VidCon and Cannes Lions are increasingly competing for attention from the same Creator Economy teams, but the two events now appear to serve different market needs.
VidCon 2025 drew more than 55,000 attendees and remains closely tied to creator culture, emerging talent, platform shifts, and the operational realities of creator-led businesses. Cannes Lions, meanwhile, expanded its creator focus through its second LIONS Creators Programme, which included nearly 400 creators, while companies including Instagram and Amazon moved major activations to the Croisette.
For teams with limited travel and event budgets, the choice is no longer simply about which festival is larger or more visible. It is about whether the priority is staying close to creators and community signals or accessing senior brand, agency, platform, and media decision-makers.
In this roundtable, 18 Creator Economy professionals weigh which event they would prioritize this year and what they would lose by skipping the other.
The right answer depends on where the creators you work with are in their journey. Cannes Lions is the room for creators who already operate as media businesses, with the IP and infrastructure to warrant a CMO conversation. The Croisette treats them as peers to agencies and platforms, not as talent for hire. That’s where deals get made at scale.
VidCon serves a different creator entirely. Small and mid-sized talent still building audience, still figuring out monetization, still in the phase where managers, MCNs, and brand partnerships are the lifeline. It’s where those relationships form in hallways, and where the next wave of breakout talent is visible months before it surfaces in a Cannes panel.
The tradeoff is real. Skip Cannes and you miss where capital is being allocated. Skip VidCon and you miss the early signal on who will be in that Cannes room three years from now.
They’re not competing for the same budget line. One shows you where the industry is heading. The other shows you who’s about to lead it.
I honestly think this one is pretty straightforward – for EU-based teams, there is now enough Creator Economy movement at Cannes for them to set meetings with creator, agents and managers for 2-3 days to make the “connection time worthwhile”. Same for NA teams, VidCon makes sense to get that same face time with creators, agents and managers.
The real difference is for the 5% of brands who are looking for major, and most likely long-term executions with a top 1% creator, then, regardless of locale, Cannes makes sense. VidCon (I’ve gone for over 10 years) has lost the 1%, gone are the days of the “Casey Neistat” or David Dobrick-level creator attendee at VidCon (and those examples show how long it’s been since VidCon WAS that).
Teams need to get on the ground and interact with creators and their “people” – but keep it reasonable to the executions you have over the next 2 years. Sometimes it’s just “use common sense”.
I’m headed to Cannes Lions this year, and I’ve been a speaker at VidCon, so I’m answering this from having actually been on the ground at both. Both events are great for fundamentally different things, and industry people genuinely show up at both – but the question of which one to pick comes down to where your business is in its arc.
For me, Cannes is the right call right now because I’m moving into a more business-focused phase. I want to be collaborating with executives, building partnerships, and putting myself in rooms with people who make decisions about budgets, deals, and long-term strategy. There are simply more monetization and partnership opportunities at Cannes than at VidCon, and at this stage of building Hosts of Influence and Creator Etiquette, those are the rooms I need to be in.
That said, I want to be honest about what I’m giving up by skipping VidCon. VidCon is where creators meet other creators in a way no other event replicates. It’s where you build peer relationships, see what’s actually working at the audience-facing level, and feel the pulse of the platform-side conversation – what creators are using, what’s frustrating them, what’s about to break. That’s invaluable, and it’s not something a Cannes panel can replicate. If you’re a creator earlier in your business, VidCon is still the room. And if you are super seasoned, it is also a REALLY awesome place to collaborate with other creators.
The bigger story this year is that the VidCon energy itself has shifted. I’m curious to see what it looks like now that the main hotel isn’t the central hub for all the activations and everything is more spread out without one big social platform sponsoring the whole thing. That changes the experience significantly, and it changes who shows up. I’ll have a fuller take after Cannes – I plan to report back on what each event actually delivered for the kind of work I’m doing now. If I had to give one piece of advice on this trade-off, it is that the right conference isn’t the one your competitors are at, but the conference/festival matches the stage of business you’re actually in. Founder-stage creators building peer networks and figuring out their content engine need VidCon and business-expansion-stage creators building partnerships, speaking pipelines, and executive relationships need Cannes. Both can be right for creators and marketers at different times, but at different points in the arc.
