Sprout Social’s own social team arrived at Cannes Lions with more than 280 creator relationships already in place, a group of powerhouse influencers built over months of webinars and online group chats that allowed Sprout to provide a personalized Cannes plan for every creator who requested one. All 280 were sourced, qualified and managed inside Sprout Social Influencer Marketing—the same product Sprout Social sells to brands to reach creators at scale.

Cannes was the midpoint of those relationships. What the team built there has since outgrown the festival, and it influences how Sprout Social operates its social strategy year-round.

Prequel: Demand with nowhere to land

Creator sourcing at Sprout Social had been patched together from disparate systems and processes. Demand arrived through LinkedIn, Threads, inbound DMs, email and word-of-mouth, and every channel required its own high-touch follow-up. One LinkedIn post asking event-bound creators to reach out produced 50+ individual responses—each one needing a manual, one-to-one series of communications back and forth to collect the same handful of details before campaign planning could begin in earnest.

The team had real demand coming in and no consistent way to intake that interest, prioritize creators or activate them at scale around a shared set of campaign goals.

Step 1: A model that breaks the mold

Any brand chasing creator attention balances two finite resources: time and money. A transaction-driven approach concentrates both on one or two creators and a handful of posts. But Sprout Social needed to activate hundreds of creators around Cannes – a single event with hundreds of activation opportunities. So we sidestepped the transaction-centric model to move to something personalized, scalable and uniquely Sprout.

In a crowded market like Cannes full of amazing branded experiences, we wanted to go from being one of many to one of one.
Curtis Midkiff
Director of Social Media Marketing at Sprout Social

Instead, the team built a model that spread its effort across hundreds of creators in three tiers: a small tier-one group producing authority content that carried Sprout Social’s social intelligence narrative, a mid-tier serving as relatable faces with aligned content deliverables, and 200+ amplifiers given frameworks for involvement but no additional incentive—a deliberate choice that made organic contribution measurable.

Step 2: Recruit, then relationships

The model required scale to succeed. Sprout Social produced our own Influencer Marketing Recruit landing page on May 1. By May 15, a few hundred creators had applied—a 4x overshoot of the original 40-60 target for creator engagement. The page also changed the process of collecting underlying information to qualify interest. Every applicant answered the same questions: who they wanted to meet, when they would be on the ground at Cannes, why they were going. With answers in hand, the team could assess who was coming through, then used Creator Hub to check creators’ self-reported reach and niche against platform data, alongside verifying their Brand Fit.

The team then hosted multiple webinars, opened a WhatsApp group and wrote personalized plans for each creator—more than 280 of them—that laid out who to talk to, how to RSVP, which events to prioritize, where to likely find and engage their target brands, and how to survive attending Cannes for the first time.This personalized plan approach reflected an opportunity identified when reviewing creator applications: many were first-time attendees who said plainly that event guidance and community were what they needed most.

We didn’t start the relationship on the beach — we started it months earlier, solidified it at Cannes, and now have a much stronger continuation point for working with these creators in the future.
Adriana Cicero-Oringi
Creator Partnerships Lead at Sprout Social

Step 3: Move with the momentum

The creator content from Cannes reached a combined potential audience of 23M followers and generated a confirmed $138K in earned media value (EMV). Press coverage of the activation also positioned Sprout Social as a leading voice on the creator economy, one of the major themes at Cannes this year.

Two additional signals came through that the team moved quickly to leverage. The first: when asked which brands they wanted to meet at Cannes, a striking number of creators named Sprout Social unprompted and unaided, and many also named Sprout Social customers. The Social team leaned in, flagging creator engagement opportunities to CSMs and customer accounts directly and making introductions within Sprout where aligned to creator interests.

Then the application link started circulating on its own, with creators posting that they had applied and were hoping to hear back. Sprout again leaned into the momentum, with Social Team members posting to their own networks to share their excitement about meeting the creators and the quality of applicants and doubling down on branded posts promoting the program. Now post-Cannes, interest in the program has kept spreading. The initial 280+ cohort has grown to a pipeline of 600+ creators looking to join Sprout Social’s creator network.

Step 4: Share the social intelligence

The same application information (once verified by Influencer Marketing platform data) became social intelligence the team transferred to relevant programs across the business. For instance, EMEA applicants were handed to field marketing counterparts as a ready-made creator network to support an upcoming major London event. The same insights sourced qualified local creators for campaigns around the Essence Festival, WNBA All-Star Weekend and Dreamforce—cutting travel costs and accelerating campaign planning and activation using pre-qualified cohorts of brand-aligned creators.

What we brought to our colleagues and Sprout leadership was a repeatable playbook built on our own product, that not only activates creators but also surfaces valuable intelligence that informs and accelerates programs across the business.
Curtis Midkiff
Director of Social Media Marketing at Sprout Social

Step 5: Keep iterating & expanding

The creator network has become an ongoing source of product feedback, program input and campaign acceleration that crosses regions and teams. By keeping regular opportunities for creators to engage with the brand in motion, Sprout is ensuring the group remains both active and ready for activation year-round.

Asked what they would tell a brand team still running creator outreach by hand, the advice is clear: Start building for scale well before you need it.

Influencers consistently say they’re looking for more trust and less transaction — an equal mix of relationship and revenue. In order to do that, you need to be able to do all that you’re doing 1:1 to create those relationships today at scale tomorrow. Make Influencer Marketing by Sprout Social the backbone of your program. It’s a far better investment of resources and time than relying solely on an agency, organic LinkedIn, Instagram searches or marketplaces, because it lets you manage every part of the relationship-building process in one place.
Adriana Cicero-Oringi
Creator Partnerships Lead

This process includes identifying creators talking about your brand, gathering baseline data on those creators, handling outreach, executing campaign management and measuring ROI at scale without bridging across multiple tools.

Build your own creator network

Creators are choosing brands that invest in the relationship ahead of the campaign, and earning a place on that list takes longer than a typical marketing calendar allows. Request a demo and we’ll map the sequence to your next activation—where Recruit captures demand, Creator Hub qualifies it and the relationship work begins long before the campaign takes flight.