Creator Con returns to Detroit, bringing together entrepreneurs, influencers and business leaders

happening this weekend called CreatorCon, certainly one I've been to and certainly one I'd love to be back at because it brings in a lot of creators, not just here from Metro Detroit, but nationwide, globally. It's such a big event, and it's happening starting tomorrow. I want to bring in Robert Courtney, who is in charge of putting this all together. Robert, good to have you back on the show. Always so good to hear you and see you. So big event, CreatorCon. I mean, last year, I know we had MD Motivator there speaking and a few other big influencers. Talk to me about what we can expect this weekend. Yeah. So this year we have some really cool people flying in. We have LaRussell flying in from California. We have David Shands coming from Atlanta. We have Jason Wilson, who is a Detroiter that a lot of people know and love. So we've stepped our game up quite a bit and we're excited for people to come and experience CreatorCon this year. Yeah. And talk to me more about This year in comparison to last year, last year's event, certainly a big one as well. But what can we expect for those who are like, should I come back? Should I attend this again? Am I going to get a different experience? Yeah, so we've added several things. You can still expect your core things like our workshops, our speaker programming, our vendor marketplace. Those things are going to be active. But this year, last year, we had 30 vendors. This year, we have 75 vendors all from around Detroit and Grand Rapids. And someone came in from Illinois today that's actually setting up right now. And then we have our Atrium activations, which I'm actually in the atrium right now, and you can see the cool activations behind me, and we're still building on those. So that'll be a new experience. We're doing a CreatorCon kids showcase, as well as the podcast playground. So there's a lot that people can expect that they've seen, but then there's a lot more that we're gonna introduce this year for the first time. Now talk to me about the days, the times. Do people need to register? How do they get tickets? Yeah, so creatorconnexperience.com is our new website. There's a button for you to plan your show. You can go in, ask a couple questions. It will give you the speakers and the sessions you definitely don't want to miss. But on that same site, you can get a full lineup of everything happening Friday, everything happening Saturday, so you can see exactly what time you want to be here. Now, for someone who isn't familiar with your background, you've certainly built an incredible landscape of social media, influencers, platforms, a site where people can do a lot of things, the social media store. Briefly talk to us about what all of this is all about and why CreatorCon, why you created this all. Yeah, so for us, given individuals tools and resources is probably at the core of everything that we do. And so from RCA with helping people manage their social platforms and educate them on how to use them to the social media store where you can go in and use our resources to do the things you need yourself to. Creator Con, where we're giving you a platform to be seen from brands and companies and people from around the country. All of them at the end of the day are for the purpose of helping people build their brands. And we just feel brand building is so important now in 2026 with technology and the speed of which things are happening. You need people, companies. platforms to help you navigate those those areas. And so we want to provide that for the people of Metro Detroit, but also for people around the country as well. And CreatorCon obviously happening at Huntington Place this weekend, downtown Detroit. What is the biggest surprise you have for us? You don't have to give the name if you don't want to, but I'm just so curious who may be there and what we can expect. Yeah, I think I kind of ruined the surprise when you first asked, but I think people will come and they're going to be surprised in just the multitude of activities and experiential elements that we've involved this year. We've always tried to be as experiential as possible, but now that we have, this year we'll have over 600 active content creators here and they'll get to. Experience these different activations in a way we've never been able to provide before. And Huntington Place is such a great space because it's so dynamic and it allows you to do so much. So we really had fun and we had a lot of fun in planning this out. And I'm really excited for people to see something like this in Detroit, maybe for the first time. Yeah, and I had a lot of fun out there last year. This year, bigger and better. I love what you're doing. We're on the other side of the building, so just in case you came last year, come to the south side. Oh, that's good to know. And I know you have a lot of setting up to do. We were barely able to get you on this call. I know. I'm so glad you made it happen. Of course. So glad you were able to pop in. We appreciate you so much, and we'll see you this weekend. Sounds good. Thank you. See you soon.