Also Cannes will cost you 2-3x what VidCon will cost you (minimum) … so factor that into your planning too.
I’ve been attending VidCon since its inception, so this one hits close to home. Last year I went to Cannes Lions for the first time and it genuinely blew my mind. For talent managers and agents, the potential there is on a completely different level.
VidCon has shifted toward tools and platforms for the Influencer Marketing industry rather than the brands themselves, and the industry pass is overpriced for what you actually get. At Cannes, I didn’t need a badge to access the things that mattered most to me. If you’re trying to build relationships with buyers, Cannes is where they are.
We advise teams to attend VidCon and Cannes Lions for very different reasons because they now serve fundamentally different functions within the Creator Economy.
VidCon remains the core event for the broader creator ecosystem. It is more cost-effective, highly education-focused, and attracts creators at every stage, from aspiring talent and UGC creators to established names. It is especially valuable for creator tech companies, talent managers, and teams looking to discover emerging creators or stay closely connected to creator culture and community.
Cannes Lions, meanwhile, has become the primary destination for brands, marketing agencies, platform executives, and established creator businesses focused on monetization and partnerships. If the goal is securing brand deals, building agency relationships, or connecting with senior marketing decision-makers, Cannes is where those conversations are increasingly happening. But because the cost of attending Cannes is so significant, often well over $10,000 once travel and accommodation are factored in, the ROI absolutely needs to be there. If we had to choose one, it would depend entirely on the objective. VidCon keeps you close to creator culture and future talent, while Cannes is where the Creator Economy increasingly intersects with advertising, media, and marketing at the highest level.
Cannes Lions, without question. VidCon is where creators go to meet their audience. Cannes is where the budgets that pay creators get decided.
For a TikTok Shop agency, our job isn’t to be in the room with 55,000 fans. It’s to be in the room with the brand side decision makers who control the spend we want flowing through creators and Shop. Cannes is now functionally the global trading floor for Creator Economy deals, the LIONS Creators Programme proves that and Instagram and Amazon moving major activations there confirms where the money actually moves.
I would choose Cannes Lions this year. Not because VidCon is less relevant, but because the Creator Economy has moved from culture into commercial infrastructure. VidCon is where you understand creator behavior: formats, fandoms, platform shifts, creator expectations and the next generation of talent. That is valuable. But Cannes is where Creator Marketing is now being discussed as part of media investment, brand safety, measurement, commerce and global growth. For InfluenConnect, that is the more strategic room to be in, because we are focused on helping brands work with creators across markets in a more transparent, measurable and scalable way. What we would give up by not attending VidCon is the raw creator-side signal. But what we would gain at Cannes is access to the people shaping budgets, partnerships and standards. If budgets are finite, I would choose the place where the category is being commercialized.
After 15 years working in social media and the Creator Economy and attending VidCon on and off for nearly a decade, I’d send my team to Cannes Lions. VidCon still plays an important role, but in my opinion, it’s fundamentally a creator-and-fan event with an industry layer attached. Cannes Lions is where marketers, agencies, platforms, and budget owners show up to talk about what’s next in media, AI, creator strategy, and culture, and where strategy and spend actually meet.
What I’d give up by skipping VidCon is proximity to the grassroots side of the space: emerging creators, audience sentiment, and the early signals you feel before they show up in a trend report. But if I only get one swing and one budget, I’d rather be where the senior decision-makers are concentrated. For an experienced team, Cannes Lions is the clearer ROI.
VidCon and Cannes Lions now represent two very different sides of the Creator Economy.
If I had to choose only one event for our team this year, I would pick Cannes Lions. The reason is simple: Cannes has evolved into the place where global marketing budgets, platform strategies, and long-term partnerships are being shaped at the highest level. It’s no longer just an advertising festival – it’s becoming a global business summit for the Creator Economy.
That said, by not attending VidCon, you lose direct access to the grassroots creator culture and emerging talent. VidCon still offers unmatched proximity to the community itself: creators, fandoms, trends, and the raw evolution of internet culture. It’s where you can feel what’s happening before it becomes a boardroom conversation.
