The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, which officially kicked off June 16, draws tens of thousands of global marketing, advertising and creative professionals to the French Riviera each year.

For platforms like Meta, TikTok and Reddit, it’s an opportunity to showcase new advertising tools and services to brands. And that’s often accomplished through luring attendees to mega experiential builds along the beach.

Chief Marketer checked in with Damien Baines, Head of Experiential + Creative, Global Experiences at Meta, to learn about the creative and business strategy behind Meta Beach at this year’s festival. (Following the conversation is a photo gallery of the experience.)

Chief Marketer: What is Meta’s experiential focus this year?

Damien Baines, Head of Experiential + Creative, Global Experiences at Meta: Similar to last year, and I would say the previous years, we’re more product-focused than specifically platform-focused. We’ve had various activations, everything from the Reels Cinema last year with Es Devlin to the Super Studio that we did in partnership with KidSuper the year prior to that. And then before that we did one with Felipe Pantone. This year we are very much focused on Reels, but we are also focused on our other AI products—we have so much advancement in that area that we want to share with everyone coming into Cannes.

CM: Typically you have an anchor experience. What is it this year?

DB: We’re paying special attention to creators this year. We’ve been championing creators for quite a while now, but the focus on them as a part of the flywheel of both what you see organically on the platform, what you see with brands and what you see with creators, underscores that. We think that they are vital to any brand success on the platform in terms of their marketing and leveraging them. And to that end, we have collaborated with the skateboarding community.

In recent years, there’s been a huge focus on individual artists, who are wonderful … But there is a creative class that is everything from creators to the skateboarding community that we partnered with, and we wanted this to feel more comprehensive and more expressive as a group. So we’ve got some fun things in store as relates to what we’re calling the “Reels Skate Park” this year.

CM: Are attendees riding skateboards? Are they doing videos of other people riding skateboards?

DB: Well, we don’t want people to come in and unduly harm themselves <laughs>, but action movements, all those things. You clearly are already picking up on the kinetic nature, and the real grit—it is a part of the skateboarding community, which is why we were inspired by them and their approach. And also this idea that it is about the energy of what you’re bringing content-wise. It’s not so much about a picture-perfect or polished aesthetic. That was another reason for our selection.

We still believe Reels is the most creative, expressive medium for brands to tell their stories. And we want people to understand the power and the flexibility and the versatility of Reels. Another reason why we have approached things in this way is that it’s more interactive than last year’s experience. Last year was about, what if we brief one of the world’s top creators? And what would she do in creating her first film for the medium? And I think here, we want to put Reels back in the hands of the experiencer. There are a few different journeys that people can have, long and short, which are a series of vignettes that people will walk through for content capture.

CM: Are you trying to attract some creators at Cannes to the platform as well?

DB: We are speaking to creators because we’ve recognized them, particularly here at Cannes in this moment, as an increasing part of the mix in terms of the audience demographic. We’ve recently launched the Edits app and when we are doing our Creator Breakfast we’ll be celebrating that and letting them know how they can further utilize that to make increasingly powerful content.

This traditionally has been a space for brand and for agency, but we have always championed creators to both brand and agency, saying, we think that they are an interesting, vital part of your mix, and you would be remiss not to include them in all of your marketing plans and your strategy. So I think this is just a natural evolution of championing creators.

CM: What do you want attendees to take away from this experience?

DB: What we really want people to understand is that our platforms, particularly for brands in this moment, are the most powerful for the story that you want to tell, and that we are doing everything that we can to empower you to do that, to tell your own story, whether you be a brand or creator. And so all of our products, everything from Reels to what we’re doing with AI—all the AI that we’re featuring in our experiences are positioned as tools. There’s SeamlessExpressive, which not only translates your voice into another language, but it retains the intonation. It feels as though it’s expansive and not reductive or substitutive. In our MelodyFlow experience, you’re able to use AI to create music. So that’s the story that we’re trying to tell here—that we have the most powerful platforms for enabling creativity.