Category Archives: creator-ing

awarding, content creating, creator-ing, streaming, trending

The Future’s Behind Us: Dispatches from Cannes Lions 2025

I love the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.

There. I said it.

I’ll admit that I’ve had my moments of scepticism over the years, but we need Cannes – perhaps now more than ever.

We need it for the celebration of the work. For the ideas. To shape and focus the industry agenda. We need it to logistically get people in one place at one time. For the opportunities to reconnect with old colleagues and friends – and make some new ones. Because it reminds us of what we do when we’re at our collective best. We need it for all those reasons, and many more besides.

I used also to think that we needed Cannes to show us the future – but I don’t think that’s the case anymore. Because the future has arrived already. We are living inside it.

My take on the vibe at Cannes Lions 2025 was of an industry not bracing for a future to come, but rather one wrestling with the reality of its arrival. It was a thought that dawned on me Tuesday whilst I was talking with a long-time industry acquaintance; that the future has moved from being something rushing towards us – into something that now lies behind us. It simply moved faster than our ability to keep pace with the changes it wrought. And now we’re playing catch up.

And so here we were. Navigating together the shared reality of our transformed world.

There was no better example of this new reality than YouTube’s presentation in the Palais des Festivals cavernous Lumiere Theatre. Less a presentation than a victory lap, the streaming platform’s CEO Neal Mohan shared with the audience that a billion hours of YT are watched daily on television sets – YouTube is the new TV. With Kaizen – the story of Inoxtag’s Everest climb – he suggested that YouTube creators are also now the new Hollywood start-ups.

Alongside creator content’s expanding influence over the industry is the halo of fan content that accompanies it – often in podcast form. Mohan shared that 1bn people watch a podcast every month on YouTube, noting the power of the connection between creators and fans – observing that “fans don’t follow culture, they shape it … fandom itself is a form of creative expression”.

Brands need not miss out on the action. Chicken Shop Date’s Amelia Dimoldenberg and Call Her Daddy host Alexandra Cooper were on hand to announce the launch of ‘open call’ – a new feature powered by YouTube BrandConnect, which enables brands to discover and partner with creators.

In a blog post, YouTube notes that “Open call gives creators of all sizes the opportunity to pursue new relationships with brands. And brands can lean on the relevance and trust of YouTube creators to get more from their social strategy on YouTube.”

Amelia and Alex put it more bluntly: creators can “take the middlemen out” and work directly with brands.

I was left in no doubt about the popularity of creators as the audience began to swell on the Palais’ Terrace Stage Wednesday, not for the excellent daily festival lowdown from Contagious’ Alex Jenkins and Chloe Markowitz – but for the following session featuring TikTok’s Global Head of Business Marketing and Commercial Partnerships Sofia Hernandez in conversation with creators Keith Lee and Logan Moffitt – the latter rocked to fame earlier this year with this viral cucumber salads.

It was bedlam.

Again, that sense that I was sat in a future that had already arrived.

We’re living and working in a world in which creator culture has supplanted the advertising model, in which streaming distribution has overtaken the broadcast model, in which clicks from search engines are declining as the foundations of search evolves – all of it powered by the invisible hand and accelerating force of AI (I got 650 words in without a mention, people).

In response, brands and marketers have changed their strategies and approaches to media and marketing.

Duolingo’s Emmanuel Orssaud described how the platform eschews the conventional integrated model (too expensive, trying to do too many things, doesn’t get people talking) in favour of a social-first model where 30% of all spend is focussed not on proven effective comms but on “figuring out what else will work”. They’re expanding next into long-form content with a Duolingo Gameshow, and an anime series.

It echoes Liquid Death CEO Mike Cesario’s comments on last year’s Cannes Lions Creative Impact stage in which he shared the brand’s category-redefining approach to marketing. The brand focusses on standing out and being entertaining. The only game in town for Liquid Death is capturing attention, because “if you can get people to stop and look at your product, you’re already ahead of 99% of the market”.

Even the vibe of the awards competition this year felt like a body of work negotiating with itself. The customary smorgasbord of brands’ ideas and innovation were competing with – and often losing out to – their own past body of work.

