The Croisette knows how to put on a show. It has hosted one every spring since 1946. Movie stars at the Cannes Film Festival in May, Formula 1 tearing through Monaco up the coast, yachts drifting west to St-Tropez. By late June the French Riviera needs a closing act. The advertising industry provides it, on the same sand, the same Carlton terraces, the same golden-hour light. This coastline has always rewarded the art of being seen. Only the cameras have changed hands.

Cannes Lions is technically an advertising festival, but in practice the week has become the creator economy’s annual international summit. Every major platform builds a beach, every agency books a rooftop, and the deals that shape the next year of creator marketing get done standing in line for rosé. The guide below cuts the week’s sprawling event calendar down to one audience: creators and the people who work with them. RSVP early. Every venue runs its own registration, and the good ones cap out weeks before the Croisette fills up.

The Anchor Events of Cannes Lions

1. Influential Beach and the Forbes Top Creators List Launch

The creator-marketing giant’s takeover of La Mandala Beach runs Monday through Wednesday, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. daily, and it is the closest thing the week has to a creator-economy headquarters. Circle Tuesday, June 23: the 2026 Forbes Top Creators List launch celebration runs 5 to 8 p.m. on the sand, the single most creator-specific moment of the entire festival. Monday closes with a Publicis welcome party from 6 to 10 p.m., and Wednesday stacks a Fanatics Advertising happy hour at 5 p.m. into an evening concert that runs until 1 a.m. RSVP at influentialbeach.com.

2. Sport Beach

La Plage Du Festival at 52 Bd de la Croisette becomes the athlete-creator crossover hub of the week, opening Sunday and then running on the festival’s most aggressive hours: 7 a.m. starts every day, with Tuesday stretching from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. If your lane touches sports content, athlete partnerships, or the IRL formats eating the creator economy, this is your standing appointment. Register at sportbeach.com/cannes2026.

The Platform Beaches

3. TikTok at Cannes Lions

Monday through Wednesday, 12 to 5 p.m. at the Carlton Cannes. The platform that reset short-form economics keeps banker’s-afternoon hours, so plan around it rather than assuming you can drop in. RSVP at tiktokatcannes.com.

4. Meta Beach

Plage Barrière Le Majestic, Monday through Thursday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Fresh off its creator-partnerships hiring spree, Meta’s beach is where Reels and wearables conversations happen with the people who can greenlight them. Details at facebook.com/business/events/cannes.

5. LinkedIn’s Creator Experience

The LinkedIn Rooftop at the Carlton runs noon to 4 p.m. Monday through Thursday, and the registration page says the quiet part out loud: this is a creator experience, built for the fastest-growing creator class of the moment, the professional poster. B2B creators should treat it as home base. RSVP at the LinkedIn event page.

6. Pinterest Manifestival

Carlton Beach Club, Monday through Thursday, roughly 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Pinterest keeps quietly writing checks in the taste economy, and Manifestival is its annual argument that aesthetics are infrastructure. RSVP at pinterestcannes.com.

7. Reddit Community Deli

The most original build of the week: a deli-themed activation at Rue Buttura and Promenade Robert Favre le Bret, running Monday from 9 a.m. all the way to 9:30 p.m., then 9 to 6 Tuesday and Wednesday. Reddit’s pitch to brands is community authenticity, which is also exactly the conversation creators should be in the room for. RSVP at the Reddit Cannes page.

8. Canva Creative Cabana

Vega La Plage, Monday through Thursday, with the week’s most generous hours: doors as early as 7 a.m. and Thursday running to 11 p.m. The creator-tools side of the economy lives here. RSVP at canva.com/events/cannes.

9. Amazon Port

The Esplanade Pantiero port takeover runs Monday through Thursday, roughly 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Between live shopping, Prime Video’s creator slate, and Twitch, Amazon touches more creator revenue lines than any company at the festival. Register at Amazon’s event page.

10. ADWEEK House

The trade-press salon of the week opens with a kickoff soirée Sunday, 7 to 9 p.m., then runs daily at the Hotel Barrière Le Majestic through Thursday. This is where creator-economy coverage gets decided as much as discussed, and where a well-timed conversation becomes a profile. RSVP at event.adweek.com.