In many ways, VidCon shows you where culture is going, while Cannes shows you where the money is going. The smartest companies will eventually find ways to bridge both worlds.
VidCon is a great event, and I loved speaking on stage last year. But veterans on the industry floor last year noticed something: it was sparser. The energy was there, the fans were there, but the buyers were somewhere else.
That somewhere else is Cannes, and it’s the hottest conference of the year. CMOs who have attended for 20 years are now seriously asking how creators fit into their enterprise budgets. The conversation has shifted and the dollars are following. It has genuinely become the Coachella for B2B.
If you skip VidCon you lose the consumer creator pulse and talent discovery. Depending on your client mix, that’s a real trade-off.
If you skip Cannes at this specific moment, you miss the wave while everyone else is paddling into it.
Go what’s best for your industry. Both are great, and ironically enough, both conferences have the same owner.
If I had to pick one, it would be Cannes Lions. It’s still the biggest global gathering point for senior leaders across brands, agencies, platforms, entertainment, and now increasingly the Creator Economy. Beyond the business opportunities, it’s also a meaningful way to reward and expose high-performing team members to the highest level of conversations happening in the industry. What you gain at Cannes is scale of access, the density of decision-makers and partnerships is hard to replicate anywhere else. That said, what you give up by missing VidCon is a more concentrated connection to creator culture itself. Cannes is broad and executive-heavy, while VidCon can offer more direct access to creators, emerging talent, and community-level trends in a less saturated environment. Both matter, but if forced to choose, Cannes has the larger long-term strategic value.
Our choice this year is VidCon. Cannes is increasingly centered around the top 1% of creators, while VidCon still feels closest to the broader Creator Economy and the everyday creators building real businesses. What makes VidCon valuable is that it still sits closest to the operational reality of creators building businesses day to day, especially emerging and mid-tier creators who are often running everything themselves. That’s increasingly where the biggest opportunities are happening.
The future of the Creator Economy won’t just be defined by celebrity influencers or brand campaigns, it’ll be defined by the infrastructure that helps creators monetize, engage audiences, and operate sustainably. That’s a big reason POP.STORE chose to go all in on VidCon this year. The conversation is shifting from “how do creators go viral?” to “how do creators build real businesses?” and VidCon remains one of the few places where creators, platforms, infrastructure companies, brands, and fans are all still in the same room having that conversation together. What you gain at VidCon is a much clearer view into the everyday creator’s behavior and where the industry is actually heading, and that resonates deeper with us.
Cannes Lions is a festival built for our brand customers to experience the best the advertising industry has to offer. In the past, you had to choose between time with clients and creators – either Cannes Lions or VidCon. Today Cannes Lions brings both together. VidCon still offers a space to explore innovation across the broader Creator Economy. But if you’re an Influencer Marketer, Cannes is the place to be.
If I had to pick one festival to send our team to this year, it would be Cannes Lions. Today’s creators are storytellers, filmmakers, and business founders. They are building media empires, transforming entertainment, and influencing culture in ways that brands are only beginning to understand. Cannes offers something different: a curated environment where creators sit down with the world’s leading brands, who are no longer just looking for ad placements but are actively looking to learn from creators about how to shape culture. For creators looking to secure meaningful, long-term brand partnerships, it has become one of the most valuable rooms to be in.
While the French Riviera is tempting, I’m choosing VidCon for my team of content strategists. Cannes offers massive mainstream appeal, but VidCon remains the unmatched epicenter for the creator ecosystem – perfectly bridging brands, agencies, creators, and fandoms, all under one roof. Over the past 15 years, VidCon’s programming has consistently reflected the state of the industry. I’d love to witness the scale of Cannes in the future when dates don’t overlap between the two events. As an OG VidCon attendee, I know my team will walk away with a steady dose of inspiration and meaningful connections fueling our mission to create breakthrough work.
As the Creator Economy transforms into a broader media channel, Cannes is at the center of the shift. The conversations won’t just be about influencers, but about how creators function as distribution channels and long-term brand partners. The brands and platforms with the biggest impact will be in one physical space at Cannes, which makes it a critical event for Later to be part of this year.
