Creator agencies are turning into entertainment studios.<\/p>\n
But unlike traditional studios, marketers are the ones footing the bill. More of them want to back up the \u201cmake content, not ads\u201d mantra with actual budget, and that\u2019s driving demand for specialist talent so high that creator agencies are either rebuilding themselves as entertainment companies or launching as one from day one.<\/p>\n
Get it right and the payoff is real.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Harley Block, CEO of creator-focused media company IF7, points to its work with SharkNinja as proof. A $20 billion company \u201cinvesting an enormous amount of money into the space,\u201d he said, is running creator-first work alongside branded entertainment with production values he compares to a TV show rather than a phone-shot post.<\/p>\n
That branded entertainment side leans on social publishers rather than creators, and the distinction matters to him. With a creator, the deal is straightforward: someone with their own following makes content with the brand and distributes it on their personal channels. A social publisher works differently \u2014 it behaves more like a digital TV network, building and evolving its own IP over time, with an established voice and a format people return to on a regular basis.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He pointed to a recent Mountain Dew project with Retirement House, a social-first publisher IF7 works with, as an example of how the two can work together rather than as alternatives: Chase Stokes, an actor on Netflix\u2019s Outer Banks, was folded into an existing Retirement House format as a guest, then given a second, lighter piece of \u201cshoulder content\u201d built for his own personal channel, extending the same appearance into his feed rather than simply reposting it.<\/p>\n
Five years ago, a business like IF7 would\u2019ve been the last place brands like SharkNinja and Mountain Dew turned to. Now, they\u2019re among the first. As Block put it, agencies like his aren\u2019t traditional marketing shops anymore. They\u2019re part entertainment, part talent management, part marketing business \u2014 \u201ca new entity,\u201d as he agreed when I put it to him, \u201cin and of itself\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Granted, agencies like his aren\u2019t so much new as they are emboldened. A few things explain that. Brands are spending more on creators because feeds themselves have changed. They\u2019re less about socializing now, more about entertainment, which is why shift ads were never built to survive. AI has only compounded that pressure. CMOs have clocked that there\u2019s no shortcut to being cited in a world where a chatbot\u2019s recommendation counts for more than a search engine\u2019s. Relevance, like it always has, has to be earned through the content itself. That puts the emphasis back on whether it\u2019s actually good enough to get recommended at all.<\/p>\n
Together, these forces are pushing creator agencies through their latest reinvention, from talent management to ad agency to this.<\/p>\n
Talent management firm G&B Digital Management made that call earlier this year, officially launching &Beyond Creators\u2019 Studio after soft-launching it at the turn of the year. To run it, the company\u2019s founder Kyle Hjelmeseth turned to television executive producer Cyndi Steele, who left a decade in unscripted TV because she could see where the money, and the audience, was going.<\/p>\n
What they\u2019ve built since then is something deliberately lean. &Beyond Creators\u2019 Studio employs two people full time, scaling that up and down as projects demand. At any given time, they\u2019re working with 10 creators from G&B\u2019s roster of 120 or so mid-market creators. Currently, the studio has 10 to 12 concepts in active development, plus a longer tail of ideas still bubbling up from talent.<\/p>\n
All of them are rooted\u00a0 \u2014 at least initially \u2014 in the creator\u2019s existing audience rather than a brand brief. Steele works with creators to build a format that fits what\u2019s already resonating then brings in a brand partner who understands the value of episodic, repeatable storytelling over one-off posts that get three seconds of scroll.\u00a0<\/p>\n
For now, it\u2019s less about responding to specific RFPs than it is proactively spotting opportunities to make the case for this kind of work. Both projects to air so far have followed that path, including a series for Candid Club NYC that launched on June 6th, releasing three short-form pieces a week ahead of each week\u2019s long-form episode.<\/p>\n
Since then, the series has put out 23 pieces of short-form content, with four finale episodes slated to drop between August 17th and 20th. The long-form finale landed on YouTube that same day, bringing the total to 27 short-form pieces and six long-form episodes, spread across Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. The short-form episodes run three minutes each, the long-form episodes 13 to 17 minutes, and the supporting social clips 30 seconds to a minute.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is something that feels always on and continues to talk to the audience for the year, because I think that when you have that consistency, you see a lot more return,\u201d said Steele.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Best laid plans, though, tend to go awry.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A media buy plans for a spike \u2014 one campaign moment, built through a sequential handoff from brief to creative to producer, each cycle resetting the next. Always-on IP compounds instead. Producers, creatives and strategists build together from inception around a format meant to grow over time, with brands funding an asset \u2014 think a scripted series or unscripted show \u2014 they can own rather than just buying reach for a message. Making that happen takes more than a pitch deck and a mantra, however. It needs structure.<\/p>\n
