I returned from this year’s Cannes Lions conversations with a familiar feeling, the same one I get at the start of every summer. Something new has the whole industry’s attention. This time it’s creators and AI, and you could barely sit through a panel without hearing that the future belongs to individual voices with a phone and a following.
I like creators. I’ve built a career alongside them. But I’ve been in this business long enough to recognize the shape of what I’m watching, and it looks a lot like a summer crush. Exciting, a little intoxicating and rarely built to survive past September.
The industry falls in love every year
Watch the calendar and the pattern is hard to miss. Each big idea owns the conversation for about a year. It gets the keynote, the awards category, the budget line and the flood of think pieces. Then the next one shows up and the room turns its head. Run back the recent crushes and the cycle is easy to see:
- Transparency.The year everyone demanded to know where their programmatic dollars actually went. The questions were fair, and much of the plumbing still needs fixing.
- Connected TV.CTV was going to reinvent the living room. It did reshape how brands buy screens, even if the measurement argument never fully ended.
- Diversity, equity and inclusion.It became the line in nearly every brand deck, then cooled as a slogan well before the underlying economics changed.
- Creators.This year’s headliner, powered by AI and real budgets, and the name everyone is currently infatuated with.
None of these ideas were wrong, and that’s the part people miss. Transparency deserved the scrutiny it got, connected TV really did change how people watch and inclusion matters as much now as it did the year it filled every deck.
What trips the industry up is a habit: We treat serious structural questions the way you treat a fling, all in for a few months and gone before the real work is done.
So are creators actually different?
Here the honest answer gets a little uncomfortable, because the money is real. Goldman Sachs Research projects the creator economy’s total addressable market could roughly double toaround $480 billion by 2027, up from $250 billion, with brand deals driving most of what creators earn. That is not a fad-sized number.
But look at who the money actually reaches. In that same research, only about 4% of the world’s roughly 50 million creators qualify as professionals, meaning they earn more than $100,000 a year. Goldman expects that sliver to hold steady even as the whole pie grows. So we have a massive, expanding industry, one built to reach everyone, now organizing its future around a very small circle of individual names.
That should sound familiar, because it’s the story of nearly every media boom. A wide field, a narrow top and plenty of talented people doing the work while the value pools somewhere above them. What’s genuinely new about the creator wave is the tooling and the speed. Strip that away and the economics look much like they have for decades.
What actually makes a trend last
There is a simple test for whether a trend has a future: ask who ends up owning it once the excitement cools. The buzzwords that fade tend to be the ones the industry treats as marketing themes, passed around in decks and dropped when the next one arrives. The ones that last change something concrete: who holds the infrastructure, who gets paid, who keeps the audience after the crowd moves on.
Creators feel powerful right now, yet most of them rent their audiences from platforms they neither own nor control. The Goldman analysis says as much when it predicts a flight to quality toward the largest incumbent platforms, precisely because those platforms hold the scale, the capital and the monetization tools that individuals lack.
AI pushes in the same direction. When making content becomes nearly free, the value moves from whoever holds the camera to whoever owns the distribution and the data. A trend turns into something durable only when the people creating the value keep a fair share of it and can survive the next change to the algorithm.
That is the part our industry keeps skipping. Independent and community-based publishers have lived with that ownership question for years, long before the trend cycle noticed it.
What comes next, and what should
If I had to name the next word on everyone’s lips, I’d bet on agentic AI, the idea of systems that plan, buy and even create with little human input. It’s already taking shape on the horizon, and it will get its keynote year like everything before it.
I’d rather talk about the one thing that never gets its turn as the buzzword, because it doesn’t run on a season: ownership. Who owns the platforms, the audiences, the data and the revenue? That question doesn’t photograph well on the Croisette, and it doesn’t slot neatly into an awards category, which is exactly why it keeps losing out to something shinier.
I started in the music business at labels like Def Jam and Atlantic, and later built a magazine of my own. Both taught me the same lesson. The artist gets the applause, and the person who owns the catalog and the distribution is the one still standing a decade later. The media works the same way, which is why I now spend my time on the question of who owns the media.
Build for what comes after the crush
I’m not asking anyone to fall out of love with creators. The energy around them is good for all of us, and plenty of real work is getting done. My one caution is to keep some perspective on how long an infatuation usually lasts. The brands and marketers still winning five years from now will have used this moment to build durable relationships and fairer structures while everyone else was busy chasing the next headline.
Summer always ends. The question worth asking now, while everyone is still infatuated, is what you want to be holding when it does.
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
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