Future of Marketing Briefing: Accenture’s Whalar bet: own the room when creator marketing gets complicated

“Marketing, and now social-first creator economy, has come to the forefront of what used to be brand creative in the boardroom,” said Matthew Lacey, managing partner at Waypoint Partners.

When that happened and the dollars around it swelled, Accenture and its peers didn’t compete with agencies for the media billings. They went straight to the CMO and CFO who were already their clients and took the transformation budget. Agencies ran the campaigns, consultants built the stack.

The deal structure makes clear which side of that equation Accenture is playing here. It bought Whalar the agency — the client-facing part that sits in the room when marketing budgets get allocated — not Whalar Group. The rest stayed with the founders. It’s the same approach it took with programmatic. Accenture never acquired a media agency or a DSP. It positioned itself as the party that could tell clients which platform to use, how to integrate it and what to do when it broke. 

The value was never in the pipes. It was in being indispensable to the person holding the budget. At Whalar, those people include marketers at Amazon, Estée Lauder, Google, PetSmart, the NFL and Spotify. At Accenture, the conversation moves up a floor, where the stakes are different. A creator campaign gone wrong isn’t just a bad week on social anymore. It shapes how a brand surfaces in AI-generated search results, it moves reputations in ways that show up in investor calls – and it can inflict cultural damage that no PR budget easily repairs. 

Getting ahead of that means owning more than a creator roster. It means having answers across CRM, commerce, paid media, content management and data infrastructure — the full architecture of a channel that has quietly expanded to touch every part of the marketing stack. 

Andy Cloyd, CEO of creator commerce platform Superfiliate, got a reminder of how fast that’s changing. A large agency recently came to him after losing a Fortune 50 account it had held for 40 years. The client’s RFP hadn’t just asked for a creator strategy , it had demanded proprietary ownership of the technology behind it. The agency couldn’t facilitate that. The account walked.

The problem is few agencies (or marketers for that matter) could say what owning that technology would even mean. Ask either about their creator tech stack and they’ll name CreatorIQ or Traackr — activation and measurement tools, not an end-to-end stack. And yet the components exist — companies spanning discovery, audience intelligence, publishing, measurement, commerce and paid media — but nobody has assembled them into anything coherent, or even mapped them in a way that makes sense to the people writing the briefs. 

That’s what Jamie Gutfreund has spent the last 18 months trying to do.

The veteran marketer has built Apples to Apples, a free industry resource that maps the creator tech landscape across more than 70 companies and 100 criteria, from discovery, audience intelligence, targeting, to publishing, content performance, business outcomes, commerce and data ownership. Each company is evaluated against those criteria, compared side by side, and explained in plain language so it’s easy for marketers to tell one platform from another and form their own opinion. 

Gutfreund is explicit about that. The goal of Apples to Apples isn’t to recommend but to give marketers a common reference point. It’s a Lumascape of sorts — an attempt to make sense of a landscape that has grown faster than anyone’s ability to navigate it. Gutfreund updates it quarterly, manually verifying capabilities with company founders where the data isn’t publicly available. It won’t be finished — the space is moving too fast for that — but it’s the closest thing the industry currently has to a map.

“I had a conversation with a CMO four years ago and I said, ‘how is your CTO keeping up with all the new technology?’ She said ‘I don’t think anybody is because this is not a priority’. It’s just ad hoc, based on relationships and assumptions,” said Gutfreund. 

Clearly advertisers have moved on from that, but only to a point. Yes, Unilever is shifting half its digital budget to creators, and sure, L’Oreal is trying to build a data layer beneath its creator efforts. But for every CMO doing those things, there are countless others still treating it as a line item, a test, something to revisit next quarter.

For a sense of where it goes from here, look at what smaller brands are already doing. 

Maeve, a pet food brand, is one example of what that more rigorous approach looks like in practice. A year ago it had no YouTube presence. Now it’s the platform where it spends most, after using Agentio — a creator marketplace with AI-driven discovery and persona matching — to scale from around 50 Instagram creators to more than 200 on YouTube at a similar spend level.