StudioB, the creator studio founded by creator Brandon Baum, is figuring out what that structure looks like next. The 60-person business is currently at what its commercial lead Olly Lewis called an \u201cexpansion stage\u201d, splitting into a clearer delineation between its brand-facing and film-and-originals sides, unified underneath by a shared production engine. That means bringing in more traditional entertainment experience to sit alongside the digital-native team that built the business without diluting what Lewis called the speed and \u201ccreator instinct\u201d that got it there in the first place.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe built an end-to-end studio in so far as we\u2019re not just about scaling the sales, strategy and the creative,\u201d said Lewis. \u201cWe\u2019re scaling the entire production operation. We call it strategy to screen, but there\u2019s no handoffs, right? We\u2019re a one-stop shop for creating, for ideating, partnering and creating content.\u201d<\/p>\n
Brands are a core part of that, but not the only part. StudioB\u2019s six-part series Spot a Fake Fan, made for Virgin Media\/O2, went from 50,000 organic views to a million per episode, with 43 million views across the wider YouTube ecosystem. Eventually, the studio wants to build content it can sell outright to brands, to studios, or somewhere else entirely.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re a studio that has as much ambition to build IP for brand partners as we do build IP for ourselves,\u201d Lewis said. \u201cThat becomes an economic circle in itself. We\u2019ll make the IP, we\u2019ll make the feature and we\u2019ll then market the feature.\u201d<\/p>\n
Because all the functions that used to define creator agencies \u2014 the talent sourcing, outreach, negotiation and reporting \u2014 have increasingly been automated. What\u2019s left, and what\u2019s now worth paying for, is strategy, creative direction and the ability to actually build something: exactly the ground The Now Agency \u2014 an arm of Rainmaker Group working directly with brands rather than talent \u2014 is planting its flag on.<\/p>\n
\u201cExecution to some degree has become commoditized, and the thinking and the creative behind campaigns has become much more valuable,\u201d said Gabe Feldman, co-founder and managing partner of The Now Agency.\u00a0<\/p>\n
How that\u2019s playing out from his purview is the shift in more marketers moving from paying creators to create content for their brands to doing it themselves, particularly on YouTube.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s also changed the shape of the work itself. Feldman\u2019s team increasingly builds around what breaks through a platform\u2019s discovery engine rather than treating distribution as a separate problem to solve after content is made. A single long-form piece now often comes with a distribution plan baked in from the start: creators lined up to clip it for TikTok and Instagram, others briefed to react to it, others to repost it on their own channels. Underneath all of it sits measurement, which Feldman treats less as reporting and more as a strategic asset \u2014 systematically tracking performance across creators, formats and platforms to inform what gets built next, rather than just what got delivered last time.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not just let\u2019s hire a group of creators to do a selfie and a caption anymore,\u201d said Feldman.<\/p>\n
Why WPP CEO Cindy Rose isn\u2019t buying Publicis\u2019s LiveRamp logic<\/p>\n
When Publicis said it would acquire LiveRamp by year end, the peanut gallery believed its rivals would be left on the back foot. WPP CEO Cindy Rose, unsurprisingly, isn\u2019t having it.<\/p>\n
On the company\u2019s earnings call, she framed identity, the premise the LiveRamp business is rooted in, as a starting point but not necessarily the silver bullet to ad effectiveness in the AI era.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor the past 20 years, the marketing industry has built its advantage around identity-based consumer targeting, but marketing in the era of AI has changed, and the industry has been slow to adapt,\u201d Rose told analysts on the call yesterday (August 8). \u201cIdentity remains a useful starting point, but identity alone cannot tell us how someone\u2019s preferences, beliefs, or behavior is changing in real time, or what they might do next.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rose never mentioned LiveRamp by name. She didn\u2019t need to. She\u2019d made her feelings on the vendor weeks ago telling Campaign at Cannes that her agencies had stopped using it. Her holdco was never going to depend on a competitor\u2019s infrastructure. The optics, let alone the fundamentals, make it a non-starter.<\/p>\n
That stance becomes even more acute in light of WPP\u2019s acquisition of InfoSum last spring. It was a bet made on where the future of targeting\u00a0 \u2014 and more broadly data \u2014 was headed.<\/p>\n
