Alicia Richardson ran a pre-Cannes gathering with Spotify — and a dozen people who had no plans to attend the festival ended up booking flights to the south of France afterward.

Building community isn’t just a nice-to-have or add-on to brand strategy. Community is the leverage itself. 

Enough of it, Richardson says, and you can dictate terms to brands instead of chasing them: "This is what you need to do to work with us." 

Meet the Master

Alicia Richardson
Head of community & brand partnerships, FiveTwoNine 

• Claim to fame: Turned a 2020 WhatsApp group into Black Create Connect, a cross-platform community connecting underrepresented creatives and tech professionals to jobs, brand deals, and each other.
  
  She now runs that alongside her role at FiveTwoNine, a global platform and community that helps creator-entrepreneurs grow their careers. 

Budget isn't the barrier you think it is. 

Richardson acknowledges that attending big events like the Cannes Festival of Creativity, for both creators and brand reps, isn’t always feasible. 

But being physically present isn’t the only way to gain proximity to the conversation. Richardson runs pre-Cannes programming for creators that puts attendees and non-attendees together. The goal is visibility inside the industry's biggest rooms, by any means available. 

The same logic applies to brands without a festival-sized budget. “You can generate a buzz about Cannes without actually going," she says. Pre-event meetups, resourcing from within your own community, and simply showing up consistently in the conversation can do work equivalent to a bigger media spend. 

For those who did plan to be present at the festival, her pre-Cannes event also served as an ice breaker — a place for practicing pitches, hearing directly from people who've navigated the festival successfully, and building a support network in advance so no one is doing Cannes alone. 

Pivoting sometimes looks like stacking. 

After a racist workplace experience in 2019 and watching the industry's reckoning with race in 2020, Richardson started a group chat to help people find jobs. A podcast followed in 2021, now past 100 episodes and recognized annually in Spotify's Black History Month programming. 

When Depop laid her off in 2022, the company turned around and asked her to help them work with creators to promote job openings and career opportunities through their own content. That was her entry point into the creator economy. Each step along the way seamlessly stacked on top of the last. 

By 2024, as she watched corporate DEI budgets slow down, Richardson made the call to go all-in: "I needed to make some money, and I also needed to help my community make money, and stop begging for people to hire us because they're Black. Instead, we need to really create some value and make some noise."

This experience led her to FiveTwoNine and a role that’s proven to be perfectly compatible with what she was already building. 

“My initial thought was, I've got to drop what I'm doing. But then I thought, no, it's a built and nurtured community, it's growing, that's a platform that people trust and know that can be leveraged.” 

It’s a win-win situation: Her network gives FiveTwoNine instant credibility and reach; FiveTwoNine’s infrastructure gives her community access.

After she posted about a Spotify event she hosted, for example, Richardson says her CMO messaged her directly — "share the pictures, we want to support you and put it on our channel and showcase what you're doing.”  

Depth over numbers, every time. 

"I'm all about deep connections versus loads of numbers," says Richardson. "I would prefer to have three in-depth relationships that we can now cultivate into longer-term partnerships... versus 10 brands."

Adobe is an example of a brand that got it right — a Creator Live event in March, SXSW, and Cannes sponsorship — rather than a single one-off check-writing moment. Brands that want "in and out" access, she says, can damage the community relationship long-term. 

One major way she measures success is by whether creators who came through her programs are still landing opportunities a year later, and whether brand relationships are still active on the same timeline. 

"It's about the lifetime value of brand relationships," she says. "If in a year's time we're still working with brands, and we've organically started working with additional brands because of that work — that is value over time."