Inside Disrupt’s Genuine Influence brunch at Cannes Lions 2026

On Wednesday 24th June, during Cannes Lions week, we did something Cannes Lions doesn't see enough of. We sat a room full of brands, creators and the people who work with creators around one table, put coffee and pastries in front of them, handed them a newspaper instead of a pitch, and asked one uncomfortable question.

How much of your influence would still be there if you stopped paying for it?

Nobody could answer it. That was the point.

Why Genuine Influence

The influencer industry is not short of numbers. If anything, we are drowning in them. Reach, impressions, engagement, EMV, ROI. And almost none of them are built to answer the question that actually matters: are you building influence that you own, or influence that you are renting and will lose the moment the invoices are paid.

The data backs the discomfort. The IPA looked at 133 million in creator spend across 144 brands and found no real relationship between what brands spend and what they get back. None. The same body also found that creator marketing is one of the best performing digital channels for long term brand building. Both things are true, and that’s the problem. 

This isn’t an abstract measurement problem - brands are trying to earn trust in the most sceptical consumer environment in a generation. The question on whether influence is real has never cost more to get wrong. 

That paradox is the reason we’re building the Genuine Influence Index, and the reason we brought it to Cannes.

As Jamie Hambleton, our Partnerships Director, put it in the room, the moment this clicked was a client meeting. “I was asked a simple question, “how do we know if it's working”. The honest answer at the time was the lazy one. Millions of views, plenty of fire emojis in the comments, and lots of saves - it’s working. But we both knew that wasn’t the real answer to the question”. 

The Index is our attempt to give a better answer.

What did we debut at Cannes Lion 2026?

The Genuine Influence Index is a framework that shows where a brand actually sits on the Genuine Influence scale, built on proprietary data and pressure tested on real brands before we ever showed it to a room.

Six weighted signals, mapped across three dimensions

• Say: what are people actually saying about you unprompted
• Do: whether that’s converting into real commercial demand 
• Drive: the harder business numbers, connected through our data partners. 

Those feed into six weighted signals, with dozens of data points beneath each, because a conversation about trust and sentiment is worth more than a single reshare.

The headline finding is blunt. When we went looking for the communities that brands claim to have, we mostly found audiences. Twenty five thousand comments, and barely two customers talking to each other rather than broadcasting back at the brand.

So we gave the patterns names. The Renter, whose dashboard glows green until the invoices clear and the room goes silent. The Darling, loved by everyone at conferences, cited in every industry round-up, and bought by almost no one. The Machine, the best programme money can buy on paper. Disclosure rates are perfect, creator mix is textbook, but no signs of life in the comments. Nobody talks about it, nobody defends it, and nobody shares it when they don’t have to. And finally, the Quiet One, modest spend, a follower count that looks like a rounding error, and a cult following defending the brand at midnight when nobody asked them to or paid them to. That last one is the most valuable audience we measured.

The deeper principle underneath all of it is ownership. We are an agency. We believe in paid. Paid is the engine that starts everything. The problem was never renting - the problem is renting and keeping nothing at the end of it. So the model we work to is simple: use the rent to build something you keep. Every paid partnership should be depositing brand equity into the brand, not just borrowing space in a feed. Helping partners go from renting attention to owning it.

Who is behind the Index.

Jamie Hambleton ran the session, and if you've ever heard Jamie talk about influence you'll know a slide deck was never going to survive contact with him. Around the table, the rest of the team on the ground were there not to present, but to to interrogate the idea in the open. Cameron Gunn, our Chief Growth Officer, opened the morning. Jay Richards, our Chief Provocateur, Tom Hemmings, our CMO, and Jake Crabb, our Marketing Lead, worked the room, asking brands and marketers the same awkward questions that sit behind the Index itself. Less a panel, more a conversation with a point to prove.

Behind the thinking are two partners we couldn't have done this without. Braidr, our data partners, have been essential in helping us surface the signals the creator economy has never been able to measure until now. The modelling that turns messy comment sections and search behaviour into something a brand can actually act on is theirs. And Culture3, who we collaborated with on the event itself, helped us build a room that felt like a conversation rather than a sales pitch.

Which brings us to the newspaper. Every guest had a copy of The Genuine Article in their hands, and that was deliberate. The last thing anyone at Cannes needs is another fifty page deck or another lecture. We wanted people to hold the evidence, read it at their own pace, and feel part of genuine influence rather than talked at about it. Print, it turns out, is a very good way to make an idea feel real.

What's next

This was our very first preview of our primary findings presented to a select few, not the finished article. The full Index will rank brands across categories, with baselines we revisit regularly, because influence is a living thing and a one off snapshot proves nothing. We are also applying the same framework to creators, which means a future where there is both a brand genuine influence score and a creator one. That will be worth watching.

For brands, the value is plain. Find out where you really stand against your category and your competitors, on a metric that you haven’t had visibility on, until now. Find out what to fix. See where it's leaking, and move it. The alternative is the nightmare every marketer knows - spending more every year, and having no idea what would happen if and when the budget gets cut, or the prices go up. 

We've spent the best part of a decade getting good at understanding attention. The next decade belongs to the people who know how to turn rented attention into owned.

We're running it again in London, soon. Come and find out your number.

If you want to know where you actually stand, not where your dashboard says you do, we’d love to show you. 

Want early access to the Genuine Influence Index? Get in touch with us today.