That doesn’t mean that VidCon isn’t influential; it’s just serving a different purpose via direct access to audience behavior. VidCon gives a clear view of what internet culture cares about and how fans are engaging in real time. But at the end of the day, our team is prioritizing where the Creator Economy is heading, and right now, that value sits in Cannes.
We consistently attend and speak at VidCon because it’s a classroom for modern marketing. There, leadership and front-line brand teams learn how to leverage creator-first creativity to drive business growth. In a landscape where social-native strategies are shifting market share, VidCon provides the practical blueprint teams need to evolve beyond traditional “broadcast” thinking.
If I had to choose one this year, it would probably be Cannes Lions. The reality is that more of the major platform, brand and agency conversations are happening there right now, especially as Creator Marketing becomes more integrated into broader marketing and media budgets. From a relationship and business development perspective, it’s become difficult to ignore.
That said, what you lose by not being at VidCon is proximity to creator culture itself. VidCon still gives you a much clearer read on emerging creator behavior, audience dynamics, and the types of talent actually shaping internet culture before the industry fully catches up. It’s less polished, but often more reflective of where the space is heading.
At Clicks Talent, both events serve different purposes. Cannes is where you build strategic partnerships and position Creator Marketing within the wider advertising industry. VidCon is where you stay close to the creator ecosystem and spot shifts early.
If you skip Cannes, you risk missing industry influence. If you skip VidCon, you risk losing cultural relevance.
Karina loves writing about the influencer marketing space and an area she is passionate about. She considers her faith and family to be most important to her. If she isn’t spending time with her friends and family, you can almost always find her around her sweet pug, Poshna.
VidCon and Cannes Lions are increasingly competing for attention from the same Creator Economy teams, but the two events now appear to serve different market needs.
VidCon 2025 drew more than 55,000 attendees and remains closely tied to creator culture, emerging talent, platform shifts, and the operational realities of creator-led businesses. Cannes Lions, meanwhile, expanded its creator focus through its second LIONS Creators Programme, which included nearly 400 creators, while companies including Instagram and Amazon moved major activations to the Croisette.
For teams with limited travel and event budgets, the choice is no longer simply about which festival is larger or more visible. It is about whether the priority is staying close to creators and community signals or accessing senior brand, agency, platform, and media decision-makers.
In this roundtable, 18 Creator Economy professionals weigh which event they would prioritize this year and what they would lose by skipping the other.
Tobias Hoss, Senior Advisor, TopFan
The right answer depends on where the creators you work with are in their journey. Cannes Lions is the room for creators who already operate as media businesses, with the IP and infrastructure to warrant a CMO conversation. The Croisette treats them as peers to agencies and platforms, not as talent for hire. That’s where deals get made at scale.
VidCon serves a different creator entirely. Small and mid-sized talent still building audience, still figuring out monetization, still in the phase where managers, MCNs, and brand partnerships are the lifeline. It’s where those relationships form in hallways, and where the next wave of breakout talent is visible months before it surfaces in a Cannes panel.
The tradeoff is real. Skip Cannes and you miss where capital is being allocated. Skip VidCon and you miss the early signal on who will be in that Cannes room three years from now.
They’re not competing for the same budget line. One shows you where the industry is heading. The other shows you who’s about to lead it.
Keith Pape, CEO, YellowPike Media
I honestly think this one is pretty straightforward – for EU-based teams, there is now enough Creator Economy movement at Cannes for them to set meetings with creator, agents and managers for 2-3 days to make the “connection time worthwhile”. Same for NA teams, VidCon makes sense to get that same face time with creators, agents and managers.
The real difference is for the 5% of brands who are looking for major, and most likely long-term executions with a top 1% creator, then, regardless of locale, Cannes makes sense. VidCon (I’ve gone for over 10 years) has lost the 1%, gone are the days of the “Casey Neistat” or David Dobrick-level creator attendee at VidCon (and those examples show how long it’s been since VidCon WAS that).
Teams need to get on the ground and interact with creators and their “people” – but keep it reasonable to the executions you have over the next 2 years. Sometimes it’s just “use common sense”.
