Catch Me If You Cannes! Austin Null is Building a Campaign with Creators Live at Cannes Lions 2026

As we return to our pre-Cannes Lions series, I’m joined by Austin Null, Chief Creator Officer at We Get It. 

Null’s session is different from the norm - he’ll be moderating a panel of two creators and Einstein Bros. Bagel’s CMO. On stage, they’ll be building a campaign live to be launched 60 days after the show.

Let’s find out what to expect from one of the most exciting sessions at Cannes Lions 2026.

Sofia Aira: Let's start by talking about your session. It sounds really exciting, and you have some fantastic creators on the panel. What are you most excited about for your session this year?

Austin Null: I'm incredibly excited. My agency, We Get It, is a creative agency powered by creators. What we are doing is taking a lot of the standard practices, like influencer marketing campaigns and producing creator content for brand social channels, and bringing them together. While this content is being produced elsewhere, it is often quite siloed. One of the big shifts I am implementing is integrating everything much earlier in the process.

Usually, traditional ad agencies assemble their creative directors, brand strategists, social strategists, and influencer marketing teams to pitch campaign ideas amongst themselves. Only then do they approach creators and tell them what to execute. I am reverse-engineering that process by building the campaign with the creators from day one.

Our session is going to showcase that very first phase. Before we even discuss influencer marketing campaigns or social channel placement, we will be building a live campaign for my client, Einstein Bros. Bagels, in real time on stage. I am excited to show the audience something completely different and demonstrate that you don't need a massive agency team packed with different departments. You just need people who genuinely understand the space, who know how to ask creators the right questions, and who can utilise them for creative, strategic, and audience insights. That is the core message I want to get across on stage.

SA: Building a live campaign on stage with creators in front of an audience is a brilliant concept. 

Given that you will be workshopping live, how crucial do you think creator input actually is to a campaign? There has been a lot of debate this year regarding how much creative control brands should hand over to creators, especially when the brand already has a strict brief in mind. Where do you think the balance lies?

AN: Personally, I lean towards giving creators significantly more input. Often, brands get pushback from talent managers saying, "Stop telling them what to do, just let creators create." While I understand the sentiment, that isn't always the best practical advice. Brands ultimately have a responsibility to their commercial goals and their brief. While you can hand a brief to certain creators and let them run with it, let's be realistic: that doesn't work for everyone.

That is exactly why my agency acts as the strategic bridge. We build the concept together. During our session, the CMO of Einstein Bros Bagels will actually be on stage to brief us. From there, I will work with the creators in real time, essentially acting as the facilitator, or a "quarterback," to use an American term!

My job is to pull everyone together and ensure the campaign functions logistically, while empowering the creators to offer deep insights in a structured, controlled way. It isn't a case of us blindly asking, "What should we do?" and just agreeing to anything. It is a true collaboration. I act as the voice for the brand, but I also advocate for the creators. If a creator pitches an idea and the brand hesitates, I can step in to explain the cultural context behind the idea and what it could achieve.

Ultimately, creators are rarely valued the right way. It is incredibly difficult to appreciate their full value if you only bring them in at the very end to execute a pre-made plan. That is why I am so passionate about building everything with them from the very start.

SA: I really love that perspective, and it feels like the definitive future of the creator economy. Looking ahead, do you have any specific predictions or major themes that you think will dominate the creator economy this year?

AN: My predictions are actually quite countercultural compared to what most people at Cannes will probably say. For a start, I am fairly anti-AI.

I have been working in social media since its inception. Back in 2010, I was working as a full-time influencer on YouTube, so I was completely immersed in the space. While I know social media isn't going anywhere, I strongly believe we are about to see a massive shift back toward real-life, smaller communities. Creators will remain vital because digital consumption will persist, but we will see creator communities being leveraged to drive real-world action, whether that is regional events, city-specific meetups, or localised experiences.

My biggest prediction is a rapidly growing consumer backlash against AI. Agencies and tech companies are pushing AI incredibly hard right now, but consumers are reaching a point of fatigue. People feel bombarded by artificial content across their feeds. They still value the human creators they follow, but they are tired of the digital noise and are craving real-world experiences.

