Hello and welcome back to Verified!
I’m off this week for a few days of recovery from my first Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, where I interviewed many creators I’m excited to share with you.
First up, in this week’s newsletter:
The atypical creators that top CMOs wanted time with in France
Co-founder Neil Waller on Whalar’s sale to Accenture Song
YouTube’s Mary Ellen Coe on the two summer box office hits
Facebook continues its creators play
This newsletter is published by Washington Post Creator, a new business outside The Washington Post’s newsroom that is focused on the creator economy and content partnerships with independent creators. Learn more about Washington Post Creator.
Photo courtesy of Dylan Wells for The Washington Post
The niche live show charming Cannes Lions’ power players
CANNES, France — As megacreators and traditional celebrities descended on Southern France to mingle with advertising industry executives and C-suite leaders of top brands, it was a nontraditional creator duo with less than 100,000 followers across platforms that chief marketing officers were gushing over.
Cannes Lions was the Super Bowl for live show Breaking and Entering, a channel focused on the ad business that streams three days a week and features interviews with industry guests — which the key players at Cannes Lions were eager to appear on.
Take Jessica Jensen, the CMO of LinkedIn, who left an event with Oprah to kick off Breaking and Entering’s Wednesday live show, filmed from the secluded COLLINS House, far from the craziness of La Croisette, and featuring leaders from Kraft Heinz, PepsiCo, Pinterest, Coinbase, Levi Strauss & Co and Chipotle. During her segment, Jensen and Breaking and Entering co-founders and hosts Geno Schellenberger and Jack Westerkamp sang “Sweet Caroline,” Jensen pretended to choke Westerkamp and said she’d wear the show’s branded merch.
“Their shows and the content they produce are insightful, condensed and hilarious. So you get actual ad industry news quickly with humor. It's magic,” Jensen told me after stepping off set. “They are real, they know what they're talking about, they actually know the industry, they understand marketing and advertising, and they ask great questions. They make it fun.”
While many of this year’s Cannes Lions panels featured a token megacreator, and many creators operated on a different track than the festival’s awards and official programming, Breaking and Entering provided an outlet for top winners and people actually working in the advertising space.
The Creator Takeover: How creators flexed their power this week.
Creators — especially those who attended attending alone — were unsure how to make the most of Cannes amidst marketer-focused panels
Ludacris, caviar ice cream and Paris Hilton by boat: inside the UTA and DoorDash Ads executive soirée at Cannes Lions
EU opens summit coverage to creators, with restrictions on political views and brand ties
Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” to skip social media influencer screenings
Leader to Leader Q+A
This week I’m turning over the Q+A section to Sara Kehaulani Goo, president of Washington Post Creator, to share her conversation from Cannes with Neil Waller, co-founder and co-CEO of Whalar Group.
In early June, Whalar Group announced it was selling its brand marketing business, Whalar, to Accenture Song for an undisclosed amount. Waller and his co-CEO James Street, will continue to run Whalar Group, which includes the talent agency business and the Lighthouse creator studios. You can watch the full WP Studio interview here. Note: This interview was part of a partnership with Whalar.
Sara Goo: There’s a lot of buzz about this sale to Accenture. What does this sale mean for the creator economy? What does it mean for Whalar?
Neil Waller: At first we were processing what it meant for us as a company. And now as we’re seeing the reaction, they way it’s been perceived as kind of a watershed moment. From the advertising perspective, when we started Whalar 10 years ago, 95 percent of creators we worked with weren't even full-time creators. They were people just creating content. Brands were doing very one-off moments. Fast forward to now, that 95 percent are full-time, building media companies. And we're here in Cannes Lions and the intersection of creators and advertising and creativity ecosystem is really huge. [The acquisition by] Accenture Song just demonstrates how strong the creator economy is as part of growth and brand building. It’s not a “nice to have” anymore. I don’t think we could have dreamt of this.
The journey has been that creators are more than just advertising businesses. They are media and entertainment companies. ...
The Platforms
YouTube Chief Business Officer Mary Ellen Coe told Goo that the success of Kane Parsons’ “Backrooms” and Curry Barker’s “Obsession” “wasn’t a big surprise. There’s an intense fandom and that just translated to the box office…this is the power of the platform. One of the things that’s a really important principle to us is we are not a gatekeeper. Ultimately, we don’t greenlight, the viewers greenlight.” Watch the full interview.
YouTube versus Netflix at Cannes
Creators can now add affiliate links or tag products directly on Instagram
Facebook reintroduced its Creator Studio as an AI-powered companion app and previewed a Creator Dashboard
Got a creator story? Drop us a line by replying to this email, or follow me at @dylanewells. If this email was forwarded to you, click here to subscribe.
