Welcome back to GenZtea's Newsletter, where I break down trends, industries, and tech with a Gen Z lens. I'm Natalie Neptune and I'm so happy you're here.

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I didn't go to Cannes Lions this year (I got invited but didn’t fill out my information in time lol). But roughly half my LinkedIn feed did, so I did what any self-respecting Group Chat Queen would do: I read everything.

Ten of the sharpest recaps from creators, founders, and marketers who were actually on the ground. Forbes 30U30 strategists, a podcaster with 2M followers, the guy who ran Creator Beach, a Stanford PhD analyzing bucket hats. I pulled it all apart so you don't have to.

Here's the honest synthesis, plus exactly what to do about it before the year ends. Because if there's one thing every single post agreed on, it's this: the window for Cannes 2027 isn't next spring. It's Q4 2026. That's ~90 days away.

Here's What We're Covering:

Now... let's get into it! ⬇️

Jake Sacks (Founder, 3rd Space) came back with a Scott Galloway quote that sums up the whole festival: creators used to be the cool kids invited to the afterparty, now they host the afterparties.

The receipts are wild:

The Stan x JT Barnett party. If your feed looked anything like mine, you already know.

Their take on it: Cannes is notoriously pretentious, and brands spend millions on activations that mean nothing. So they did something different, one killer villa, 300 of the top creators, early 2000s bangers on a real d-floor, and burgers flown in from NYC at midnight. By most accounts, the best night of the week. Hands down.

Read that back against LinkedIn's $11M nightclub. A villa, a playlist, and burgers beat an eight-figure activation, because the room was curated by someone the room actually wanted to be around. (Remember, JT is literally the person Scott Galloway name-checked as the "creators host the afterparties now" example.)

And here's the part that should make every reader of this newsletter sit up: a huge chunk of that crowd were LinkedIn creators. JT's own framing, this is what consistently showing up on LinkedIn gets you. From the feed to the south of France. If you want to be at the next one… start posting.

I've been saying this for years, but it hits different when the receipts are a villa invite: your posts are your pipeline. The people dancing to early 2000s throwbacks in that villa didn't buy their way in. They posted their way in.

Jake's prediction, and I think he's right, is that brand dollars follow the rooms. As creators keep owning the communities, the distribution, and the host role, budgets redirect into their pockets. He's calling that next year's impact from this year's shift.

If you're an investor reading this: that's your signal. The value is migrating from the plumbing (agencies, media buys) to the people who can gather a room (lol key why GenZtea is a long-term investment).

Danielle Spencer (Founder & Engagement Strategist, Forbes 30U30 in Marketing & Advertising) wrote my favorite hot take of the whole cycle. She coined a term for it: Creative Congestion.

Her observation: she landed in France and experienced zero friction. No language barrier. TikTok billboards at arrivals, Canva Creative Cabana, Spotify Beach. She was moving through the south of France like it was a North American marketing conference that happened to sit next to the Mediterranean.

And the takes on every stage? "Embrace AI." "Attention is the new currency." "Authenticity matters." Not wrong, just tired. The same conversations we've passed around from SXSW to Afrotech to every Soho House panel, from Toronto to LA to New York.

Her framing: it's not a lack of talent. It's a lack of range. The rooms are full, the budgets are flowing, and the ideas all sound the same.

So how do both things coexist, the most exciting creator moment ever AND intellectual gridlock? Easy: the fresh energy lived in the creator-curated rooms, not the official programming. Lia Haberman (Creator Economy Expert) proved this from the stage itself. The best panel of her week was the last session of the last day, loosely planned, no PR-approved questions, no prep call ("where spontaneity goes to die"), just four sharp people riffing. Standing room only while everyone else was heading to the airport.

The pattern across every post: intimacy beat spectacle. Mel Robbins spoke at Creator Beach with no ropes and no security perimeter, and stuck around after. That accessibility, not the production budget, is what people remembered.

If you host events (hi, it's me, and probably you too): curate hard, prep soft. Design for conversation, not spectatorship.

1. Your lived experience is your moat. Steven Bartlett's point via Brett's recap: when a creator in Manhattan and a creator in Mumbai have identical AI tools, the scarce resource is you. Audiences can already feel the difference between generated content and content that made someone feel something. Specificity compounds. Genericness dies.

2. Live and IRL are the trust layer of the AI era. Twitch CEO Dan Clancy's session might've been the sleeper insight of the festival: Gen Z and Gen Alpha increasingly distrust whether what they're watching is even real. You cannot fake a live stream, or a room full of people. Twitch's average watch time is 72 minutes (!). His line: "What is trending tomorrow happened live on Twitch." Optimize for moments, not impressions.

3. One-off brand deals are the worst deal in the room. Consensus from a panel with Alexis Barber, Leslie Mosier (Doug the Pug), and Andrea Casanova: four brand deals a month over 12 months categorically outperforms four one-off posts, for both sides. Creators: start pitching retainers. Brands: ask what a long-term relationship unlocks instead of pricing a single post.

4. The Superpower Brief. From TBWA\Chiat\Day creative leads + creator Lauren W: stop briefing creators like ad placements. Find the creator's superpower. Find the brand's superpower. Build from the intersection, that's where the brief writes itself. Creators: show brands that intersection before they ask. It separates you from 90% of pitches.

5. Gen Z is moving from audience to authority. Elayna Christine (Founder, Future Voices @ Cannes) launched a program that put nine Gen Z founders and creators on stage as subject-matter experts, answering questions like "how does Gen Z build trust at scale with zero ad budget?" for rooms full of executives. Her thesis: the companies that win in 2030 are bringing Gen Z insights to the table before the campaign is scheduled, before the product launches, before the media plan locks. Not as the target demo. As the strategists.