New campaigns for Apple competed with ten years’ worth of the ‘Shot on iPhone’ campaign’, while Dove’s 2025 entries vied for metal with ‘Real Beauty for Dove’ – a 20-year-long body of work for the brand.

As Contagious’ Alex Jenkins put it – it’s a bit like bringing a gun to a knife fight.

One juror in a post-panel discussion shared with me that brand campaigns competing with the whole back-catalogue of others caused a fair bit of debate. I bet it did. The same juror indicated that they would be referring the issue to Cannes Lions. I can’t imagine it will be allowed to happen again.

So it turns out that the hero of Cannes Lions 2025 wasn’t innovation or ideas, nor was it comms platform vs tactical campaigns, or creativity vs tech or ads vs content or anything vs anything else.

The hero of Cannes 2025 was change itself.

Along La Croisette and in the Palais and everywhere in between was an industry grappling not with the future to come, but with a future that now lies behind us. The current source of unfair advantage is being able to marshal your resources – be they marketing, agency, creator, or anything in between – to leverage better than your competitors the world around you.

It’s tempting to suggest that it was ever thus; but we all know, deep down, that it’s never before been like this.

On stage in the Omnicom Space, Malcolm Gladwell noted that “There is a nobility in failure. [and that] the stories of failure are the most compelling stories that are not being told. The costs of trying crazy shit are not nearly as high as people think. This is exactly the moment to be trying crazy shit and failing!”

Or as Mercado Libre CMO Sean Summers puts it, “The industry is facing a tsunami. The biggest risk, is not taking a risk.”

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I’ll be publishing more thoughts and perspectives from last week’s festival. Subscribe to catch the rest as soon as it drops.

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co-creating, collaborating, community-building, content creating, creator-ing, realtiming

Streaming’s Next Decade: From Ads to Audiences – and Why Creators are Set to Win

I evaluated in my previous post some media and marketing predictions I made in late 2014. Netflix had announced their arrival in Australia for the following March. My expectation that content would win out over channel, that ability to deliver on desire for choice on-demand would determine growth, and that programmatic would swallow huge swathes of the industry – have all proved I think, largely, true.

My prediction however that the industry would largely fall out of love with the ‘ad’ didn’t come to pass as expected. Adverts have remained the predominant unit of currency for paid branded messaging.

Instead, the group that capitalised on the opportunity as I saw it – to create “platform-neutral content strategies that can adapt to platform and context more quickly – generating more relevance for brands’ comms” were not brands, but creators. The “native content in video form” that I foresaw becoming predominant in video did come to pass, but with a generation of content creators – rather than brands – at the helm.

For many brands and marketers, success is now dependent on engaging and fuelling this generation of content creators – who intermediate between products and services on one hand, and customers and consumers on the other.

Last week saw two awesome examples of this now established marketing model in practice.

How Capcom Inspire an Army of Creators to Fuel Monster-Hunting

Monster Hunter Wilds, which released worldwide on February 28, has had a great launch. Within the first three days, the game sold over 8 million copies (it’s now over 10m), setting a record as Capcom’s fastest-selling title. On Steam it attracted more than 1.3 million concurrent players shortly after launch, securing a position among the platform’s top 10 most-played games by concurrent users.

Whilst this success wouldn’t be possible without a great product – Wilds has been critically well-received, earning 90 out of 100 on Metacritic with reviewers praising engaging combat, impressive creature design, and innovative gameplay features – its success is also down to a determined effort to engage audiences thru the game’s affiliated army of creators.

Last Tuesday’s Monster Hunter Wilds Showcase, hosted by producer Ryozo Tsujimoto, revealed the first free update, which is scheduled for this coming Friday. The content is relevant of course for people who play the game (declaration: I’m 49 hours in and counting), but I’d suggest that’s not the primary audience for this content.

Rather, Tuesday’s content was designed and deployed not primarily for the game’s 10m players, but for creators. The update had more than enough new information to fuel new content, but enough details held-back and teased to allow room for all-important speculation and prediction. This video from the awesome Khraze Gaming channel is a great example.

