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On Tuesday, I hosted the inaugural Next in Media event at the Dead Rabbit in New York City. The theme was Scaling Creator Media - and big thanks to my partners at VuePlanner for sponsoring the event and helping make it a reality.
The big question of the evening - and a big one for the industry at large - was, now that brands are pledging to be all-in on working with creators, can they actually spend the kinds of dollars they are talking about with the kind of speed, efficiency, and accountability they are used to?
Or is the creator world never going to work like that?
The range of opinions - and really, philosophies on creator media - was vast, and seemingly in potential conflict.
On the plus side, the IAB just released a forecast predicting that creator ad spending will reach $37 billion in the US next year, growing four times as fast as other media. So it’s not as if things are off to a bad start.
At the same time, the startup Agentio - which aims to make it much easier to scale creator ad deals - just raised $40 million in new funding.
Any company that can deliver on bringing together the efficiencies of ad tech with creator advertising should help, right? Well, it really depends on your point of view.
“Advertisers are there,” said Zoe Soon, vp of IAB Experiences Center. “The issue is, brands are seeing these creators as Hollywood storytellers but then wanting them to perform like programmatic ad units. There’s a massive disconnect. [Plus, there are a lot of issues to iron out]. We don’t have the infrastructure, the measurement’s not there, it can be in different teams, etc.”
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The Bull Case For Ad Tech
“If you look at where technology can capture margin in an advertising framework,” said Conor McKenna, partner at Luma. “It is always where is there fragmented media. What is more fragmented than the creator ecosystem?”
Arthur Leopold, Founder Agentio, argued that roughly $10 billion in ad budgets are going to creators, versus $800 billion for platforms like Meta, TTD, Amazon, Google, etc., in large part because of “all the complexity around dealmaking, brand safety, etc.”
He said, thanks to ad tech and LLMs, “We could actually automate the friction and eliminate all the challenges marketers have to deal with to build and scale creator programs.” The company has started with a 90-second brand integration unit on YouTube which he calls “and insanely performant ad.” Agentio is able to deploy $500,000 budgets in 24 hours, he said.
Jeremy Stewart, SVP and Co-Founder at VuePlanner, said that his company, which was built to help brands with contextual targeting on YouTube, is getting a lot more requests to help brands target specific creators, and help apply predictive scoring to their videos.
“They’re asking, ‘how do we build a framework that is repeatable and predictable?’ he said, noting the company’s recent work with Conagra. “Yes, there can be some level of standardization.”
The This Ain’t Programmatic, or TV, Argument
Yet at the same time, several other executives at the event talked about the need to ‘let go’ of creative control and to fully trust creators to produce content that will appeal to their audiences.
“We think about entertainment first,” said Sol Betesh, co-founder and CEO, Fallen Media. A lot of brands don’t understand how these platforms work, and they think it’s just a place to push commercials.
“Creators aren’t ad agencies, they are not ad units, they are culture,” added Ian Schafer co-founder and president, Ensemble.
Jesse Spencer, Sr. Director, Head of Global Social Media and Influencer, Coca-Cola, noted that it’s great for the creator industry that far more C-level executives at brands are not paying attention. But, that could come with a downside.
“The bad [part] is, maybe a little bit of…thinking about it less as a human approach and more an an ad unit approach,” he said. “The key of scalability for big companies are well organized, thoughtful systems.”
Indeed, not only is there a broad range of thinking of what role creators should play, and how brand integrations should be executed, but there’s of course, the measurement conversation. While brands certainly care about views and subscribers, they won’t be able to get away with not proving the effectiveness of creator ad programs for too long.
And there’s a risk is reducing creator content to just another place to build reach or rack up impressions.
"When you have teams from PR, creative, media, etc.,” said JiYoung Kim, President, North America, GroupM during an IAB press briefing earlier this week. “They speak a completely different language, with different objectives.” One idea the IAB is exploring is some kind of common creator metric.
“If you have these different groups, you need to give them the tools to understand each other,” said Kim. “If this super power of this space is engagement - is there a metric we can buy against?’”
That doesn’t sound easy, since each creator is so different, and engagement has lots of definitions.
In the meantime, are third party tech companies welcome in a space that is already complicated? “That’s fine, as long as there’s budget,” said Haley Friedman, Talent Manager, Made By All, while noting that the industry has a lot of work to do.
Take it from creator Sydney Jo Robinson, of the TikTok viral show “Group Chat,” who closed out the event.
“One of the things I’ve come to learn is just how many hoops brands have to jump through,” she said. “In the beginning I would get so frustrated, and say ‘why is this so hard?!’ But now I understand, there is so much legal, there are so many higher-ups and departments they have to go through to get things approved.”
That about sums up where brands are at the moment, and the challenges ahead.
An underserved area with low hanging fruit for tech is around creator talent management - the agencies need tools that are more bespoke but enable legacy publisher capabilities to address things like inventory management and yield optimization.
That said, creators recognize they are selling premium inventory and partnership fit matters as well. A pilot with one creator may start standard, but if it’s succesful, negotiations quickly become more bespoke. I think of it more like what buying local radio and TV used to be -but way more fragmented and you are almost always dealing with the equivalent of a single station owner - Instead of ‘If you want access to Denver, you go through me.’ If you want my audience, there’s only one way to get them.
Measurement is definitely immature but platforms seem to encourage opacity… would more granularity on audiences for Meta partnership ads hurts the creator ecosystem system by creating more of a barbell? Meta enabled paid boosting to creator audiences - seems like a good way to get marketers performance metrics by proxy while letting creators thrive.
Price transparency seems to be more procurement driven, but can see that being an area of continued chatter given range of middlemen.
(Do M&A in creator space)