For most of its history, Cannes Lions belonged to consumer brands, celebrity talent, and the agencies that ran their campaigns. That is still mostly true. What’s changing is the room next door, where marketers are sitting down with AI educators, data analysts, and workflow specialists whose audiences are product managers and finance teams, not Instagram followers.

The Drive Agency, the Chicago-based talent management firm led by CEO Patrick Zielinski and Chief Talent Officer Leila Marsh, has 14 creators attending Cannes this year, with a number of them partnering with brands in a paid capacity or as part of official Cannes programming. The roster covers artificial intelligence, workplace technology, B2B marketing, and professional education – categories that until recently didn’t merit much attention at advertising’s most high-profile gathering. 

“It just naturally ties into what we’re already doing,” Patrick says. “We work with so many of the brand partners and agencies that are present there. We have so many relationships and contacts that we want to continue to get face time with.”

The Commitment Came Before the Deals

The partnerships that followed didn’t begin with pitches to brands. They began with Patrick and Leila pushing their clients to go. The agency strongly encouraged its roster to commit to Cannes early, convinced that the opportunities would come once creators were already confirmed. “Once you’re saying you’re going, the opportunities will manifest,” Leila says. 

That sequence played out across the roster. Jess Ramos is speaking on LinkedIn’s official “Creator Exchange” panel, one of three creators selected for the session. Colin Rocker is on-site with Adobe’s Firefly team, extending a relationship that began at last year’s festival and has since grown into an ongoing ambassadorship. Megan Lieu will be covering the week in partnership with Later. “A Women in AI” lunch, co-hosted by Ramos alongside Aria Kim, Aditi Mishra, Shira Lazar, and Jenny Stojkovic, took shape after the creators confirmed attendance.

Patrick is direct about what happens when the dynamic is reversed. “If you’re just looking for a transactional deal, you’re automatically reducing your value,” he says. 

A creator asking brands to underwrite a trip transfers leverage to the brand. A creator who committed independently, with a track record of collaboration with those same brands, operates from a different position entirely.

Why Cannes Became the Right Room for B2B Brands

The shift at Cannes tracks a broader change in how large technology companies think about creator partnerships. Adobe is demonstrating Firefly. LinkedIn is expanding its creator monetization tools and featuring creators in official programming. Meta, Spotify, and Microsoft all have substantive activations planned. These are not consumer brands chasing Gen Z reach. They are enterprise and platform companies competing for professional audiences, and creator-led distribution has become a meaningful part of the mix.

“The brands in the B2B and B2C space are activating at Cannes because they’re able to show off a lot of their new technology and get in front of their buyers,” Patrick explains. “The creators are part of that because they’re helping amplify those storylines.”

Leila traces the shift to data. “These marketers have seen the results of the power that subject matter expert creators have across their audience to actually make an impact,” she says. “They’ve seen the conversions. Instead of us just telling them that it works, they’ve seen the proof.”

One signal from the festival itself points in the same direction. Creator programming, which was previously staged separately from the main beach properties, has been folded into the central event footprint this year.

What Expert Creators Offer That Celebrity Influence Doesn’t

The creators The Drive Agency represents are practitioners. They explain transformer models, walk through AI workflow integrations, and have spent years building credibility within specific professional industries. Their audiences have opted in because the information is specific and reliable.

“It’s one thing to talk about AI,” Patrick says, “but to actually talk about different models, tokenization, and the tools being used in very specific ways is really fascinating. The brand can go back and say, ‘This person really knows what they’re talking about. There’s got to be something here because this is really complex stuff and they can break it down in simple terms.’”

That specificity is harder to manufacture than celebrity reach and, when genuine, more durable. Patrick and Leila have each spent roughly 15 years across digital talent and brand partnership, from the early VidCon years through YouTube’s first major programming investments to the development of LinkedIn’s creator ecosystem. 

Walking into Cannes with expert creators isn’t unfamiliar territory for them. It’s a new category of a pattern they’ve been watching build for years.

“There’s never really been a space that kind of brings people together in this sense,” Patrick says of the festival. “Many conversations that we had on the ground last year materialized in the last 12 months.”

Building a Private Room Inside a Public Festival

In addition to the official programming, The Drive Agency is co-hosting a private gathering with The Visionaries, an organization founded by Alex Morrison, Amy Tunick, and Geoffrey Colon that brings together marketers, brand leaders, and industry professionals.

Booth handshakes and brief introductions at brand activations produce one kind of relationship. A dinner does something different. “Once that brand person has a personal relationship with the creator, they’re going to continue to think of them when opportunities arise,” Leila says. “We’re very particular about who we represent. These are super smart, educated, respectful professionals, and we’re excited to introduce them to these people on the brand side in a more intimate setting.”

The gathering reflects a conviction the agency holds: the professional depth of their roster only becomes visible in extended conversation, and that creating those conditions is part of the job.

What Brands Keep Getting Wrong With B2B Creators

Patrick and Leila have a consistent message for the marketers they’ll meet with at Cannes. 

The first is about voice. “Allowing the creators to express that knowledge in their own voice is the way it’s going to connect best with the audience and see the strongest impact and conversions,” Leila says. Marketers have improved here in recent years, she notes, but the instinct to over-script persists, particularly with technical content, where the complexity tempts brands to treat deliverables like product documentation.

The second issue is format. “Many of our experts might be prominent on short-form platforms, but they also have a newsletter and a YouTube channel that maybe isn’t garnering 100,000 views per video,” Patrick says. “There’s a deep-rooted audience there that really follows them for that credibility and expertise.”

His recommendation: custom packaging. Rather than commissioning three short-form videos, a brand might take one cross-posted video, two newsletter write-ups, and a live LinkedIn panel with the product team. 

The Jess Ramos partnership with Microsoft was structured that way. “We were able to sit down and brainstorm with them on drawing up the ideal structure to tell this narrative,” Patrick says. The package included multiple newsletter integrations and Jess appearing as interstitial content across two live-streamed Microsoft developer events, Posette and Cosmos Conf, reaching a professional audience that short-form video alone wouldn’t have accessed. 

The 12-Month View

Neither Patrick nor Leila is calculating success at Cannes in deals closed by the end of the event. “We want to further the relationships we have and go home feeling like everyone had a good time and was happy with the opportunities that came up,” Patrick says. “Then the rest will take care of itself.”

The festival is, for The Drive Agency, a compressed version of a longer argument: that creators with genuine expertise in professional categories are a growing line item for the brands that need to reach those audiences, and that the infrastructure supporting those creators needs to match. Fourteen of them on the Croisette is, in one sense, just a trip. In another, it reflects where the marketing dollars are already moving.

“Some of these creators have never been in these types of rooms as much before,” Patrick says. “The fact that they’re getting to sit down with all these platforms and have conversations on panels really shows that this isn’t just a random famous celebrity. It’s someone who’s a practitioner and lives and works in this field.”

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