Gigi Robinson, Founder, Hosts of Influence
I’m headed to Cannes Lions this year, and I’ve been a speaker at VidCon, so I’m answering this from having actually been on the ground at both. Both events are great for fundamentally different things, and industry people genuinely show up at both – but the question of which one to pick comes down to where your business is in its arc.
For me, Cannes is the right call right now because I’m moving into a more business-focused phase. I want to be collaborating with executives, building partnerships, and putting myself in rooms with people who make decisions about budgets, deals, and long-term strategy. There are simply more monetization and partnership opportunities at Cannes than at VidCon, and at this stage of building Hosts of Influence and Creator Etiquette, those are the rooms I need to be in.
That said, I want to be honest about what I’m giving up by skipping VidCon. VidCon is where creators meet other creators in a way no other event replicates. It’s where you build peer relationships, see what’s actually working at the audience-facing level, and feel the pulse of the platform-side conversation – what creators are using, what’s frustrating them, what’s about to break. That’s invaluable, and it’s not something a Cannes panel can replicate. If you’re a creator earlier in your business, VidCon is still the room. And if you are super seasoned, it is also a REALLY awesome place to collaborate with other creators.
The bigger story this year is that the VidCon energy itself has shifted. I’m curious to see what it looks like now that the main hotel isn’t the central hub for all the activations and everything is more spread out without one big social platform sponsoring the whole thing. That changes the experience significantly, and it changes who shows up. I’ll have a fuller take after Cannes – I plan to report back on what each event actually delivered for the kind of work I’m doing now. If I had to give one piece of advice on this trade-off, it is that the right conference isn’t the one your competitors are at, but the conference/festival matches the stage of business you’re actually in. Founder-stage creators building peer networks and figuring out their content engine need VidCon and business-expansion-stage creators building partnerships, speaking pipelines, and executive relationships need Cannes. Both can be right for creators and marketers at different times, but at different points in the arc.
Also Cannes will cost you 2-3x what VidCon will cost you (minimum) … so factor that into your planning too.
Christopher Ryan, Talent Manager, Chris Ryan Marketing
I’ve been attending VidCon since its inception, so this one hits close to home. Last year I went to Cannes Lions for the first time and it genuinely blew my mind. For talent managers and agents, the potential there is on a completely different level.
VidCon has shifted toward tools and platforms for the Influencer Marketing industry rather than the brands themselves, and the industry pass is overpriced for what you actually get. At Cannes, I didn’t need a badge to access the things that mattered most to me. If you’re trying to build relationships with buyers, Cannes is where they are.
Kat McGuire, Founder, No Stone Unturned
We advise teams to attend VidCon and Cannes Lions for very different reasons because they now serve fundamentally different functions within the Creator Economy.
VidCon remains the core event for the broader creator ecosystem. It is more cost-effective, highly education-focused, and attracts creators at every stage, from aspiring talent and UGC creators to established names. It is especially valuable for creator tech companies, talent managers, and teams looking to discover emerging creators or stay closely connected to creator culture and community.
Cannes Lions, meanwhile, has become the primary destination for brands, marketing agencies, platform executives, and established creator businesses focused on monetization and partnerships. If the goal is securing brand deals, building agency relationships, or connecting with senior marketing decision-makers, Cannes is where those conversations are increasingly happening. But because the cost of attending Cannes is so significant, often well over $10,000 once travel and accommodation are factored in, the ROI absolutely needs to be there. If we had to choose one, it would depend entirely on the objective. VidCon keeps you close to creator culture and future talent, while Cannes is where the Creator Economy increasingly intersects with advertising, media, and marketing at the highest level.
Remy Beaumont, Founder, Z MEDIA®
Cannes Lions, without question. VidCon is where creators go to meet their audience. Cannes is where the budgets that pay creators get decided.
For a TikTok Shop agency, our job isn’t to be in the room with 55,000 fans. It’s to be in the room with the brand side decision makers who control the spend we want flowing through creators and Shop. Cannes is now functionally the global trading floor for Creator Economy deals, the LIONS Creators Programme proves that and Instagram and Amazon moving major activations there confirms where the money actually moves.