The Rooms Worth Working For

11. Creator Culture Club: Cannes Lions Edition

Meltwater’s invite-only creator community hosts a three-lunch series at Beau Restaurant Cannes on Monday, June 22, Tuesday, June 23, and Thursday, June 25. Creator Culture Club was founded by the Magic Connector, Antonia Jade Amico. She built CCC inside Meltwater to bring creators, brands, agencies, and platforms together through curated in-person experiences. The Cannes edition is positioned as the relaxed, elevated alternative to the Croisette networking churn. An intimate table, a real lunch, and a deliberate mix of creators, marketers, platform leaders, and cultural tastemakers. Request a seat via the Creator Culture Club calendar.

Snapchat’s Cannes Lions Run

Snapchat is spreading its presence across partner venues all week, June 22-26, and the through-line is creators. Times and locations are on each registration page.

12. Meltwater x Snapchat Panel ft. Shuang Hu

A creator-focused panel pairing the platform with Meltwater’s data, featuring actress and creator Shuang Hu. RSVP at the event page.

13. Later x Snapchat Creator Panel ft. David Dobrik

Dobrik arrives at Cannes months removed from being crowned Snapchat Creator of the Year the Snappys. A David Dobrik panel on creator strategy is the kind of room that fills fast. Register at the Later event page.

14. Later x Snapchat Fireside Chat with Roblox

Snapchat and Roblox in one conversation is the under-25 internet talking to itself, and the brands listening should include anyone chasing Gen Z and Gen Alpha attention. Same registration as the Dobrik panel, at the Later event page.

15. Sprout Social x Snapchat CMO Happy Hour

The decision-maker room: a happy hour built around CMOs, which for a creator means the rare chance to talk budgets with the people who set them, drink in hand. RSVP at the Sprout Social event page.

How to Play the Week

Three practical notes. First, every event above runs its own RSVP separate from your festival badge, and the creator-specific ones cap hardest, so register this week, not when you land. Second, build your days around the anchor hours: mornings at Sport Beach or Canva, platform beaches in the afternoon window, and evenings at whichever party matches your lane. Third, Tuesday, June 23 is the densest creator day of the festival: Sport Beach runs sixteen hours, the Creator Culture Club lunch sits at midday, and the Forbes Top Creators List launch closes the evening. If you can only fly in for one day, that is the day.

Jon Powell News Editor

Jon Powell is an American and British editor and writer covering Hip Hop, R&B, and the wider creative world through an international lens.

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Creator Economy Influencer Marketing Live Streaming Social Media

There is a specific small dread that comes with wanting iced coffee in Italy. You know the order is wrong before you say it. The barista knows it too.

Gstaad Guy just handed his millions of followers the password. In a video posted this week, the luxury-lifestyle satirist declared the caffè shakerato his “drink of the summer,” and pitched it squarely at Americans who would rather not be the person requesting a venti iced anything on the Amalfi Coast. His version adds a touch of vanilla. The classic is a simple nod to La Dolce Vita.

What you are actually ordering

The shakerato is three ingredients and one piece of theater. The barista pulls a fresh espresso and shakes it hot with ice and simple syrup in a cocktail shaker, hard, until the drink transforms. La Marzocco notes that the vigorous shaking stretches the espresso’s natural crema into a tight, stable foam. Strained into a chilled coupe or martini glass with the ice left behind, it arrives looking like a cocktail. It is just coffee: non-alcoholic and dairy-free in its classic form, which makes it the rare universal order. The syrup does double duty as sweetener and foam stabilizer.

Barista Magazine traces the name to the English verb “shake” with an Italian ending, and notes the drink’s exact origin is unknown, usually credited to Italian bartenders in the 1990s. Federica, a manager at Rome’s Sant’Eustachio il Caffè, told the magazine it is “so much more fun to drink than a normal espresso.”

How to do it like you have done it before

Say “un caffè shakerato, per favore.” That is the whole script. It works at nearly any bar in the country, from a Milan counter to a beach kiosk in Puglia, no specialty café required while on your Eurosummer. A few notes that separate the traveler from the tourist: it is an afternoon drink, the natural answer to the hour when a cappuccino would raise eyebrows. Drink it standing at the counter, the way Italians take their coffee, and know that sitting at a table typically costs more for the same glass. And if you like Gstaad Guy’s vanilla twist, ask for “vaniglia” without apology. Flavored syrups are an established variation, and even Ina Garten has a vanilla version.