Because of this, we will see a substantial shift back to genuine human interaction, moving beyond the comment section into physical spaces where creator communities can unite. Back in the early days of YouTube, collaboration was the primary driver of growth. Lately, collaboration has taken a backseat to hacking the algorithm and chasing viral metrics. By moving back to basics, creators will naturally collaborate more, their audiences will cross-pollinate, and that will translate into offline engagement. That is the shift consumers are starting to demand.

SA: I love that idea of returning to the simpler, foundational days of social media.

AN: That is the perfect way to phrase it. For years, the industry mantra has been about scaling, innovating, and expanding at all costs. While innovation is excellent, scaling just for the sake of scale isn't always beneficial. Marketing and advertising have become obsessed with it, but consumers don't care about scale; they just get trapped in the machinery of it.

Consumers want genuine connection, and it is impossible to foster true connection at scale. I have been preaching this in the influencer marketing space for a long time. In the early days, brands wanted to be part of thriving, close-knit communities. Then the industry shifted to a mass-scale mindset: "Let's not pay individual creators properly; let's just get 5,000 micro-influencers with 500 followers to post simultaneously." It became entirely transactional, just for the sake of generating noise, and consumers saw right through it.

It is perfectly fine to keep things simple. It is okay to streamline a campaign around a select few creators, a specific niche community, or a localised real-life activation, using compelling content to encourage people to physically show up. Keeping things simple has become a lost art.

SA: That is a fascinating point. Going back to your thoughts on AI, it is incredibly difficult to build a relationship with a piece of AI or a massive, faceless corporation. Public sentiment is leaning heavily anti-AI. Whenever I scroll through TikTok, I see people calling for AI boycotts due to its environmental impact and massive water consumption.

AN: Personally, I put that down to standard capitalism and corporate exploitation. However, the irony is that creator marketing only exists because brands witnessed authentic communities thriving and wanted a piece of that magic. When brands entered the space, they initially damaged the creative ecosystem by treating creator content like standard television commercials. Now, with AI, they are making a similar mistake because an executive at the top read an article or took advice from an out-of-touch consultant.

If you look at the comment sections, the audience, particularly the younger generation, genuinely dislikes it. We are seeing this tension across society, but it is especially pronounced in marketing. Consumers are over it. It is ultimately up to us as marketers to act as the voice of reason and firmly tell our clients when a strategy isn't going to work. That is exactly what I am trying to achieve with my agency.

SA: I completely agree. You are in a unique position because you started your career as a creator and transitioned into the corporate agency world. That is the exact reverse of the current trend, where people leave their 9-to-5 corporate jobs to become influencers. What was that transition like for you?

AN: It is funny you bring that up, because it is something I have been reflecting on a lot lately. I see so many colleagues in marketing and advertising who are desperate to quit and become full-time creators, and I always think to myself, "I don't miss that lifestyle whatsoever."

To give you some background, I started creating YouTube videos during university in 2010. After graduating, I took a job in Los Angeles at a multi-channel YouTube network called Fullscreen. I managed social media for Fullscreen and advised some of their top-tier creators on their channel strategies. Eventually, my personal YouTube channel started generating more revenue than my actual salary, so I transitioned into full-time content creation.

While it was an incredible experience, my content revolved around daily vlogging and showcasing my private life. Over time, it began to feel like The Truman Show. It became an incredibly strange way to live when every waking moment is filtered through the lens of what will generate the most views and revenue. You get trapped by the algorithm and end up exploiting your personal life for a living.

I learned an immense amount about community building and audience engagement, but when I crossed over into the advertising agency world in 2017, it was a completely different landscape with its own set of challenges.

I completely understand why people crave the autonomy of creator life. However, even within traditional advertising, I worked at several major agencies and gained brilliant experience, but I absolutely hated answering to corporate hierarchies. Running my own agency now gives me the best of both worlds. Leaving my agency job to launch my own firm gave me the exact same autonomy I felt when I left Fullscreen to do YouTube full-time, but without the personal toll.

Creator life is incredibly tough. I don't want to generalise because it depends entirely on the type of content you produce, but relying solely on public perception and constant audience demands just to make a living can really take a toll on your mental health. It works beautifully as a creative outlet, and if you can anchor it to a distinct purpose, it can be fantastic.

