Future of Marketing Briefing: Creator agencies are becoming entertainment studios — brands are footing the bill

Get it right and the payoff is real. 

Harley Block, CEO of creator-focused media company IF7, points to its work with SharkNinja as proof. A $20 billion company “investing an enormous amount of money into the space,” 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.

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 — 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. 

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’s Outer Banks, was folded into an existing Retirement House format as a guest, then given a second, lighter piece of “shoulder content” built for his own personal channel, extending the same appearance into his feed rather than simply reposting it.

Five years ago, a business like IF7 would’ve been the last place brands like SharkNinja and Mountain Dew turned to. Now, they’re among the first. As Block put it, agencies like his aren’t traditional marketing shops anymore. They’re part entertainment, part talent management, part marketing business — “a new entity,” as he agreed when I put it to him, “in and of itself”. 

Granted, agencies like his aren’t so much new as they are emboldened. A few things explain that. Brands are spending more on creators because feeds themselves have changed. They’re 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’s no shortcut to being cited in a world where a chatbot’s recommendation counts for more than a search engine’s. Relevance, like it always has, has to be earned through the content itself. That puts the emphasis back on whether it’s actually good enough to get recommended at all.

Together, these forces are pushing creator agencies through their latest reinvention, from talent management to ad agency to this.

Talent management firm G&B Digital Management made that call earlier this year, officially launching &Beyond Creators’ Studio after soft-launching it at the turn of the year. To run it, the company’s 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.

What they’ve built since then is something deliberately lean. &Beyond Creators’ Studio employs two people full time, scaling that up and down as projects demand. At any given time, they’re working with 10 creators from G&B’s 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.

All of them are rooted  — at least initially — in the creator’s existing audience rather than a brand brief. Steele works with creators to build a format that fits what’s 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. 

For now, it’s 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’s long-form episode.

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.

“It 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,” said Steele. 

Best laid plans, though, tend to go awry. 

A media buy plans for a spike — 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 — think a scripted series or unscripted show — 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.

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 “expansion stage”, 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 “creator instinct” that got it there in the first place.

“We built an end-to-end studio in so far as we’re not just about scaling the sales, strategy and the creative,” said Lewis. “We’re scaling the entire production operation. We call it strategy to screen, but there’s no handoffs, right? We’re a one-stop shop for creating, for ideating, partnering and creating content.”

Brands are a core part of that, but not the only part. StudioB’s 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.

“We’re a studio that has as much ambition to build IP for brand partners as we do build IP for ourselves,” Lewis said. “That becomes an economic circle in itself. We’ll make the IP, we’ll make the feature and we’ll then market the feature.”

Because all the functions that used to define creator agencies — the talent sourcing, outreach, negotiation and reporting — have increasingly been automated. What’s left, and what’s now worth paying for, is strategy, creative direction and the ability to actually build something: exactly the ground The Now Agency — an arm of Rainmaker Group working directly with brands rather than talent — is planting its flag on.

“Execution to some degree has become commoditized, and the thinking and the creative behind campaigns has become much more valuable,” said Gabe Feldman, co-founder and managing partner of The Now Agency. 

How that’s 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.

That’s also changed the shape of the work itself. Feldman’s team increasingly builds around what breaks through a platform’s 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 — systematically tracking performance across creators, formats and platforms to inform what gets built next, rather than just what got delivered last time.

“It’s not just let’s hire a group of creators to do a selfie and a caption anymore,” said Feldman.

Why WPP CEO Cindy Rose isn’t buying Publicis’s LiveRamp logic

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’t having it.

On the company’s 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.

“For 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,” Rose told analysts on the call yesterday (August 8). “Identity remains a useful starting point, but identity alone cannot tell us how someone’s preferences, beliefs, or behavior is changing in real time, or what they might do next.”

Rose never mentioned LiveRamp by name. She didn’t need to. She’d 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’s infrastructure. The optics, let alone the fundamentals, make it a non-starter.

That stance becomes even more acute in light of WPP’s acquisition of InfoSum last spring. It was a bet made on where the future of targeting  — and more broadly data — was headed.

For WPP, the thesis is that the direction of travel is to a place where data never has to move at all. InfoSum’s model is federated so data stays inside its owner’s 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.

If Rose had stuck with LiveRamp, it would have undercut one of the core pillars of her own plan. It’s the same rationale her counterpart at Omnicom John Wren used when he made the same move shortly after the deal was announced.

“Traditional identity-based systems require brands to move their data into a centralized third-party system,” said Rose on the call. ‘“In doing so, brands risk giving up control of one of their most important and unique competitive advantages: their data and data insights.”

Her comments get at a deeper point — the one underneath all the LiveRamp pontificating. Identity was never really LiveRamp’s 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’s why pure identity businesses aren’t in vogue anymore. What works now is identity baked into something bigger — 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.

“Our approach at WPP is fundamentally different. Infosum, which we acquired in 2025, is what makes this possible,” she added. “Infosum 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.”

What we’ve heard

“We’ve always been quite clear about where we expect this to head, and that’s been consistent from our perspective. What’s 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.”

—Wesley ter Haar, chief AI and revenue officer at Monks, on S4 Capital’s earnings call earlier this week (August 5)

Numbers to know

27.2%: Percentage by which Bluesky’s monthly active usage declined in June 2026

19%: Percentage by which Snap’s Q2 revenue grew year-over-year, from $1.35 billion in 2025, to $1.56 in 2026

640 million: Total global monthly active users Pinterest recorded during its Q2 2026 earnings

20%: Percentage by which AppLovin’s stock declined following the company’s Q2 2026 earnings

What we’re reading

Disney agrees deal to let TikTokers use its films and TV shows in videos

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’s $1bn Sora deal with OpenAI in March.

AI Influencers Are Heading Into Uncharted Territory

AI influencer creators face the EU AI Act’s labelling rules from 2 August plus platform crackdowns from TikTok, Meta and Pinterest demoting synthetic content. The market’s still growing — $14.5bn to a projected $110.4bn by 2033 — but Matt Navarra warns detection is a sledgehammer that will catch human creators too, according to Wired.

Amazon Sponsored Products campaigns gain creator placements on August 10

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.

Meta debuts first AI coding agent to take on Anthropic and OpenAI

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’s shares fell on a light forecast and shrinking free cash flow, according to CNBC.

What we’ve covered

OpenAI brings product carousels to ChatGPT ads

OpenAI is adding a product carousel to ChatGPT ads, letting multiple items from a retailer’s feed run in one slot. It pulls from catalogues like Google Shopping, with OpenAI — not the advertiser — deciding when to serve it.

Sony is scaling up its Playstation advertising ambitions

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’s the company’s fourth attempt at the ads business, and eMarketer puts gaming at social video’s time spent for a tenth of the ad dollars per minute.

The case for and against agencies betting on tokens the way they bet on media

Holdcos are buying AI tokens in bulk and reselling them at a margin inside principal media deals. The case for: agencies can’t keep absorbing AI costs. Against: no rate card to benchmark, and fixed multi-year token commitments risk a write-off if orchestration gets leaner.

Why brands like Gap Inc. and Staples are inviting their employees to be creators

Gap Inc. has opened its creator programme to employees on affiliate commission; Starbucks runs a separate Green Apron Creators setup plus a new TikTok network. Sprout Social has 40% of consumers — 61% of Gen Z — discovering products via employee-generated content.