For WPP, the thesis is that the direction of travel is to a place where data never has to move at all. InfoSum\u2019s model is federated so data stays inside its owner\u2019s walls. This way nothing gets copied or centralized, and matches happen without any single party, WPP included, ever holding the raw data. Publicis is betting the opposite. It wants to own the identity graph, own the pipes and move data through infrastructure it controls.<\/p>\n
If Rose had stuck with LiveRamp, it would have undercut one of the core pillars of her own plan. It\u2019s the same rationale her counterpart at Omnicom John Wren used when he made the same move shortly after the deal was announced.<\/p>\n
\u201cTraditional identity-based systems require brands to move their data into a centralized third-party system,\u201d said Rose on the call. \u2018\u201cIn doing so, brands risk giving up control of one of their most important and unique competitive advantages: their data and data insights.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her comments get at a deeper point \u2014 the one underneath all the LiveRamp pontificating. Identity was never really LiveRamp\u2019s moat. The marketplace and the breadth of connections built on top of it were. A clean room or identity graph without that surrounding infrastructure is closer to storage than to a solution. That\u2019s why pure identity businesses aren\u2019t in vogue anymore. What works now is identity baked into something bigger \u2014 an ad tech vendor that also buys media, say, so its data marketplace and identity spine can show a CMO exactly what their addressable universe looks like for activation.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur approach at WPP is fundamentally different. Infosum, which we acquired in 2025, is what makes this possible,\u201d she added. \u201cInfosum is now embedded into WPP Open, enabling brands and partners to collaborate, connect real-time signals, and generate marketing intelligence without sharing, moving, or commingling their underlying customer data.\u201d<\/p>\n
What we\u2019ve heard<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve always been quite clear about where we expect this to head, and that\u2019s been consistent from our perspective. What\u2019s still surprising is the length agents can now work without supervision, which lets us do much more real-time work without human oversight, since the concept of hallucinations has pretty much gone away, and agents are very good at long-form work and holding context. So even though you could predict the trend line going up, the current length of unsupervised agentic workflows is still surprising to see.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2014Wesley ter Haar, chief AI and revenue officer at Monks, on S4 Capital\u2019s earnings call earlier this week (August 5)<\/p>\n
Numbers to know<\/p>\n
27.2%: Percentage by which Bluesky\u2019s monthly active usage declined in June 2026<\/p>\n
19%: Percentage by which Snap\u2019s Q2 revenue grew year-over-year, from $1.35 billion in 2025, to $1.56 in 2026<\/p>\n
640 million: Total global monthly active users Pinterest recorded during its Q2 2026 earnings<\/p>\n
20%: Percentage by which AppLovin\u2019s stock declined following the company\u2019s Q2 2026 earnings<\/p>\n
What we\u2019re reading<\/p>\n
Disney agrees deal to let TikTokers use its films and TV shows in videos<\/a><\/p>\n Disney is letting creators use Star Wars, Marvel and Toy Story clips on TikTok without copyright takedowns, with the videos also running on its Verts platform, per the BBC. It follows the collapse of Disney\u2019s $1bn Sora deal with OpenAI in March.<\/p>\n AI Influencers Are Heading Into Uncharted Territory<\/a><\/p>\n AI influencer creators face the EU AI Act\u2019s labelling rules from 2 August plus platform crackdowns from TikTok, Meta and Pinterest demoting synthetic content. The market\u2019s still growing \u2014 $14.5bn to a projected $110.4bn by 2033 \u2014 but Matt Navarra warns detection is a sledgehammer that will catch human creators too, according to Wired.<\/p>\n Amazon Sponsored Products campaigns gain creator placements on August 10<\/a><\/p>\n From 10 August, Amazon will run Sponsored Products ads inside Influencer Program creator content, enrolling existing campaigns by default at current bids, per PPC Land. On placements with no query Amazon infers the search term, putting top-of-funnel traffic in the same budget line as high-intent search.<\/p>\n Meta debuts first AI coding agent to take on Anthropic and OpenAI<\/a><\/p>\n Meta has launched Muse Code in preview, a coding agent running on Muse Spark 1.2 and aimed at Claude and Codex. Alexandr Wang says Meta is competing on price, not capability, with a contributor tier over 10x cheaper for developers who opt into improving the model. It lands a week after Meta\u2019s shares fell on a light forecast and shrinking free cash flow, according to CNBC.<\/p>\n What we\u2019ve covered<\/p>\n OpenAI brings product carousels to ChatGPT ads<\/a><\/p>\n OpenAI is adding a product carousel to ChatGPT ads, letting multiple items from a retailer\u2019s feed run in one slot. It pulls from catalogues like Google Shopping, with OpenAI \u2014 not the advertiser \u2014 deciding when to serve it.<\/p>\n Sony is scaling up its Playstation advertising ambitions<\/a><\/p>\n Open roles across client partnerships, ad ops and Tokyo ad sales suggest Sony is building a global PlayStation ads organisation spanning programmatic, FAST and CTV. It\u2019s the company\u2019s fourth attempt at the ads business, and eMarketer puts gaming at social video\u2019s time spent for a tenth of the ad dollars per minute.<\/p>\n