Four companies spanning creator publishing, audience measurement, talent management, and sponsorship intelligence today launched The Creators List, a publicly accessible directory of more than 200 creators expected to attend the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity later this month, giving brands and agencies a structured starting point for dealmaking on the French Riviera.

The announcement, dated June 8, 2026, came from Tubefilter, Comscore, Whalar Group, and Gospel Stats. Together they describe the resource as independent and curated rather than affiliated with the festival itself - a distinction the project website, thecreatorslist.com, makes explicit with a footer note stating it is "not affiliated with Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity."

What the directory contains and how it works

The Creators List covers creators across entertainment, lifestyle, sports, culture, business, and digital media. Access is gated: brands and agencies must submit a request form with their work email, company name, and role before receiving entry. Creators who wish to appear in the directory submit separately, and according to the project site, an approved creator profile becomes visible to every brand and agency that has been granted access.

The directory is expected to continue growing. According to Comscore, the list will be updated as Cannes approaches and as additional creators are confirmed. No ceiling on the final count has been announced, though the launch figure of more than 200 represents a meaningful slice of the estimated attendance at one of advertising's most densely networked annual gatherings.

The festival itself runs June 22 to 26, 2026, in Cannes, France. That schedule gives brands using the directory roughly two weeks to identify and reach out to creators before the Croisette fills with deal-seekers.

The four organizations behind the list

Each of the four partners brings a distinct operational capability to the project, and understanding their individual functions clarifies why this particular consortium assembled around the creator-at-Cannes problem.

Tubefilter has operated as a trade publication covering the creator economy since 2007 - nearly two decades of tracking YouTube, streaming, and social video from the perspective of creators themselves. Drew Baldwin, who serves as CEO at Tubefilter and Managing Partner at Gospel Stats, described the directory's practical logic directly. "Cannes has become one of the most important opportunities for brands and creators to meet and The Creators List helps complete the connection," Baldwin said. "The Creators List gives brands, agencies and media a curated view of the creators shaping the conversation at Cannes, and a more practical way to turn interest in the creator economy into real connections."

Comscore (NASDAQ: SCOR) brings the measurement layer. Headquartered in Reston, Virginia, it operates cross-platform audience measurement infrastructure that spans digital, linear TV, over-the-top video, and theatrical viewership. Its involvement here positions the directory inside a broader argument Comscore has been building for over a year: that creator content deserves the same rigorous audience quantification that traditional television has enjoyed for decades. Steve Bagdasarian, Chief Commercial Officer at Comscore, framed the directory's purpose in terms of that measurement gap. "Creators are now a core part of how brands reach and engage audiences, but the industry is asking for more clarity, context and measurement around those partnerships," Bagdasarian said. "The Creators List helps fast track those conversations and creates a foundation for smarter, more actionable collaboration."

Whalar Group describes itself as a global creator company with a team of more than 400 people. Its structure is unusually broad for the sector: it operates a full-service creator and social agency, a 360-degree talent management unit, a physical campus for creators and teams, a digital operating system for managing talent, a venture studio, a gaming studio, and an education and consultancy hub. Co-Founder and Co-CEO Neil Waller placed The Creators List within the company's broader view of what attendance at Cannes now means for the industry. "This list celebrates the individuals showing up at Cannes not just as attendees, but as business leaders, storytellers, and cultural architects," Waller said. "At Whalar Group, Creators are at the heart of everything we do, and we're proud to help spotlight the talent driving the future of our industry."

Gospel Stats completes the consortium as a YouTube sponsorship intelligence platform. According to the company, it uses proprietary technology to track tens of millions of creators and billions of videos, surfacing data on brand deals, spend patterns, and performance impact. The platform positions itself as a transparency layer for the opaque sponsorship market - the part of creator commerce that sits outside platform-brokered deals and happens directly between a brand and a creator's team.

Comscore's role: from measurement to matchmaking

The most technically consequential aspect of this launch may be Comscore's involvement. The company has spent the past 18 months methodically extending its measurement infrastructure into creator content, a segment that has historically operated without the third-party verification that television and large digital publishers take for granted.

In January 2026, Comscore and Spotter announced a partnership that brought broadcast-calibre audience measurement to long-form YouTube content. That deal designated Comscore as Spotter's official independent measurement partner, with Spotter's creator portfolio at the time generating more than 88 billion monthly watch-time minutes - 71 percent of which occurs on connected television devices. Comscore had also unveiled daily TV program tracking powered by AWS AI technology on January 6, 2026, establishing program-level reporting for creator content alongside traditional television programming.

Earlier still, Comscore expanded its cross-platform measurement suite in December 2025 to include streaming audio and enhanced Meta social reporting, broadening the channels it can measure in a unified, deduplicated way. In July 2025, it had expanded its Social Incremental Audiences capability to nine additional international markets, covering Chile, Colombia, Peru, Germany, Ireland, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Australia.

The Cannes directory initiative connects that measurement capability to a physical networking context. Comscore will also partner with Tubefilter for a Creator TV Roundtable in Cannes on June 23, 2026, specifically aimed at moving industry discussion beyond the question of whether creator content deserves attention toward the more operational question of how brands can evaluate and allocate budgets against highly engaged creator communities. That framing - attention is a given, measurement is what's missing - reflects a shift that has been underway in the sector for several years.

Why Cannes, and why now

The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity has been the advertising industry's flagship summer gathering for decades. CMOs, agency holding company executives, platform representatives, and media owners converge on the Croisette every June for award ceremonies, beach-side meetings, and deals that take months to close in New York or London but can be agreed in principle over a single afternoon in the south of France.