Carol Chan, Founder, InfluenConnect
I would choose Cannes Lions this year. Not because VidCon is less relevant, but because the Creator Economy has moved from culture into commercial infrastructure. VidCon is where you understand creator behavior: formats, fandoms, platform shifts, creator expectations and the next generation of talent. That is valuable. But Cannes is where Creator Marketing is now being discussed as part of media investment, brand safety, measurement, commerce and global growth. For InfluenConnect, that is the more strategic room to be in, because we are focused on helping brands work with creators across markets in a more transparent, measurable and scalable way. What we would give up by not attending VidCon is the raw creator-side signal. But what we would gain at Cannes is access to the people shaping budgets, partnerships and standards. If budgets are finite, I would choose the place where the category is being commercialized.
Joey Gagliardi, Director of Creator Programming & Education, G&B Digital Management
After 15 years working in social media and the Creator Economy and attending VidCon on and off for nearly a decade, I’d send my team to Cannes Lions. VidCon still plays an important role, but in my opinion, it’s fundamentally a creator-and-fan event with an industry layer attached. Cannes Lions is where marketers, agencies, platforms, and budget owners show up to talk about what’s next in media, AI, creator strategy, and culture, and where strategy and spend actually meet.
What I’d give up by skipping VidCon is proximity to the grassroots side of the space: emerging creators, audience sentiment, and the early signals you feel before they show up in a trend report. But if I only get one swing and one budget, I’d rather be where the senior decision-makers are concentrated. For an experienced team, Cannes Lions is the clearer ROI.
Gerardo Sordo, Founder & CEO, BrandMe
VidCon and Cannes Lions now represent two very different sides of the Creator Economy.
If I had to choose only one event for our team this year, I would pick Cannes Lions. The reason is simple: Cannes has evolved into the place where global marketing budgets, platform strategies, and long-term partnerships are being shaped at the highest level. It’s no longer just an advertising festival – it’s becoming a global business summit for the Creator Economy.
That said, by not attending VidCon, you lose direct access to the grassroots creator culture and emerging talent. VidCon still offers unmatched proximity to the community itself: creators, fandoms, trends, and the raw evolution of internet culture. It’s where you can feel what’s happening before it becomes a boardroom conversation.
In many ways, VidCon shows you where culture is going, while Cannes shows you where the money is going. The smartest companies will eventually find ways to bridge both worlds.
AJ Eckstein, Founder & CEO, Creator Match
VidCon is a great event, and I loved speaking on stage last year. But veterans on the industry floor last year noticed something: it was sparser. The energy was there, the fans were there, but the buyers were somewhere else.
That somewhere else is Cannes, and it’s the hottest conference of the year. CMOs who have attended for 20 years are now seriously asking how creators fit into their enterprise budgets. The conversation has shifted and the dollars are following. It has genuinely become the Coachella for B2B.
If you skip VidCon you lose the consumer creator pulse and talent discovery. Depending on your client mix, that’s a real trade-off.
If you skip Cannes at this specific moment, you miss the wave while everyone else is paddling into it.
Go what’s best for your industry. Both are great, and ironically enough, both conferences have the same owner.
Joey Chowaiki, Co-Founder & COO, Open Influence
If I had to pick one, it would be Cannes Lions. It’s still the biggest global gathering point for senior leaders across brands, agencies, platforms, entertainment, and now increasingly the Creator Economy. Beyond the business opportunities, it’s also a meaningful way to reward and expose high-performing team members to the highest level of conversations happening in the industry. What you gain at Cannes is scale of access, the density of decision-makers and partnerships is hard to replicate anywhere else. That said, what you give up by missing VidCon is a more concentrated connection to creator culture itself. Cannes is broad and executive-heavy, while VidCon can offer more direct access to creators, emerging talent, and community-level trends in a less saturated environment. Both matter, but if forced to choose, Cannes has the larger long-term strategic value.
Gautam Goswami, CEO, POP.STORE
Our choice this year is VidCon. Cannes is increasingly centered around the top 1% of creators, while VidCon still feels closest to the broader Creator Economy and the everyday creators building real businesses. What makes VidCon valuable is that it still sits closest to the operational reality of creators building businesses day to day, especially emerging and mid-tier creators who are often running everything themselves. That’s increasingly where the biggest opportunities are happening.