SA: That is such an insightful perspective. There is a massive difference between having professional autonomy and being able to maintain your personal privacy.

Take a creator like Mia McGrath here in the UK. She is a relatively new finance creator and CEO who happens to be headlining CreatorFest this year, which is why she is top of mind for me. She is incredibly transparent about her company earnings, her financial strategies, and her goal to become a millionaire by 30, yet her personal life remains completely private. I know absolutely nothing about her outside of business.

It is fascinating to see that shift. Back in the 2010s, there was a cultural expectation that vloggers had to document their lives 24/7. I remember watching creators like Zoella and the rest of the British YouTube community, and it felt like we were privy to every single second of their day. Looking back, it seemed exhausting, almost like dealing with constant paparazzi.

AN: You are absolutely right. I was part of that specific vlogging era, just operating on the American side of the community.

The reality is that if you are online constantly, you are always being perceived by others. Even if your content feels raw, authentic, and unedited, you are still actively curating and editing a narrative. Even for a finance creator who shares zero personal details, they are still a public commodity. If they get recognised in public, they might feel frustrated that people only view them as "the finance person" rather than a human being, but that is the trade-off. It is a very difficult balancing act.

Ultimately, I don't believe human brains were structurally evolved to handle fame. When my YouTube channel was active, I had around 400,000 subscribers. Even at that scale, a few times a month I would be spotted out in Kansas City, Missouri, by viewers wanting to say hello. That was manageable, but imagine the reality for someone on the level of Justin Bieber, where you are essentially treated like a zoo animal wherever you go. I found my level of exposure challenging, so I cannot fathom how global celebrities cope.

Being perceived by millions of people isn't entirely healthy, though you can absolutely channel that platform to do immense good, impact lives positively, and teach people new perspectives. There are wonderful positives to the job, but it is fundamentally a very complicated, messy space.

SA: We might get some firsthand insight into that at Cannes this year. I wanted to ask what advice you would give to independent creators who are looking to transition into the corporate or agency world? As a Chief Creator Officer, you are the ideal person to ask.

AN: The work I am doing on stage with these prominent creators is tailored to a specific client campaign, but the broader strategic model is actually incredibly beneficial for smaller, rising creators. What I am trying to establish is a system where we consult creators for their strategic insights, cultural knowledge, and audience understanding, and build campaigns collaboratively.

Crucially, this doesn't mean you have to be the face of the campaign yourself. If you are a creator within a specific niche, we can bring you in at the foundational stage, even if we ultimately hire different influencers to execute the public-facing promotion down the line. To me, utilising a creator's brain for strategy offers far better results than relying on a traditional creative director who has never actually made content, builds an unrealistic campaign in a vacuum, and then forces a creator to execute it. That is where the industry disconnect happens. If a creator designs the blueprint of a campaign, the execution will naturally be much more authentic.

If you are a creator looking to break into the corporate world, this consultancy model is something I am actively trying to scale into a broader creator network. For instance, if a brand like Ford needs a campaign, I want to bring in a creator from the automotive space to co-build it. For a smaller creator, I could easily pay you the equivalent of a standard content brand deal just for a week of your strategic thinking and insights.

On a practical level, my advice is to get on LinkedIn immediately. Follow brand marketers, agency leaders, and advertising executives, and start engaging with their content. Most importantly, own the value of what you have built. If you have successfully grown an audience of 10,000 or 20,000 engaged followers, that is a genuine achievement. You have cracked an audience formula that brands spend millions trying to figure out. Have the confidence to approach brand marketers, explain what works for your audience, and pitch how those insights can solve their problems.

That is exactly how I framed my own CV when I transitioned into advertising. I laid out everything I had accomplished on YouTube, the views generated, and the community engagement metrics, and explained how I could replicate that success for a corporate brand. It is a highly transferable skill set.

The main obstacle when I made the jump was that the traditional advertising industry didn't take creators seriously. The prevailing attitude was, "We make cinematic television commercials, you just make internet videos." Today, the tables have completely turned. Creators are in an incredibly strong position to make that corporate transition.

SA: The tables really have turned over the last five years. Thank you so much for your time, Austin!