Creators have been present at Cannes informally for years, attending as brand partners, panelists, and talent representations clients. What has changed recently is the scale of their commercial importance. US creator economy ad spend reached $37 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $43.9 billion in 2026, representing year-on-year growth of roughly 18.6 percent - a rate that outpaces most other digital advertising categories. Those numbers come from the IAB's 2025 Creator Economy Ad Spend and Strategy Report, published December 15, 2025.

At those budget levels, creator partnerships are no longer a supplemental line in a media plan. They are a primary channel, competing directly for the same dollars that television, search, and display have historically captured. That shift is visible in YouTube's own Creator Marketing Playbook for 2026, which cites an 86 percent higher long-term return on ad spend versus paid social, a figure drawn from a Circana meta-analysis commissioned by Google in 2025 spanning 40 marketing mix models across 10 US consumer packaged goods brands.

The challenge the directory addresses is structural rather than aspirational. When more than 200 creators scatter across a coastal town of roughly 75,000 permanent residents that temporarily expands into an industry city of 15,000-plus credentialed attendees, finding the right creator at the right moment without advance information is genuinely difficult. The Creators List is essentially a pre-conference mapping exercise.

The measurement argument at the center of creator investment

The participation of both Comscore and Gospel Stats points to a specific friction point in the creator economy: buyers want quantification before they commit. A brand CMO attending Cannes may already know which creators they follow or admire, but transforming that familiarity into a defensible budget allocation requires data.

Gospel Stats addresses the sponsorship transparency dimension. Its platform claims to track brand deals across tens of millions of creators and billions of videos, providing visibility into which brands are spending on which creator types, at what estimated scale, and with what apparent effect. That kind of intelligence has historically been scattered across agency reports, PR announcements, and industry estimates. Centralizing it, even partially, gives buyers a comparative frame.

Comscore addresses the audience verification dimension. Its cross-platform measurement infrastructure allows advertisers to evaluate creator audiences using the same demographic and behavioral data they apply to television buys. Comscore's Content Measurement system, launched in January 2025, integrates data streams from linear television, streaming services, personal computers, mobile devices, and social media platforms into a unified view.

YouTube restructured its entire creator-brand infrastructure in March 2026, unifying BrandConnect and the Creator Partnerships Hub into a single platform called YouTube Creator Partnerships, available across seven markets with global expansion planned. That consolidation reflects exactly the kind of operational maturation that buyers have been pushing for: a single place to find, vet, negotiate with, and measure creator partners, rather than navigating multiple systems.

IAB UK took a parallel step on May 19, 2026, launching what it describes as the first industry-backed creator qualification in the United Kingdom - a structured training program helping creators understand advertising rules and disclosure obligations. At 50 pounds for 90 minutes across nine modules, it signals that the industry is beginning to treat creator commercial literacy as a baseline requirement rather than a bonus.

The significance for marketing professionals

The Creators List is a relatively simple product - a curated directory with a gated access form - but it lands at a moment when the structural pieces around creator commerce are visibly assembling. Measurement standards are being formalized. Platform infrastructure is consolidating. Compliance frameworks are being codified. What has been missing is a practical, real-time coordination mechanism for the moment when buyers and creators are in the same physical location.

That gap is familiar in traditional media. Television upfront presentations, print advertising showcase events, and radio roadshows all exist partly to solve the same problem: buyers need to know who will be in the room before deciding whether to show up. The Creators List applies that logic to the creator economy's most important annual gathering.

For agencies managing creator programs, the directory may also change the economics of Cannes attendance itself. Sending a team to the festival is expensive - registration fees, travel, accommodation on the Riviera during peak season. The calculus changes if the list allows a media team to identify which specific creators are worth a meeting request before the flight is booked.

The June 23 Creator TV Roundtable that Comscore is co-hosting with Tubefilter will add a structured programming layer to what might otherwise be an ad-hoc networking effort. Moving the conversation toward how brands can make informed decisions - rather than simply which creators are present - suggests the consortium sees the directory as a starting point for a longer engagement with the creator measurement question.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Tubefilter (creator economy publisher, founded 2007), Comscore (NASDAQ: SCOR, global media measurement company headquartered in Reston, Virginia), Whalar Group (global creator company with 400-plus employees), and Gospel Stats (YouTube sponsorship intelligence platform). Named individuals include Drew Baldwin (CEO, Tubefilter and Managing Partner, Gospel Stats), Steve Bagdasarian (Chief Commercial Officer, Comscore), and Neil Waller (Co-Founder and Co-CEO, Whalar Group).

What: The launch of The Creators List, an independent, curated directory of more than 200 creators expected to attend the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. The directory is accessible via thecreatorslist.com, with separate access paths for brands and agencies (who request entry) and creators (who apply to appear). The list will continue to expand before the festival. A companion Creator TV Roundtable is planned for June 23, 2026, co-hosted by Comscore and Tubefilter in Cannes.

When: Announced June 8, 2026. The Cannes Lions festival runs June 22 to 26, 2026. The Creator TV Roundtable is scheduled for June 23, 2026.

Where: The directory is available online at thecreatorslist.com. The festival, and the in-person matchmaking context the directory is designed to support, takes place in Cannes, France, on the Croisette.

Why: Creator economy advertising in the United States reached $37 billion in 2025 and is projected to climb to $43.9 billion in 2026, according to the IAB. At that budget scale, brands need structured mechanisms to identify, evaluate, and connect with creators - particularly during high-density events like Cannes, where more than 200 creators may be present simultaneously but without a centralized way to locate them. The directory addresses a practical coordination gap, while the Comscore partnership situates creator selection within a broader measurement and audience intelligence framework that allows buyers to evaluate creator investments alongside traditional advertising spend.