It’s a Knowledge Creator’s World Now

Like any marketer, creative, or creator, I’ve been devouring nothing but Cannes Lions recaps for the last week (and developing major FOMO. Not gonna lie, going is on my vision board). 

As I was watching, one theme kept resurfacing: the creator economy is moving away from aspiration and towards expertise. 

Cannes hosted approximately 500 creators this year. And not just to create aesthetic content about what it’s like to party on a yacht in the South of France, but to actively participate in conversations and sit on panels with CMOs, agency heads, and media buyers.

This represents a huge shift in the weight and importance of creators. Where creators have typically been treated like an afterthought, only to be activated if there’s leftover budget, they’re now treated as both a key distribution channel and a strategic partner.

Not only is this an indication of a media reorg underway, but also of how authority is built and how brands are leveraging creators to build it.

Here are five takeaways from Cannes and what they mean if you're building a media presence around your expertise.

For a decade, the creator economy was usually associated with lifestyle influencers and entertainers. This year’s Cannes made it clear that a new type of creator is emerging: the knowledge creator. 

This is the operator, founder, or domain expert whose knowledge is the content and who can use that content for leverage. These creators are creating infotainment-style content rooted in their expertise. In this case, expertise isn't just a supporting credential anymore—it's the media asset itself, and it converts into influence, the way entertainment used to convert into reach.

Knowledge creators are eligible to be B2B creators, or creators who are tapped by B2B brands to create content geared toward business decision makers. These are professional audiences, such as C-suite executives, VPs, and directors (also the same audience that “New Media” content falls into). 

What it means: If you're building a media presence around what you know rather than who you are, you fall into a new class of creator and could be a great partner for B2B brands (or even legacy media outlets).

Both Google and LinkedIn recently announced tools to support creators. LinkedIn announced LinkedIn Creator Marketplace, a B2B influencer discovery hub built into Campaign Manager. It allows brands to search for verified, vetted creators by topic, view precise audience demographics (such as job titles and industries), and copy contact emails. Google announced Google for Creators, offering creators tools, products, and guidance to help establish, grow, and build their brands.

Not only is this making it easier for brands and creators to establish partnerships, but it’s also shifting how people discover and vet trusted voices. Search used to be about surfacing information, but now, it's becoming about surfacing people. 

Credibility is decentralizing from institutions to individuals who are building a track record in public. The platforms are just now formalizing it based on who has actually earned the attention, surfacing the people worth trusting on a given topic.

What it means: The compounding work you're doing now, the consistent point of view, the traceable body of work, is what these marketplaces will eventually be built to surface. 

You no longer have to be the biggest or loudest creator to win. The creators who are winning this next era of the creator economy are the most consistent, generous, transparent, and valuable over time. 

Fandom and community are functioning as a genuine competitive advantage, and they're squeezing out a specific group: mid-tier creators and mid-tier brands that scaled on reach alone, without ever building trust beneath it.

This is the return on influence, the value exchange a creator builds with a community that actually believes in them, and it's proving more durable than impressions or views alone. Mediocre creativity, even at scale, is getting edged out by smaller audiences who trust deeply.

What it means: You don't need to outproduce anyone; rather, position yourself as the go-to source on your topic for your audience. 

Venture capital and private equity are actively moving capital toward creator-led businesses. It’s not just about brand deals anymore; it's about expanding a creator’s IP into an entire media company or entrepreneurial venture, with book deals, licensing, merch, and more.

The creator economy is becoming a business function in the way companies think about growth and distribution, not a marketing tactic bolted on. We’ve seen the emergence of New Media in Silicon Valley and the acquisition of niche founder-led media companies by larger, established brands. 

What it means: If you're still thinking about your content presence as something adjacent to your real business, the market has already moved past you. The people getting funded are the ones who built the media presence as a business.

Traditionally, Cannes has always been about agencies, media, and celebrity. Now, it’s about creators. The reason all three now have to tie together rather than remain siloed is that scale alone is no longer a strategy. What's replacing it is distinctive thinking, deeper understanding of a specific audience, and real community, the kind that shows up as an always-on, ground-up ecosystem of creators, curators, gatekeepers, and brand partners rather than a top-down campaign.

Brands can't produce enough compelling content on their own. That's why they’re tapping creators to shape the editorial agenda rather than executing someone else's brief. Cultural relevance, emotional connection, and trust are doing the work that reach used to do, and all three are fundamentally human. They don't scale by adding more output. They scale by adding more depth.

What it means: The brief for building authority isn't going bigger—it’s getting sharper. Niche, subculture, and specific lived expertise are now an advantage, not a limitation, because there's less competition for genuine depth than for reach.

Here’s how I see these takeaways playing out over the next year:

Creator marketplaces will formalize trust verification layers within the next 12 to 18 months. Google and LinkedIn are the visible early movers, but expect identity and credibility infrastructure to become a standard feature of how platforms differentiate, not a nice-to-have.

Legacy media budgets will keep migrating toward creators as the distribution channel, not just the content supplier. The agency-creator-brand triangle that showed up at Cannes this year is the new default structure, not a temporary hybrid.

The line between founder and creator will keep dissolving. Expect more knowledge content creators to formalize into actual businesses: books, licensing deals, advisory practices, product lines, built directly on top of an existing body of editorial work rather than launched separately from it.

Mid-tier generalist creators will continue to lose ground while niche experts gain ground. The squeeze isn't coming for depth. It's coming for the middle: creators and brands who scaled on reach without ever building a specific, trusted point of view rooted in community.

Cannes itself becomes a permanent creator-media hybrid event. Cannes will only get bigger with more creators in attendance. And it will get a lot more competitive for the people who show up without a real point of view.

This year’s Cannes showed us that the future of marketing is being built from the ground up by people with something real to say, and it’s time we started listening.