The future of the Creator Economy won’t just be defined by celebrity influencers or brand campaigns, it’ll be defined by the infrastructure that helps creators monetize, engage audiences, and operate sustainably. That’s a big reason POP.STORE chose to go all in on VidCon this year. The conversation is shifting from “how do creators go viral?” to “how do creators build real businesses?” and VidCon remains one of the few places where creators, platforms, infrastructure companies, brands, and fans are all still in the same room having that conversation together. What you gain at VidCon is a much clearer view into the everyday creator’s behavior and where the industry is actually heading, and that resonates deeper with us.
Jennifer Quigley-Jones, VP of Strategy & Partnerships, PMG
Cannes Lions is a festival built for our brand customers to experience the best the advertising industry has to offer. In the past, you had to choose between time with clients and creators – either Cannes Lions or VidCon. Today Cannes Lions brings both together. VidCon still offers a space to explore innovation across the broader Creator Economy. But if you’re an Influencer Marketer, Cannes is the place to be.
Gracie Schram, Head of Creator Partnerships & Strategy, Epidemic Sound
If I had to pick one festival to send our team to this year, it would be Cannes Lions. Today’s creators are storytellers, filmmakers, and business founders. They are building media empires, transforming entertainment, and influencing culture in ways that brands are only beginning to understand. Cannes offers something different: a curated environment where creators sit down with the world’s leading brands, who are no longer just looking for ad placements but are actively looking to learn from creators about how to shape culture. For creators looking to secure meaningful, long-term brand partnerships, it has become one of the most valuable rooms to be in.
Aditi Rajvanshi, Head of Strategy, Portal A
While the French Riviera is tempting, I’m choosing VidCon for my team of content strategists. Cannes offers massive mainstream appeal, but VidCon remains the unmatched epicenter for the creator ecosystem – perfectly bridging brands, agencies, creators, and fandoms, all under one roof. Over the past 15 years, VidCon’s programming has consistently reflected the state of the industry. I’d love to witness the scale of Cannes in the future when dates don’t overlap between the two events. As an OG VidCon attendee, I know my team will walk away with a steady dose of inspiration and meaningful connections fueling our mission to create breakthrough work.
Paige Kelly, General Manager, Creator, Later
As the Creator Economy transforms into a broader media channel, Cannes is at the center of the shift. The conversations won’t just be about influencers, but about how creators function as distribution channels and long-term brand partners. The brands and platforms with the biggest impact will be in one physical space at Cannes, which makes it a critical event for Later to be part of this year.
That doesn’t mean that VidCon isn’t influential; it’s just serving a different purpose via direct access to audience behavior. VidCon gives a clear view of what internet culture cares about and how fans are engaging in real time. But at the end of the day, our team is prioritizing where the Creator Economy is heading, and right now, that value sits in Cannes.
Evan Horowitz, Co-Founder & CEO, Movers+Shakers
We consistently attend and speak at VidCon because it’s a classroom for modern marketing. There, leadership and front-line brand teams learn how to leverage creator-first creativity to drive business growth. In a landscape where social-native strategies are shifting market share, VidCon provides the practical blueprint teams need to evolve beyond traditional “broadcast” thinking.
Craig Vallado, Campaign and Influencer Manager, Clicks Talent
If I had to choose one this year, it would probably be Cannes Lions. The reality is that more of the major platform, brand and agency conversations are happening there right now, especially as Creator Marketing becomes more integrated into broader marketing and media budgets. From a relationship and business development perspective, it’s become difficult to ignore.
That said, what you lose by not being at VidCon is proximity to creator culture itself. VidCon still gives you a much clearer read on emerging creator behavior, audience dynamics, and the types of talent actually shaping internet culture before the industry fully catches up. It’s less polished, but often more reflective of where the space is heading.
At Clicks Talent, both events serve different purposes. Cannes is where you build strategic partnerships and position Creator Marketing within the wider advertising industry. VidCon is where you stay close to the creator ecosystem and spot shifts early.
If you skip Cannes, you risk missing industry influence. If you skip VidCon, you risk losing cultural relevance.
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