Why this endorsement travels

Gstaad Guy built his following on two characters: Constance de von Gstaad, an old-money European, and Cousin Colton, his new-money American counterpart. The act runs the real Eurosummer circuit from the Swiss Alps to the Côte d’Azur, and a meaningful slice of the audience books the same coastline his content is set on. A thirty-second Reel naming the right coffee order does what a thousand-word travel feature cannot: it lands in the feed of someone flying to Rome in June and tells them exactly what to say at the bar.

The shakerato earns the moment on its own. It runs through an Italian summer the way the Aperol Spritz runs through happy hour: ordered standing, unhurried, and nearly universal. The difference is you can have it at 3 p.m. and still make dinner.

Megan Meadows

Megan Meadows is a lifestyle writer covering fashion, taste, and the way the internet lives, with a small-town eye for what everyone else stopped noticing.

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Last March, Ludwig Ahgren and Michael Reeves rode motorcycles the length of Japan with no smartphones, no maps, and enough Japanese to get themselves into trouble. It became one of the best YouTube series of 2025. So naturally, they’ve made it harder this year, just finishing their infamous two-week journey across China. The two have been recording their daily adventures with translations added afterwards, adding a level of humor to the fun, as listeners can now understand the bewilderment of people trying to help the travellers on their journey.

Their new adventure, Tip 2 Tip: China, sent the pair from the southern coast of China all the way to the Mongolian border in two weeks, without maps or smartphones. The final video was just released today. Ludwig and Michael’s route began in Guangzhou and ended near Erenhot, covering roughly 3,000 miles, about the same as going coast to coast in the continental U.S., with very minimal Chinese language skills and lots of rural terrain.

The rules were the same as last year: no highways, no maps, no smartphones, although Michael and Ludwig were allowed to let good samaritans pull out their own phones to translate. China presented a specific logistical challenge before they even got on the bikes. Unlike Japan, which still runs on cash, much of China’s payment infrastructure is built around smartphone QR codes, with smaller vendors and stalls often having no cash registers at all.

In preparation for their journey, the two spent months studying Mandarin before the trip. Clearly, their language preparation was not enough.. In episodes running around 30 minutes each, Michael and Ludwig showcase the Mandarin they learned while frequently failing to get their point across, at one point asking for a “pig shop” instead of a hotel. Their frequent miscommunications and antics travelling across the country have gone viral on Bilibili, the popular Chinese social media app often compared to YouTube.

Early antics included failing to find a compass, clogging a toilet, karaoke, getting pulled over, picking up a hitchhiker and getting invited to the mayor of a small Chinese city’s house. Their lack of experience in the Mandarin language lead to many mishaps, including an incident where the two accidentally crash a “happy funeral” in Hunan province, mistaking the funeral banquet for a restaurant.

It did not slow them down much. Over the course of the series they picked up a hitchhiker, got invited to a Chinese mayor’s home, and spent a day with a group of local kids, during which it became apparent that Ludwig is oddly good with children. They stumbled onto what viewers started calling “the most beautiful shortcut in the history of shortcuts.” There was a bread mishap with ongoing consequences.

The language barrier was worse than Japan throughout. Rural Chinese dialects can sound almost nothing like standard Mandarin, and the underdeveloped infrastructure of some stretches made navigation genuinely difficult. Mandarin is also a very difficult language to learn, having many different tones that can be unfamiliar to non-native speakers. Ludwig kept mispronouncing the Chinese word for “adventure” in a way that came out as “cat line.” 

Chinese traffic law added a wrinkle Japan didn’t: motorcycles are prohibited from expressways, meaning they were legally required to take the surface roads regardless of the rules of the challenge. The series ran daily on Ludwig’s YouTube channel, shot and edited ahead of release, with a buffer week built in for the editing team, with episodes already reaching millions of views on YouTube. The Bilibili audience followed along in parallel, with fan-run sites translating Chinese viewer comments back into English for Ludwig’s regular audience to read. Two groups of people watching the same trip from opposite ends of the language barrier. The full series is now available on Ludwig’s YouTube channel.

James Lewis

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