For one week every June, the advertising industry decamps to the French Riviera to take its own temperature.
The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, now in its 72nd year, ran from 16 to 20 June 2025 and drew roughly 15,000 delegates from 90 countries, the sort of crowd that turns a seaside town into a rolling conversation about where attention is going next.
This year the answer was hard to miss. Creators were everywhere, formally so: the festival renamed its long-running Social and Influencer Lions the Social and Creator Lions, a small piece of housekeeping that said a lot about who the industry now thinks it works for.
AI dominated the panels, as expected. But the livelier story was unfolding on the beach, where the people who make the content, rather than the agencies who used to broker it, were the ones holding court.
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At Cannes Lions, Bryson DeChambeau made the case for athletes as creators. The strategy underneath the slogans is more interesting than the slogans.
Somewhere in the keynote, between the applause lines about authenticity and the obligatory nod to data, Bryson DeChambeau said something that cuts to the heart of modern sport.
Before YouTube, he explained, other people had built his public image for him. Traditional media decided who he was, yet he wanted to tell his own story instead.
That, more than any statistic on the screen behind him at Cannes Lions, is why a two-time major champion was standing on a marketing stage in the first place.
The moderator, Mary Ellen Coe – Chief Business Officer at YouTube, opened with a number that gets repeated like gospel in the sports business these days: 65% of viewers, she said, want to experience sport through the creators they follow.
It is a striking figure, and like a lot of striking figures at advertising festivals, it shows up without a footnote. Take it for what it is, the organising belief behind a YouTube sales pitch rather than a settled fact, and the rest of the hour makes sense.
YouTube has a thesis, and athletes are the proof. DeChambeau is the witness everyone wanted to hear from.
And he is a good one, because his case is so concrete. He has won the US Open twice, in 2020 and again in 2024, which buys him the sporting credibility the pitch needs.
But the number that matters to marketers is the other one: his YouTube channel has passed 2.6 million subscribers, big enough that it has at points gone toe to toe with the official PGA Tour account.
His origin story will sound familiar to anyone who has watched a creator find their feet. The early videos were technical, all swing mechanics and equipment, and they flopped.
The audience, talking back through comments, likes, dislikes, and the brutal honesty of the analytics dashboard, wanted something else. So he changed course.
It is the oldest lesson in the creator economy, and he delivered it plainly: the people watching will tell you what they want, if you are willing to listen.
What they wanted, it turned out, was golf you could actually sit through. A round can run four hours, which is death on a platform built for momentum.
So DeChambeau brought in a production team to cut that down to something closer to an hour, fast enough to hold attention without losing what he calls the essence of the game.
You see the idea most clearly in his Break 50 series, where he and a guest try to shoot under 50 over 18 holes.
The format turns a slow sport into a tight, high-stakes hour, and it has pulled in names from well outside golf, among them the actor Adam Sandler and the basketball player Stephen Curry, whom DeChambeau has called the most requested guest the show has ever had.
The crowd that gathered around all this was not the one golf expected. It skewed older at first, he said, then got younger. The thing he seemed proudest of was the viewer who has never held a club and watches anyway.
For a sport that frets constantly about its greying audience, a young non-golfer tuning in is not a vanity metric. It is the whole point.
None of it is cheap or easy, and he was honest about that. Other pros ask him how to copy it, and his honest answer is that it takes a real team and a serious amount of time and money.
He said his motive was never mainly financial, which is fair enough, though the disclaimer quietly admits just how big the operation has become.
The scrappy, do-it-yourself spirit of the early creator era, the one that turned a six-year-old unboxing toys into an eight-figure earner, has hardened into something that looks a lot like a small media company.
You could hear that maturity in how he talked about what actually works. The temptation, he said, is to chase virality. The payoff is in consistency, episodic content, and trust, the slow build of an audience that keeps coming back. Brands, he argued, should think the same way.
A YouTube video can sit online for 10, 15, even 20 years, picking up views and goodwill long after a TV spot has gone dark.
For marketers raised on the campaign as a one-off burst, that is a genuinely useful way to look at it: creator content as something that gains value over time, not something that bleeds it.
His advice for those marketers came down to a word that has been rubbed nearly smooth from overuse, authenticity, though he gave it more teeth than usual.
Audiences spot insincerity instantly, he warned, and a brand that does not actually share a creator’s values gets found out.
Coming from someone whose whole YouTube project started as a way to take back his own story, the point lands harder than it would in any slide deck.
The most telling moment was one he played off as a stunt. DeChambeau ran a giveaway built around an audacious trick shot, with a luxury car as the prize, and so many people tried to enter that the website fell over.
He has run more than one of these, and the details blur in the retelling, but the signal is hard to miss. An athlete, working as his own broadcaster, drove enough demand to crash a server.
That is the number the CMOs in the room had really come to see.
What he wants next is to step away from golf without leaving it entirely, into travel, global challenges, and storytelling that treats the game as a base camp rather than a fence.
It is the natural arc of a creator who has outgrown his first niche, and it raises the question the whole Cannes pitch tiptoed around.
If the athlete becomes a media brand, and the media brand becomes the point, what happens to the sport that made him? For now, DeChambeau is still winning majors.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