Megan Cho (Product Marketing, Google Gemini) heard the same thing from the brand side: creators are blurring advertising, media, entertainment, and press, and brands have to adapt with simpler briefs, faster reviews, and actual trust in creator intuition. Plus one values-check from Dr. Marcus Collins worth tattooing on every brand deck: give back to culture rather than extracting from it.

Madame Joyce (2M followers, 2X MOBO-nominated podcaster) wrote the accountability post of the season. The opportunity was right there, and she watched creators miss it three ways:

They chased celebrities instead of decision makers. The Alex Cooper photo is fun. But the budget holders aren't on the red carpet, her needle-moving conversations were with YMU, Billion Dollar Boy, Edelman, and TikTok. Agencies and platforms. The people who actually write checks.

They made content instead of connections. Her reframe is the one to steal: your content is your proof of concept. Use it to open conversations, not just fill the feed. She left her chat with TikTok's Head of Creators knowing exactly how to align her strategy with the platform's priorities for the rest of the year. That's the ROI, intel, not impressions.

They stayed in their safety net. Familiar faces, familiar energy, all week. Her point: everyone at Cannes already knows they're in a room full of strangers. Everyone is open to being approached. "The rooms are incredible, but only if you're brave enough to be in them fully."

Being in the room is table stakes. Converting the room is the skill.

Avni's recap deserves its own section because she wrote the most honest breakdown of the mechanics of the week, the stuff nobody puts in the brand recaps. Her big ones:

The hierarchy is invisible. At a normal conference, you can map the power: main stage, breakouts, afterparties. At Cannes, the official programming isn't the point. The real decisions happen at private dinners, hotel lobbies, and rooms you only hear about if someone personally tells you. Her line that stuck with me: culture doesn't just happen online, it gets negotiated in rooms most people never see.

Exclusivity isn't the vibe, it's the infrastructure. Every wristband, list, and QR code felt infuriating at first. Then she clocked why it exists: the gatekeeping is what lets Oprah walk by in daylight and lets a celebrity stay after a talk to actually meet young women. The filter is what makes the proximity possible. (Doesn't make the $7K+ entry cost less real, it just explains the machine.)

Luck is geographic. My favorite of her notes. She shook Oprah's hand, met Sophia Amoruso, and had conversations that could change her trajectory, none scheduled, none guaranteed, and none possible if she hadn't physically been there. Luck isn't random; it's putting yourself in the one square mile where impossible collisions are statistically more likely. You can't plan the outcome, but you can increase the surface area.

Speaking beats networking, by a mile. She spent days introducing herself around town. Then she gave an 8-minute talk on the LinkedIn stage and the room locked in, people quoted her lines back to her, posted about it, found her afterward. Her conclusion: speaking scales trust faster than networking ever will. And the mindset shift that followed is one every reader here should sit with: she doesn't want to attend rooms anymore — she wants to shape them. (Founders: this is your argument for pitching a panel instead of just buying a badge.)

The most valuable room wasn't sponsored. Her highlight of the whole week was a villa she shared with 10 women B2B creators, no brand sponsor, no itinerary, no manufactured community moment. Everyone paid their own way, and everyone helped each other: filming, negotiation strategy, pricing, hiring. Her prediction, and I co-sign it hard: the smartest brands will stop trying to manufacture community from scratch and start supporting the communities creators already built for themselves. (GenZtea readers, you understand why I had to include this one.)

The boxes are dissolving. Two structural shifts she called: every software company now wants to be a media company, attention has become the distribution channel, the sales engine, and often the entire moat. And the B2B/B2C creator divide is collapsing, because humans aren't categories: CMOs wear outfits, engineers go to concerts, professionals buy toothpaste. Her framing: the future isn't B2B or B2C. It's human.

And on AI, she landed exactly where Steven Bartlett did, but sharper: <br>"AI is not replacing creators; it is replacing those without a point of view."

This is the part to screenshot. Pulled from Brandon Smithwrick's playbook (Content Strategist, Forbes 30U30, ex-Kickstarter/Squarespace/Ralph Lauren), Gigi Robinson's first-timer guide (Founder, Hosts of Influence), and Danielle's global-positioning strategy.

Gigi's number: budget $7K minimum, flights, stay, transport, food. That's the out-of-pocket path. Which is exactly why the next section matters.

If you're a creator:

If you're a founder or brand:

If you're an investor (or investor-curious):

Cannes 2026 confirmed the shift everyone in this community has felt for a while: the people who can gather a room, hold trust, and translate across cultures are the new center of gravity, and the institutions know it.

But access without strategy is just an expensive vacation. The creators who win 2027 are doing the unglamorous work this fall: applications, budget asks, brand outreach, language reps, cold-approach practice.

The window is Q4. The clock's already running. ⏰

Are you thinking about Cannes 2027? Hit reply and tell me, if enough of you are serious, maybe we make it a group chat. 👀

— Natalie 💛

Sources & credits: Danielle Spencer (Founder & Engagement Strategist), Brandon Smithwrick (Content Strategist, note: his piece was written in partnership with Cannes Lions), Jake Sacks (3rd Space), Lia Haberman (Creator Economy Expert), Megan Cho (Google Gemini), Elayna Christine (Future Voices @ Cannes), Brett Dashevsky (Creator Economy NYC / Creator Beach), Madame Joyce (podcaster & speaker), Gigi Robinson (Hosts of Influence), David Zeng (Beacons), and JT Barnett x Stan for the party recap. Go follow all of them — every insight here is theirs; the synthesis is mine.

Ready to work together? Reach out to [email protected] to discuss how GenZtea can help amplify your brand in the Gen Z startup community.