Last year, Cannes Lions introduced its first-ever creator program. Filled with sessions for digital content creators from companies like Google, Amazon, TikTok, and Viral Nation and creators like Jay Shetty and Steven He, LIONS Creators gave our industry a dedicated space at one of the world’s biggest annual advertising events.
And this year, LIONS Creators is going to be even bigger.
Running June 16-20 in Cannes, France, the 2025 LIONS Creators program is “a week of access to the world’s best creativity with unrivaled networking opportunities at Cannes Lions,” the festival says.
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LIONS Creators will feature sessions from Rare Beauty, Mattel, Heineken, McDonald’s, Sephora, Benefit Cosmetics, and Duolingo, along with top creator speakers including Kai Cenat, Amelia Dimoldenberg, Keith Lee, Colin & Samir, Logan Moffitt, and Grace Beverley, all talking about various aspects of our industry, from navigating the current platform landscape to improving storytelling in videos to negotiating brand deals and building long-term businesses.
Beverley, who has over 3 million followers across platforms and has launched four companies, will focus especially on that last point. She got her start making fitness content on YouTube and Instagram, but when student loans didn’t clear for her second year of music school, she had to get creative.
Now she owns and operates activewear brand TALA, fitness tech brand Shreddy, personal organization brand The Productivity Method, and is co-founder of AI company Retrograde, which she says aims to create an artificial intelligence talent agent for creators. To date, she’s raised $14 million in funding for TALA and Retrograde, was named a Forbes 30 under 30 in retail and ecommerce, and hosts weekly podcast Working Hard, Hardly Working.
She’s shifted away from making personal content on YouTube and Instagram, but believes the time she spent in content creation gave her the foundations she needed to launch her companies. At Cannes Lions, she’ll share her story–and her advice–with creators.
“I think there’s so many transferable skills between content creation and brand creation,” she tells Tubefilter. “So many of the best businesses on socials grow because they have an inherent understanding of what kind of content makes people tick, and how organic you have to be to really create advocates rather than customers. You only have to look at how many brands are now exploding on TikTok thanks to employee-generated content to see that people want to engage with people, not brands.”
This means companies can learn from creators, she says–but also, individual creators can take these lessons and apply them to things like making content for brand deals, and eventually to creating social content for their own brands. She adds that creators’ growing ability to niche down also provides them a platform to grow companies relevant to their digital content, and thus their established audiences’ interests.
“We’ve really gone from a one-size-fits-all industry where everyone sees an ‘influencer’ as one thing, to a sporadic, niche filled economy which encompasses everyone from Kim Kardashian to a gardening creator in the UK countryside with 5000 followers,” she says. “I think the role of moments like LIONS Creators is to have nuanced conversations about the multi-faceted industry we find ourselves in, and how brands can best exist and foster it, rather than deal in big sweeping statements.”
With her content background and executive day to day, Beverley exists at “the intersection between being an entrepreneur and a creator,” she says, and “I would love to help any creators looking to start their own ventures to take that leap.”
Catch her onstage at the Creators Rooftop during this year’s edition of Cannes Lions. Passes for LIONS Creators are available here.