The shift was driven by category logic as much as platform strategy. Pet food is a high-consideration purchase that typically requires multiple touchpoints before someone converts. Instagram is good for discovery; YouTube is where education happens, and Maeve’s senior director of brand Maddy Tank said the difference shows up in the numbers: around an 80% view-through rate on YouTube integrations vs. drop-off within seconds on Meta.

Beyond those immediate gains was something more enduring. YouTube content keeps delivering impressions months after posting — spend from 2025 is still generating returns in 2026. That predictability has changed how Tank approaches budget allocation internally, and crucially, how she talks about it. Agentio gives her the kind of attribution and measurement data that performance teams take for granted — a toolbox, she says, she’s never had on the brand side before.

“I can continue to prove that it’s driving value, month in and month out,” said Tank. “And the numbers speak for themselves.”

The tech stack, in other words, is starting to matter to the people who write the briefs. As platforms build access commerce layers, measurement tools, direct brand partnership APIs, the channel looks more like a media buy than a sponsorship. That’s pulled in the money: US creator ad spend hits $43.9 billion this year, per the Interactive Bureau of Advertising. The more that grows, the closer creator content gets to becoming the primary creative pipeline for paid media, which means the more the infrastructure has to grow with it.

Matt Barash,  chief commercial officer at creative ad tech platform Nova, put it well in his LinkedIn post on the deal. Creators aren’t simply media inventory anymore, he wrote. They’re the engine for media consumption and a production model that generates culturally relevant creative, audience insights and authentic communities, Barash added. The Whalar deal makes a lot more sense, he explained, when viewed through that lens rather than the agency one.

— Seb Joseph

OpenX CMO: The SSP won’t exist in a few years

The SSP label has a shelf life. That’s the view of Amanda Forrester, CMO of OpenX, one of the largest supply-side platforms in programmatic advertising — and it’s a more structural argument than it might first appear.

“I don’t think that the term SSP will exist in the way that it exists today in a few years,” Forrester told Digiday. 

It’s a comment that speaks to the identity crisis gripping the industry as AI reshapes the stack. The companies that come out the other side, Forrester argued, won’t be defined by where they sit in the chain. They’ll be defined by whether they have direct relationships with publishers or not.

In fact, that shift is already underway. Marketers have spent years anchored to their DSPs. Now they’re moving into the supply side. “Marketers have been deep in with their demand side platforms for years, and now they’re starting to step into the supply side space,” Forrester said.

AI is the forcing function. Companies with proprietary identity graphs, quality data infrastructure and direct publisher connections are building something buyers can plug directly into. “We can give access to our graph to partners to model off of so they can actually plug into us and use the different pieces of our infrastructure to create their own AI solutions,” Forrester said.

Driving most of this is the pressure to avoid redundancy. The bottom 90% of SSPs remain interchangeable — same supply, same services, same margins. What’s happening at the top is different. Strategies are genuinely divergent for the first time in a decade, which makes a single label increasingly inadequate.

Nobody has landed on what replaces it yet. But the pressure is coming from both ends of the stack.

— Krystal Scanlon

What we’ve heard

“We’re now able to see in near real time how the key opinion leader [influencer] performance is. And we’re looking for a few things. First, are they on message? So we’re using generative AI to tag and understand if they’re on message or not. Second, are they getting a level of followership that’s giving us a signal that this thing could become a viral communication vehicle? And so we can then boost that ad or boost that content so that more and more people can ultimately see it. So we spend a lot of time — and this is not just the KOL space, we’re now focusing this now on the user-generated space as well. And the nice part is it sounds very complicated and tricky, and you mentioned China, we got a lot of — actually, we got a lot of insights from China.” —Seth Cohen, chief innovation officer at Procter & Gamble at the annual Evercore Consumer & Retail conference

Numbers to know

132.8 million: Total U.S. unique visitors on X in March 2026

$8.5 trillion: The global total social commerce is expected to reach by 2030

52.9%: Percentage of brand partnerships on YouTube which are affiliate deals 

35%: Percentage of Spotify’s audience that is Gen Z

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