CANNES, FRANCE — Content creators have descended on Cannes Lions in force, with themed programming occupying a stretch of the festival’s sunny beachside promenade and online talent seeking out brand deals with marketers that are carving out more of their media budgets for the tactic. 

Expedia Group is among the companies ramping up work with creators to better connect with Gen Z and further diversify beyond traditional media. The firm’s namesake travel-booking platform in April partnered with IShowSpeed, a top streamer with over 55 million YouTube subscribers, on a globe-trotting campaign as his first official travel sponsor. The effort taps into IShowSpeed’s penchant for marathon live video sessions — a debut stream for Expedia lasted 12 hours — and includes a microsite where visitors can book experiences highlighted in the content. 

“He has a significant impact on all of the economies that he goes to. It just shows you how creators are a channel in their own right,” said Natalie Wills, senior vice president of integrated marketing and creative at Expedia Group, of IShowSpeed, whose real name is Darren Jason Watkins Jr. “He’s getting views that most of the media companies would be jealous of.”

Expedia Group, which also owns Vrbo and Hotels.com, has tried to orient its brands closer to consumer culture through other types of partnerships, including a year-long deal with toymaker Mattel that factored into Expedia’s Super Bowl advertising. Animated creative shows Ken, of Barbie fame, as he voyages out solo for the first time and takes advantage of Expedia perks like bundling flights, stays and car rentals. The big game work helped debut a larger brand platform, “The One Place You Go to Go Places,” that shores up Expedia’s positioning as a one-stop-shop for travel planning. 

Marketing Dive caught up with Wills, who joined the company from rival Booking.com last year, at Cannes to hear her thoughts on the value creators deliver for Expedia Group’s brands and why Ken was the right face for its Super Bowl push.

The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. 

MARKETING DIVE: How did the IShowSpeed partnership come together? 

NATALIE WILLS: It’s actually crazy that no travel provider had partnered with him before. If you look at his livestreams, it all revolves around travel. He goes and brings his whole audience along with him and he experiences the culture of a country. 

Especially in the AI age, a lot of people are craving realness. He is exactly that. He’s super real. He goes in, it’s all livestreamed, which is obviously a little bit risky for a lot of brands, to have everything livestreamed with no editing. But we just went all in on him and he's done an incredible job. 

In terms of digital content, it doesn’t have to be a 30-second ad. I was amazed that I was so captivated by a 24-hour livestream. It's so captivating because you have no idea what's going to happen next. 

When you talk about your level of surprise that no one had partnered him, and these livestreams where anything can happen, is there just difficulty [for other brands in] relinquishing that level of control?

I think for a lot of brands there probably is, but many brands have partnered with him. I just think it’s crazy that he fits so well into the travel demographic and no one has jumped on him before. It is a big thing because you’re like, “Oh my goodness, is he going to swear?” He knows his audience the best. We know that he does great work and you do have to relinquish control.

That’s, in general, [true] with all the creator work that brands do these days. We want you to be authentic. Otherwise, it just feels like we might as well have got him to do a paid ad. We wanted him to actually show how he’s using the product, how he’s actually experiencing attractions that are available on Expedia. You can book these things. That was the big part about us having the microsite attached to it. 

Expedia is IShowSpeed’s first travel sponsor. Are you looking at that as your creator model or does it depend on the partner?

Obviously we have many different marketing channels that we activate within Expedia Group, depending on the brand, but creators are super important to our strategy, in general. There is no better way to reach a targeted group of consumers than through creators. 

One of the things with the creator economy that people have turned off a bit is a lot of the paid promotion. If you can show someone actually using the product and showing it actually works, that’s 10 times [more effective] than somebody saying, "You should use this app." Creators are a huge part of our strategy and they will continue to be from macro- to microcreators, depending on the country.

You've been busy with marketing on the whole this year, starting with Expedia's Super Bowl work. 

We are super excited about [Expedia Group's] three brands. All of them are so unique. They have such great consumer platforms. We've been spending the last year basically developing those out and telling consumers why they should use us.

Super Bowl is one thing, but there’s a plethora of channels in which we activate. Linear TV, connected TV, big partnerships are still very important in our media strategy, because the only thing people are watching on linear TV is pretty much live sport. But then, where is everybody else? On social, on digital. Who runs things on social and digital? Creators. You have to be very non-traditional in the way that you think of your media approach going forward. 

For the Ken work, how do you think about embedding Expedia in culture more broadly and leaning into partnership to do it?

Similar to creators, partnerships are extremely important to us. We like to say we're like a cultural chameleon. You'll see a lot more from Expedia in not just having one creative that’s sent out to everybody, but a lot of variety, a lot of different channels, a very diverse media strategy in different countries. 

For the Super Bowl, you have to do something that is off the wall. The ads that perform well are things that stop people in their tracks. With Ken, he had never left Malibu. And Ken leaving Malibu, we thought would be a wonderful opportunity for us to tell the story of how easy to use the app is because — even if you’re Ken and you've never left Malibu — Expedia is so easy. Now look at him, he's in Tuscany. 

We have a great brand partnership with Mattel. We also did a partnership with Uno from Mattel and Vrbo. Where things are going, you need to tell real people stories, even if it’s not through a real person. People can resonate with something within Ken, from their fear of booking travel or going places: “If Ken can do it, I can do it.”

What do you have your ear to the ground for at Cannes Lions?

Everybody obviously is going to say AI, so AI. I absolutely love a lot of the AI tools that we’re working with creatively. There are a lot of incredible platforms. We do a lot of stuff with Google. There’s more of an ethical debate in terms of what people want to see you use AI for. How do people feel about AI creators? Does that have an impact on brand trust or not? 

These are all things that the whole marketing industry is working out as we go. The wonderful thing about being at a place like this is that you hear from people in different industries in terms of what questions they’re getting asked. I think all opinions matter and [help] make you make more informed decisions.