The Coming Creator Budget Tug of War
“This is an extremely frictional process.”
For much of the media-buying community, there is a clear and urgent need in 2025 to do more with creators.
But what if that’s not their job?
That was an intriguing question that came out of a creator/brand-focused panel held on Tuesday at Advertising Week in New York. As working with creators, and connecting with their audiences, becomes an increasing priority - if not the core strategy for many brands - there have been a slew of initiatives, products and startups aimed at trying to make it easier to spend more media dollars with these new media moguls.
Yet given just how important many of these top creators are in terms of carrying brands’ messages, or in many cases, co-developing them, a legitimate, not-so-easy-to-answer question came up. Maybe these initiatives should be funded and managed by creative departments, or the brands’ internal teams, and not media agencies?
“They need to know your brand and be indoctrinated,” said George Hammer, Global Head of Luxury Marketing at Marriott International, referring to creator ad buying. “I don’t like it being run by media agencies. It feels like a very relationship and creative-driven process.
That kind of thinking - which I’m betting is not yet universal - could lead to a potential turf war in an agency landscape that is already hampered by silos, and is facing an existential threat from AI. If creators may become the last bastion of ‘real relationships’ and strategic work for brands and agencies, it’s a good bet that both departments are going to want to lead the charge, for if no other reason than to stay relevant.
Maximize your YouTube advertising with VuePlanner. As a member of the YouTube Measurement Program for Brand Suitability and Contextual Targeting, VuePlanner enables you to buy with confidence, clarity, and precision. Using advanced technology and AI-powered optimization, VuePlanner offers custom-curated contextual collections, exclusive content strategies, and transparent reporting for measurable, impactful results. Take control of your campaign performance—partner with VuePlanner now.
____
Right now, ‘going big’ with creators is still very convoluted, regardless of who is driving the bus, noted Damon Berger, Head of Consumer Digital Engagement, Gap Inc.
“It’s a very fragmented world we are living in,” Berger said, adding that it’s not uncommon for major creator-centric ad campaigns to involve “three to four different organizations” such as managers, talent agencies, ad agencies and others. “This is an extremely frictional process.”
So you’d think that any intermediary that can roll up groups of creators and execute brand deals would be welcome. But there are challenges inherent to more rote way of buying creator ads.
“When we work with creators,” said Casey McCartney, Chief Brand Communications Officer, Unilever US, “we’re trying to get in culture. That’s really hard to do, and we’re not doing that at scale.”
Instead, Unilever often relies on a tight roster of creators - “a many-to-many” approach, she said.
But as for who brokers such deals, and then manages them day-to-day, Berger theorized that many brands will find ways to push out messages broadly to hundreds, if not thousands of creators through a more streamlined media buy, while working directly with a handful of top creators in a fashion that is more akin to hiring a celebrity endorser for a TV campaign.
Then again, that sort of structure would seem to bump up against the idea that many creators are building studios, or ‘mini media companies’ - which get funded by media dollars, and evaluated against other media vehicles.
Doing things the other way around raises all sorts of issues - can you expect creative agencies or brands to have to take metrics like creator views or completion rates and translate them into reach and frequency numbers, or whatever their brand uses as a media barometer?
And while many marketers have elected to take creator work in-house, Hammer noted how challenging that might be at a big company where “procurement sucks.”
Creators “need to know your brand and be indoctrinated,” Hammer said. But marketers need repeatability and flexibility. “We need templates, and we need to work with an agile innovation team,” he said. “The hardest thing for a brand right now to do is to do things at scale and having time for innovation.”
That makes sense on some level (and it probably very much depends on the product category). However, here’s another new wrinkle. As Berger noted, the big platforms, especially YouTube, aren’t ceding this ground as much, and are reinserting themselves into brokering brand/creator partnerships.
“Platforms starting to own some of those relationships again,” said Berger. “What’s old is new again. The platforms know how valuable the space is and how frictional it is, so it will be interesting to see how it evolves over the years.”
Very interesting, since the YouTubes and Metas of the world are very much used to selling to, and dealing with, the media teams at big agencies. Because that’s where the big money is.