There’s now a very established – and mutually beneficial – relationship between the Monster Hunter Wilds dev team and the game’s content creators. The game’s owners are supporting their community of content creators, who in turn are producing content to build their community of subscribers.

This isn’t all one-way. There’s been plenty of pushback from hardcore fans of the series, critical that the game is too easy. But the devs aren’t shying away from this. They are embracing this community feedback, in an open letter this week announcing that:

“We would also like to thank you for the many comments, thoughts and feedback we have received since the game was released.

The development team has been reading your feedback, and we are encouraged by it. We are also using the comments and feedback we have received to help us plan our future actions.

Future updates will see more Tempered Monsters (★8) added to the game … And for even more of a challenge, Arch-tempered monsters will make an appearance. These are even stronger versions of tempered monsters.”

Another masterful example of a marketing team engaging and fuelling content creators was from Marvel.

How Marvel Inspired Creators to Create with a Five-Hour Plus Livestream

In this even more astonishing and finely-tuned example of the marketing-to-creators model, Marvel revealed the cast of the now-in-production Avengers Doomsday via a five hour plus live-stream – with a new cast member being revealed on the back of a director’s chair every 12 minutes. The announcement concluded with Robert Downey Jr. – who will play Doom in the strategically crucial film for Marvel – walking out to sit in the final chair and asking the audience to be quiet on set.

Just to reiterate in case you read that quickly – the Avengers Doomsday cast reveal announcement video was a panning shot of 27 director’s chairs … which lasted five and a half hours.

This clearly is content designed not to be watched by audiences. Rather – just like Monster Hunter Wilds – its content precision-made for creators. Content machine-tooled to be poured-over in crazy detail in real-time by an army of creators (many of whom are of course huge fans).

Creators like The Breakroom team, who scrambled into their studio to livestream their discussions and reactions to the Avengers announcement video, in real-time. A livestream of a livestream. Marvel designing and deploying content for creators.

This is the new and now established model. Content from brands tailor-made for creators, designed to fuel the production of content for their audiences. Creators are the intermediaries and amplifiers of brand messaging. Communities are maintained and managed not directly by brands, but by a team of creators the literal job of who is to drive engagement with audiences for brands; either because they are fans, or their income depends on it – and in reality, usually and probably both.

This is what will underpin brand success over the next decade of video.
This is a model about to be supercharged by next-generation AI production capabilities.
This is what marketing precision at scale really looks like.

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advertising, content creating, creator-ing, predicting, streaming

Streaming’s First Decade: Three Predictions I Got Right – and One I Called Totally Wrong

It’s been ten years to the month since Netflix launched in Australia (where I was lucky enough to be working at the time). A decade on, it’s worth reflecting on what’s changed, what I called right, and what caught me (and the industry) off guard.

There’s been some great commentary from Tim Burrowes both via Unmade (paywalled) and on the MediaLand podcast about the impact of the streamers on the broader media landscape down under. In a Mediation post back in 2014, I made some predictions about what the arrival of streaming would mean for marketing in Australia, and the broader media landscape.

I think I mainly called it right.

Three Out of Four Ain’t Bad: Three Predictions That Nailed It (and One That Didn’t)

Prediction one: “In the immediate term there is undoubtedly going to be a firestorm for views and scale – brace for plenty of press releases in the first quarter of 2015 about content deals, views and reach. in the medium term this will play out in a battle for content – with many shows already locked away in local deals, there will be fierce competition between the platforms as distribution rights cycle into play.”

Verdict: Totally called it. The fight for content has not only played out between the streamers, but more broadly across the industry as legacy broadcasters and streaming platforms battled for the content that will drive and retain subscribers. In Australia that battle continues to this day, with the launch of Max on Monday locking HBO’s content library onto the platform – and the arrival of ESPN on Disney+ introducing an additional potential bidder for many of the market’s upcoming sports rights negotiations. Content has, for the last decade, remained king and has been a key defining element of the success – and conversely the struggles – of the streaming platforms.

