million followers, and the actual condition, sitting through compliance training.
"He's like, so I can say this, but I can't say this. I can say this, but I can't say this. And whenever you see those ads — actual patient — there's a lot that goes into it."
She was careful to put the blame in the right place. This is not the pharmaceutical marketers being difficult; it is the FDA review that every asset must clear.
"If the FDA could understand the creator community — which they don't really care about — then things would actually move smoother."
What she wants is not deregulation. It is a defined creative allowance inside the model, small, so the finished asset does not read as scripted. And she has been on the receiving end of the alternative.
"They'll tell me, okay, tell us all about your story. And some marketing person will think that they know me and send it back and say this. I'm like — okay, yes, I'll say that, but that's not the way that I articulate it."
The structural culprit, in her account, is not a person. It is a seat.
"You have somebody that sits in the brand or the agency in between, and they don't actually let the creator speak to the brand. It's just a middle person, and that's what makes it really, really hard."
Katie's framing for that seat — the momentum-killing middleman — is the phrase the session gave the industry, and it is the thing independent agencies are structurally best positioned to eliminate. Ashley made that case explicitly when asked how a mid-sized independent competes with a holding company budget.
"When you have the lack of red tape and hierarchy that the bigger agencies and holding cos have, you can bring the creator in on the creative brief and have them be part of the actual campaign, and not just this one little piece of the media plan."
She named the cultural obstacle to that inside agencies, and it is not budget.
"There's been this very separated vibe between creators and creatives in the agency world. It feels like maybe they're encroaching a little bit, because creators have all these ideas."
Part Three — The one-off is the business model problem
Kofi's central argument is that the industry's addiction to single campaigns is not a strategy. It is the path of least resistance.
"It's low-hanging fruit. I could say the lazy way. It's easy to just look at who's hot or what's hot right now and just tap in, instead of investing and building."
His counter-model comes from sport. He pointed at the way Nike has historically signed athletes long before they were finished products — Kobe Bryant as the reference case — and stayed with them through the development.
"Taking talents when they're literally not the final material yet, and staying with them and watching these brands blow up. That takes time. That takes a lot of effort. That takes a lot of faith."
Which produces the single most portable line of the session, and a genuine reframe of how creator selection should work.
"If I'm a brand and I'm looking for a brand ambassador, I don't have to find one. I need to build one with someone."
He then connected short-termism to the thing brands claim to want most, and the connection is hard to argue with.
"How do you expect consumers to be loyal to you when you're not even loyal to people that you partner with?"
Run his hindsight test on any brand you like: look at a decade of their creator activity and see whether it reads as a plan or a series of platform reflexes. Vine, then whatever came next, then social impact, then whatever is happening now. His question is not what they did. It is who they are still with.
Shamekka's version of the same argument comes with a working template attached, and it is a broadcast one.
"State Farm has Caitlin Clark and these other people, and you'll see them in various different situations. They should equate those TV commercials to content creators and keep it that way."
The brand-side objection to long-term deals is usually cost. Her rebuttal is that the alternative degrades the asset you paid for. A creator who posts a different sponsor every week trains their own audience to discount them.
"It just seems as if you're monetizing it, which is fine, I'm not going to knock your hustle. But now I'm going to change the way I view you, and I may not want to see your content, because the next thing I know, next week is going to be a new ad."
She works the long term into paper rather than hoping for it: agreements written for continued use rather than a single deliverable, and a prep call before any script exists, so the people writing it have the whole person rather than a bio.
"Learning from the past, it was just a script, and it's like — you want me to read this? This isn't even true."
Ashley's contribution to this section is about selection rather than duration, and it lands on the briefing process most agencies run on autopilot.
"It's usually like a shotgun approach — we just want this category of creators. And then I get a brief, and they're describing what they want from me, and I'm like, this is not what I do at all. Do you even know what my content is?"
Her instruction is to get granular to the level of the individual.
"Pick actual people that you watch and like and want to work with individually."
And then the measurement fix, which is the most immediately actionable thing said all session. Her work is business-to-business. Nobody impulse-buys enterprise software off a reel.
"This is stuff that is expensive. It's for enterprises. It's something that is going to take months, if not years, for them to decide if they want to buy. So, loosening the reins a little bit on the analytics that come with these partnerships, and looking at other KPIs instead of views and impressions. Think about the saves on the video, and if there's any DMs or questions about it. Those are so much more important, and will lead to those long-term conversions."
Kofi's vent, when Katie opened the floor for it, is the same complaint from the supply side: the work put in versus the result expected. He described brands insisting on a creator who was wrong for the product because the person was going viral, then registering shock at the outcome.
"All of a sudden — she does an average of two million views per video, and this is five hundred thousand. Like, what else did you expect? You didn't put that intentionality in."
And the mechanism nobody on the buy side seems to internalize.
"There's this thing in the creator ecosystem where normally, when it feels like an ad, it goes terrible. When people don't feel it's authentic. And a lot of brands don't understand that."
His summary is six words long.
"You just don't point at someone and expect them to do magic for you."
The uncomfortable truth
The sharpest passage in the session is Kofi admitting that he takes the tick-the-box money.
He can identify a performative brief on sight. He said so in his first answer. And then, unprompted and with a warning that it might be controversial, he explained what he does with that knowledge. Sometimes the brand is only renting a cultural moment. Sometimes there is no real intention behind it. He proceeds anyway.
His reason is that the check is not abstract to the person receiving it. It can change a creator's life. So the calculation is not whether the brand is sincere; it is whether the opportunity is worth having regardless. What his team does is convert the shallow engagement into something durable after the fact — deliver the work, go back to the company, point at what performed, and propose the relationship the original brief never contemplated.
That is a more honest account of how this business runs than anyone usually gives on a stage at Cannes. The purist position — refuse the inauthentic brief — is available only to people who are not responsible for someone else's income. Everybody advocating for creators is making this trade constantly, and it is rarely said out loud.
Shamekka named the same bind from the other direction, when Katie asked what each of them had unlearned.
"I fight so much for them that it's like — okay, I don't want to fight too much for them. I'm fighting for them, to speak up for the talent, but then I don't want to lose the client. So I have to unlearn: okay, I have to put on this hat and not this hat. That's hard when you play both sides."
There is no resolution offered for that, because there isn't one. Anyone sitting between a brand and a creator is being paid by one and trusted by the other, and Kofi's version of the warning is blunt: in the middle, when anything goes wrong, you are the one it lands on.
Shamekka also raised a compliance asymmetry that deserves more attention than the room gave it. A fitness creator can claim a five-mile run they did not do, or credit their physique to discipline rather than to a procedure or a substance, and no regulator will ever look at it. A patient with a documented condition, speaking about a treatment she has personally taken, must clear a PRB review — the promotional review board gate every pharmaceutical asset passes before it can run — that will sand her voice down to something robotic. The regime polices the people telling the truth and ignores the people who aren't. Her question — where is the balance — went unanswered.
And the last honest note came from the floor. An audience member asked whether the industry is heading into creator fatigue. All three said it is already here. Kofi's evidence was a question back to the room: how fast do you scroll when your favorite creator's video turns out to be an ad? Five seconds, usually. Shamekka's evidence was production reality — a three-day turnaround, a location, a look, a revision round, then another, until there is no fun left in it and the burnout arrives quickly.
The fatigue is not a consumer trend that happened to the industry. The industry manufactured it, one over-scripted one-off at a time.
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