In 2026, Cannes Lions made more room for the Creator Economy than ever before. LIONS Creators ran across all five days of the festival, gained its own dedicated program and brought content Creators closer to the center of an industry that had long seen them mainly as distribution channels.
But this is not an isolated shift. In 2025, the festival had already renamed its “Social & Influencer Lions” category “Social & Creator Lions”. It may look like a simple name change, but it is hard to see those decisions without noticing a bigger transformation.
Creators are not just getting more space. The industry is beginning to rethink where Creators’ value lies.
“An audience watches. A community builds.”
I attended the Summit Mulheres nas Profissões, and a point Ana Paula Renault made during her talk stayed with me: “An audience watches, a community builds.”
The line would be powerful on its own. But it takes on another meaning coming from someone who has just won Brazil’s biggest reality show, in a contest decided precisely by the ability to mobilize people.
Of course, winning BBB involves storytelling, strategy, a sense of connection and plenty of other factors. Still, there is a difference between having millions of people watching and having some of them choose you as Brazil’s next millionaire.
That is when Cannes and BBB, two worlds that seem far apart, started to look connected to me. Maybe both are showing that getting attention is no longer enough. Value also lies in what we build once we have it.
More Visibility Also Means a New Role
Early on, the logic of the Creator Economy seemed fairly simple: build an audience, gain reach and turn that visibility into advertising. That model still exists and still matters. What changed is that it is no longer the only option.
As the industry matures, content Creators are no longer brought in only at the end of a campaign to distribute a message someone else created. They are taking part in strategy, creation, culture and relationships with people who have chosen to stick around.
And that relationship opens up other possibilities.
When Value Changes, So Do the Ways to Monetize
Advertising and brand partnerships remain an important part of the Creator Economy. Today, though, they can sit alongside subscriptions, products of their own, experiences, events, exclusive content, licensing, recurring funding and original projects.
To me, progress is not about trading one revenue stream for another. It is about being able to have more than one.
The more ways you have to sustain your work, the less your career depends solely on the next campaign or a change in the algorithm. That is where monetization becomes directly tied to independence.
Independence Means Being Able to Choose
Being independent does not mean working alone or no longer working with brands. It means having more room to choose: which partnerships make sense, which projects to take on, what to create and what to turn down.
And the more autonomy you have, the more room there is to protect what makes a content Creator recognizable. Maybe that is why “authenticity”, a word repeated so often in recent years, is beginning to mean something more interesting.
A distinct voice, a point of view, a sense of humor, an aesthetic or a particular way of connecting with a community are hard to copy. Authenticity starts to work like an asset. In some cases, even like intellectual property.
From an Economy of Influence to an Economy of Authorship
When I put these shifts together, I get the feeling we are entering a new phase of the Creator Economy. The first big breakthrough was allowing people to build an audience without necessarily needing a broadcaster, publisher or major media outlet.
The next may be making it possible for that audience to become something that increasingly belongs to the people who create.
We are gradually moving from an economy of influence to an economy of authorship. And it is hard to watch that shift without thinking about the structure Creators will need to sustain it.
If community is becoming more valuable, we need ways to bring Creators closer to people who genuinely want to take part. If a career needs to rely less on one revenue stream, we need more ways to monetize. And if authenticity becomes an asset, we need ways to create value from it.
Flamus was born from those questions. From the start, we wanted to build a platform that helps Creators sustain their original projects without giving up what makes them unique. Because when income depends only on the algorithm, the next sponsored post or whichever partnership comes along, there is always a risk that creative work starts bending toward what pays the bills instead of what that person actually wants to put into the world.
Flamus Is for Creators Who Want to Turn an Audience into Recurring Revenue
It is a space where Creators can bring their community together and build a steady source of income through subscriptions, bringing those who create closer to people who truly value their content.
The idea is not to replace brands, social media or other ways to monetize. It is to give Creators more freedom to choose where they show up, which partnerships to pursue and which stories to tell.
Because the more we can support everything around the creative work, the more room we have for what really matters: creating.
