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Next week, the advertising industry will once again descend on the South of France for Cannes Lions.
Meta Platforms will reclaim its coveted spot on Cannes’ famous Croisette boulevard just outside the Palais des Festivals. The company first launched its beachfront activation there a decade ago.
Ahead of the premier international advertising festival, Alex Schultz, Meta’s CMO and vice president of analytics, joined us on the latest episode of Scalable.
During the conversation, we unpacked Meta’s own creator strategy, its massive investments in AI and what the future of advertising looks like. Schultz also shared why he believes AI is a “threshold technology.”
Here are some of the key takeaways.
Making Smart Glasses Cool
Many AI companies have turned to creators to promote their products and try to change people’s opinions about AI. Schultz isn't convinced that strategy is working.
“I love a lot of the marketing folks at OpenAI. But I don’t think we’ve resolved the concerns about data centers or the trust in OpenAI at all in the last year,” he said.
OpenAI acquired tech podcast TBPN in April and has worked with creators like Gigi Robinson to promote some ChatGPT applications, such as health.
He may have a point. Consumer sentiment toward AI has seemingly deteriorated recently, with only 34% of Americans saying they think the technology will do more good than harm in their day-to-day lives, according to a Quinnipiac poll from March. Over half (55%) said it will do more harm.
Instead, Schultz is more focused on working with creators to get people to buy Meta’s smart glasses, including both its Ray-Ban and Oakley models. One example: Creator Reece Feldman, known as @guywithamoviecamera, wore the Meta Ray-Bans on the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival in May as part of a partnership with Meta. The company also featured livestreamer iShowSpeed in a 2026 Super Bowl ad for its Oakleys.
But that’s still an AI strategy. Meta AI is embedded into the latest version of the glasses, meaning that these creators are also effectively promoting Meta’s AI assistant.
Earlier this month, Meta also hired Jim Shepherd to lead content and creator partnerships, with a focus on its wearables business. Shepherd spent the past decade at Snap, where he was the company’s top executive focused on creators. Snap was also the first social media company to release smart glasses. Earlier this week, it unveiled the new consumer version of its AR glasses, Specs.
AI’s Messaging Problem
If creators won’t change people’s minds about AI, then who will?
According to Schultz, some of it will come down to the people leading AI’s development—and that’s not necessarily people who work at Meta.
“The thought leader on this is very much Dario [Amodei, CEO of Anthropic],” Schultz said. “It needs to be people like him that go out and actually talk about the excitement and the reason that policymakers shouldn’t be scared.”
One major problem, as Schultz sees it, is that these leaders are giving mixed messages: They warn about jobs being destroyed while excitedly racing to release more powerful models.
Changing minds will also require local marketing in communities impacted by AI data centers. Schultz said Meta has “run a bunch of local campaigns” and explains what jobs and opportunities the company is bringing to the community. But marketing isn’t enough: He added that companies need to “prove to people these products are good for them,” such as helping them be more efficient.
To Schultz, that’s already starting to happen in the ad world. In a recent op-ed, he wrote that he believes that AI has “crossed the threshold” where it’s allowing marketers to produce creative work more quickly.
“You’re never going to use the AI if it’s worse than doing the work yourself until it crosses the threshold where it’s actually better than doing the work yourself,” he told us.
That’s not to say, however, that AI is going to replace CMOs, agencies or creatives, as this Wall Street Journal report from last June suggested Meta was aiming to do. Instead, Schultz thinks that it will have the opposite effect and grow all of those roles.
AI has certainly already helped Meta grow its own business. The company’s revenue rose 33% year-over-year during the first quarter of this year. That followed record revenue in 2025, when it surpassed $200 billion for the first time.
Much of that growth has to do with Meta’s investments in AI, which help it serve the right ads to the right people at the right time. This year, the company estimates it could spend up to $145 billion on AI, with most of that spending going toward infrastructure and data centers.
We asked Schultz if that spending is worth it.
“We’ve made bets that big before,” he said.
For our full conversation with Schultz, where he also teases some of Meta’s upcoming creator announcements at Cannes Lions, tune into our latest podcast episode, embedded below. The episode is also available on Spotify, Apple—or wherever else you get your podcasts.
Scalable x Cannes Lions
We’re attending Cannes Lions for the first time under our own media company! Unsurprisingly, we expect the two biggest topics this year to be creators and AI. (Ahem, see above.)
The conference first introduced a dedicated creator program and event space in 2024. This year, LIONS Creators is moving from the rooftop of the Palais to a prime beachfront location as part of a new partnership with Adobe, as we exclusively reported. It’s a symbolic move that reflects how crucial creators have become to marketing strategies.
