TikTok at Cannes Lions Festival: Why Creativity Is Now a Business Tool, Not a Brand Virtue
How TikTok is turning creativity into measurable growth.
TikTok held its Cannes Lions press briefing in the garden at the Carlton Hotel this week with a consistent message: creativity is not a campaign input; it is their business engine. The pitch is not new. What was different this year was the product depth behind it: creator testimony, a brand case study from Canva, and the launch of Symphony Agent, TikTok’s most ambitious AI creative suite to date.
Creativity as a compounding multiplier
Isobel Sita Lumsden, Global Head of Business Marketing, set the tone. TikTok users are not passively scrolling. “You don’t check TikTok. You watch it.” Brands entering that environment cannot rely on reach alone. The audience is choosing to be there and engage with creators.
Creativity, she said, is not an input to a campaign; it is a “compounding multiplier.” It converts attention into engagement, engagement into affection, and affection into commercial outcomes. The model TikTok is proposing is participatory rather than adjacent: brands are expected to engage with culture rather than run alongside it. Creator content, community response, and brand activity reinforce each other. Getting it wrong is more visible than on platforms where audiences are not paying close attention.
The creator who built a community
Marisa Hammonds, Global Head of Creator Marketing, sat down with creator Henry Smith (@henryhenryhenryhenryhenr), one of five creators present at the session. Smith spoke on stage; the others, Jeremiah Brown and Emmanuel Duverneau among them, were in the audience. Together they represented a deliberate cross-section of the communities and content categories TikTok wanted to showcase.
Smith spent six years in politics and government relations before becoming a full-time TikTok creator. He came home in the evenings and made videos to make himself laugh: no trends, no hashtags, no posting calendar. He went full-time in March last year and now operates Henry Henry Henry Henry LLC, his California business. He knew he had built a community rather than an audience when strangers began stopping him and asking how his mother was or following up months later on a difficult period he had once posted about. They were not watching content. They had absorbed him as someone they knew.
His output has not changed materially since he started. “I don’t think you’d be able to tell the difference between a post from last week and one from two years ago”, he said.
The Sephora partnership illustrated the commercial value of that. He made a video saying men should feel comfortable going to Sephora. Sephora noticed, sent branded merchandise, and built a long-term partnership from that first video. The brand had not briefed the content. They recognised something already working and joined it. The partnerships that have worked best, he said, are those where brands understood his audience before the first call.
“Go where the warmth is” was his advice to creators starting out. The same logic, applied to brand strategy, shaped the rest of the morning.
What creator-led strategy looks like at scale
Lachlan Stewart, Canva’s global head of social, joined David Kaufman, TikTok’s head of product operations for North America, to demonstrate what creator-led strategy looks like at scale.
Canva has operated on TikTok since 2020 and now runs ten localised channels across priority markets. The rationale is straightforward: creative culture does not translate directly across borders. What resonates in Brazil will not work in Italy. Separate local voices, built with local insight, produce engagement that a centralised global feed cannot replicate. The decision about which markets get a dedicated channel is driven by TikTok audience data showing where meaningful communities around the brand already exist.
The more telling example came from Content Suite, TikTok’s tool for surfacing organic content brands did not commission. Stewart described finding a student creator posting about using Canva for university work: no brief, no partnership, not content a media planner would identify as ad-ready. Yet it became Canva’s best-performing growth campaign asset last year. Canva is now using Content Suite systematically to find similar content for performance campaigns rather than waiting to commission them. The content did not look like advertising, which was exactly the point.
Symphony Agent: removing the friction
Moritz Bartsch, global head of creative operations, closed the session with the product announcements. Symphony Agent is now integrated across three of TikTok’s creative platforms. Where Canva mined Content Suite by hand, Symphony Agent is built to do the same automatically.
In Symphony Creative Studio, brands can describe a campaign brief in natural language and receive a full creative storyboard within minutes, drawing on trend data and audience signals. What previously took days takes a conversation.
In TikTok One, it addresses creator discovery, filtering the marketplace by audience overlap and content style to produce relevant recommendations at speed. In Content Suite, it replaces manual search, allowing brands to surface organic content from users already talking about their product and to build custom creator networks from their own affiliates and ambassadors within TikTok One. The system includes AI labelling, invisible watermarks, and content moderation filters throughout. A new integration with Dentsu’s AI-powered media activation platform joins existing Symphony connections with WPP and Adobe Express.
Bartsch was deliberate about the framing: Symphony Agent is meant to remove the friction that stops creativity from scaling, not to replace the creativity itself. “We want to help marketers spend less time managing processes and more time creating.”
The creative process TikTok spent the morning celebrating (slow, personal, community-rooted, built by someone making videos for themselves with no audience in mind) is not what Symphony Agent is designed to produce. Generating a storyboard from a product brief in minutes is a different activity from what made Henry Smith’s Sephora partnership worth having. TikTok did not address that gap directly. It is the question the industry will keep asking.