Prediction two: We’ll see “a radical shift in viewer expectations. more choice, more freedom to choose what we watch and where, how and when we watch it. This future has been a long-time coming and has been with some for much longer than others”.

Verdict: Two for two. If anything has defined streaming’s impact, it’s the expectation of choice, on demand. That expectation has spilled beyond streaming—into podcasts, and even cinema. The streaming age taught many of us that, for the typical movie, it was easier to wait and watch at home – a behaviour reinforced by ever-reducing windows between theatrical and home release.

As the Entertainment Strategy Guy put it in a recent post, we’re drawn to the cinema now for ‘events’; “the actual most popular “genre” isn’t really a genre, but a style: exciting. People go to the movies to see spectacle, which often means action or exciting set pieces …18 of the top 25 films [in the US 2024 box office] have a lot of action set pieces. (Even Wicked ends with one).”

Prediction three: “With increasingly fragmented and diverse platforms and viewing services, advertisers and their agencies will increasingly rely on programmatic solutions to build reach quickly.”

Verdict: Absolutely. Over the past decade, programmatic advertising has transformed the industry by enabling real-time bidding, automating media buying, and enhancing targeting capabilities. On one hand, this shift has driven greater efficiency, has undoubtedly improved ROI, and empowered marketers to deliver more personalised experiences. But it’s also led to concerns about transparency, data privacy, and brand safety – not to mention the broader impact of an over-reliance on short-term, performance-based media on brands and long-term brand-building. It’s all our jobs to ensure we build tech that will serve us better over the next – AI-powered – decade, than we did for the last.

Prediction four: “Many advertisers and ad agencies will finally be forced to break out of the ‘advert’ model – using instead platform-neutral content strategies that can adapt to platform and context more quickly – generating more relevance for brands’ comms. think native content in video form.”

Verdict: So this one is a lot less clear. I genuinely thought back in 2015 that the industry’s long-held affinity for the ‘advert’ would wane. I thought the classic ad, so effective in the broadcast age, wouldn’t survive in a streaming world; a world in which tolerance for content interruption would be significantly reduced.

I was genuinely wrong on that. The power of the ‘ad’ holds sway to this day. The industry didn’t wholesale move on from the ad. It didn’t predominantly leverage more diversified content and ideas-based marketing to create fewer, better, more transformative experiences for audiences.

Too expensive. To difficult to scale and measure. Too hard.

Only it wasn’t.

Because while the industry remained predominantly stuck in ad-land, the last decade has seen a content revolution that has more than delivered on my prediction of ‘native content in video form’.

Native Creators: The Creator Economy Delivered What Marketing Didn’t

In parallel to the growth of streaming over the last ten years, the creator economy had, by 2023, blossomed into a $250 billion industry. This expansion is projected to continue, with estimates suggesting the market could reach $480 billion by 2027.

A report last year (admittedly from YouTube) found that an astonishing 65 percent of Gen Z responders self-identified as video content creators. The number of content creators worldwide has surpassed 200 million, reflecting the increasing appeal of content creation as a profession. The market for global influencer content has more than tripled since 2020, reaching approximately $33 billion in 2025.

It seems trite to point-out that this incredible growth – and it is incredible – is largely down to the fact that creator-made content is typically significantly more engaging than traditional ‘adverts’; it feels authentic, personal, and tailored to specific communities … because it IS authentic, personal, and tailored to specific communities.

Audiences tend to trust creators they follow, viewing their recommendations as more genuine and relatable than polished brand messaging—leading to higher attention, interaction, and emotional connection.

The prediction I made a decade ago suggesting that the industry’s ad-venture would come to an end was correct, it just turned out to be a generation of creators – powered by platforms like YouTube and latterly TikTok – that delivered on that strategic opportunity of ten years ago. The great irony of course is that advertisers did end up being an integral part of this creative content revolution; they were the money.

In other words, it wasn’t the brands who changed the game—it was creators and their audiences. And it’s that shift – from ads to creator-audiences – that will define the next decade of streaming.

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