“Creators and AI will continue to be a really big theme for 2026. They're so significant a shift to the industry and their impact continues to grow,” Ed Davidson, chief growth officer of LIONS, told us.
We’re looking forward to our live recording of Scalable on Tuesday at the Creators & Culture Villa. You can RSVP here!
Earlier that day, we’ll give our state of the union on the creator economy in a conversation moderated by the Washington Post’s Dylan Wells at a CMO breakfast hosted by Whalar Group and 3C Ventures. On Thursday, Jasmine will moderate a panel on navigating creator-brand relationships at The Female Quotient.
Scalable is a media partner this year, so look out for our logo and QR code at LIONS Creators Beach.
For those of you who won’t be there, we’ll have plenty of coverage of the festival and podcast interviews with top CMOs, brand executives and creators to share once the festival wraps. Thank you to Sounds Profitable for providing us with studio space on the beach!
The Round Up
Threads has reached 500 million monthly active users. The Meta-owned app also rolled out Your Algo, a feature that aims to give people more control over the conversations they see on their Threads feed. It’s similar to Your Algorithm on Instagram, which we discussed in more detail on last week’s podcast.
Pinterest launched an experimental AI shopping app called Ask Pinterest.
Fox Creator Studios announced the latest group of creators it’s working with to develop original content, including Josh Richards, Emelia Hartford, Sorted Food, Mad Realities and Christina Richardson. The new division of Fox Entertainment launched in January, initially focusing on partnerships around food content, including with celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay and YouTuber and baker Rosanna Pansino.
Character.ai, an AI chatbot service, announced new features like analytics and upgraded mobile editing tools for creators who create customizable characters on its platform.
Deals, Deals, Deals
Jake Paul’s venture capital firm Anti Fund closed a $100 million growth fund. The firm has invested in companies including defense startup Anduril, corporate credit card provider Ramp and prediction market firm Polymarket.
Swsh, a fan engagement startup for live events, raised $4 million in seed funding led by Game Changers Ventures. Swsh, which is used by touring artists, allows fans to find photos of themselves at events and upload their user-generated content in bulk. Artists and other creators using the service can then use the content on their own social media accounts.
Dolphin, an entertainment marketing and content production company, is partnering with Kynetic Media Ventures, a media and venture investment holding company, to launch Graviteur Studios, an independent film and TV studio focused on creators.
Fox Advertising and animation studio Toonstar are partnering to help marketers reach audiences through animated content. The idea is to create new opportunities for brands to engage with creator audiences for animated content, while providing creators with more monetization and distribution options.
New Heights Goes Live in LA
Travis and Jason Kelce hosted a live version of their podcast “New Heights” at the Orpheum theater in Los Angeles on Monday. Jasmine was there!
The energy at the event was “electric,” to borrow a term from Travis. On arrival, people were lined up to buy New Heights-themed merch, as well as copies of the brothers’ book “No Dumb Questions,” named after a segment on their show. Inside, the crowd broke out into chants initiated by the brothers, who also shot T-shirt canons and threw footballs into the audience.
The event was presented by Amazon-owned Wondery, with special guests Will Ferrell, US women’s soccer stars Alex Morgan and Kelley O’Hara and NFL players Myles Garrett and Andrew Whitworth. Sponsors included Xfinity and Enterprise. One segment of the show that stood out: The brothers played blooper clips from their very first podcast, where they stumbled over their scripts and Jason questioned whether it was any good.
Overall, the event reinforced several themes we’ve been following: Top podcasts are now essentially TV talk shows; high-profile guests, money and even audiences are consolidating at the top; and it’s harder than it seems to make a podcast!
A Message from Open Influence
Open Influence has spent over a decade defining how the world's biggest brands work with creators. This month they're bringing that expertise to two stages: Cannes Lions and VidCon Anaheim 2026. Catch their team on-stage and on-site at both, shaping the future of the creator economy.
Brand Buzz
Procter & Gamble developed a short-form telenovela series called “Rico’s Tacos” with grocery giant Albertsons’ ad sales and data unit, Albertsons Media Collective.
The show, which features one to two minute episodes, features P&G products and follows a widowed father as he builds a taco business with his family. Albertsons will show teasers of the episodes in its supermarkets.
It’s the latest example of how brands are getting into entertainment—and also shows how in-store advertising is evolving.
Talent Tracker
Brian Flanagan is leaving Rhett & Link’s Mythical Entertainment after nearly a decade. Flanagan, who was president of the company, will launch a new tech and business intelligence company for the creator economy, he wrote on LinkedIn.
Matt Schwimmer joined Amazon’s business development team focused on creator services.
Julia Gosden and Sarah Halper were promoted to vice president roles at Link Management, a talent management company representing creators.
