Six years in, The WIE Suite's Dinner for Visionary Women has become a fixture at the Cannes Lions Festival for the women shaping media, business and culture at the highest levels. This year's intimate gathering was held in partnership with Statusphere, the AI-powered influencer marketing platform that helps consumer brands scale authentic creator partnerships without the operational burden typically associated with influencer campaigns.
The night opened with our featured speaker, Forbes CEO Sherry Phillips, who offered a clear-eyed read on the trends reshaping media today, from how audiences are consuming information to what trust looks like in a landscape defined by constant change. She emphasized that while last year was all about the dominance of AI, this year's focus was more human-centered and about using technology to fuel our personal creativity.
“We work with creators every day." Phillips said, "So how are we enabling technology to allow us to be more creative, to collaborate with creators and our colleagues in a way that's natural and human and fair and for the common good? That's what I think the narrative will and should be going towards.”
Then dinner kicked off with a welcome toast from Statusphere founder and CEO, Kristen Wiley alongside The WIE Suite founder, Dee Poku. The two spoke to what has made the partnership enduring: a shared belief that women rise fastest when they invest in one another and have a platform and a voice.
Wiley also reflected on the role of women in the creator landscape: "We have hundreds of thousands of creators on our platform, and many of them are women. We actually started out as a women-only platform, because women influence buying decisions more than anyone — around 74% of all purchasing decisions. That's a powerhouse, and the impact speaks for itself."
Now in its sixth year, this year's table included: Julia Boorstin, Senior Media & Tech Correspondent at CNBC; Stephanie Horton, Senior Director, Global Commerce, Retail and US Ads Marketing at Google; Amanda Baldwin, CEO of Olaplex; Elizabeth Preis, Chief Marketing Officer at Victoria's Secret & Co.; Esi Eggleston, Chief Growth and Marketing Officer at Unilever; Elana Drell Szyfer, President of CEW; Debi Chirichella, President of Hearst Magazines
The evening's impact showed up almost immediately in the reflections that followed. Ajaa Long, Managing Director at Meta, described the dinner as a beautiful moment brought together with care, and said the evening left her inspired by the conversations, connections and unguarded laughs.
Alicia Lebeouf, Head of Retail & Ecommerce at Meta, reflected on how far the gathering has come, calling the women she met as interesting as they were accomplished.
Reflecting on the broader moment since, Dee Poku pointed to a shift she believes the industry has yet to fully reckon with. Women are quietly driving the fastest-growing new economy in the world, projected to hit $1.34 trillion by 2033, and the conversation has not caught up to who is actually behind that growth.
"We should be talking about women executives as the new influencers," Poku said in a recent reflection. "We are not choosing between the boardroom and the platform, we're combining them. Social feeds and major stages are becoming the same stage. The content and ideas coming out of that combination are driving trends, sales, and the growth of entire platforms. Not as a side effect of visibility, but as the actual strategy."
