Future of Marketing Briefing: Creators are learning to pitch AEO, not just audiences

With more creators competing for the same brand budgets than brands have room for, some are betting that being able to spell out exactly how they influence those responses is what tips negotiations in their favor. 

“We’re definitely working on how we advise creators to get better,” said Jenny Kelly, head of content, creator and AI at Deloitte Digital. She and her team are advising companies that represent creators, helping them coach their own clients on how to better articulate their ability to influence LLMs to marketers. Kelly added: “My hope is that it stays more on the education side, even as you’re working with them, because if brands are starting to ask, ‘What do you understand about discoverability?’ it’s going to filter creators until they go, ‘I should figure out discoverability’.”

Crystal Duncan, evp of brand engagement at Tinuiti has watched that shift start to shake out in recent months. Creators used to always open with some version of “I had my last pasta video go viral, and it brought this many views” or some derivative when pitching to her team. Now, it might be “my video about PFAS in your water shows up when you search it,” she continued. 

Often, that comes up in response to questions from Duncan and her team. Increasingly, though, it’s unprompted, with some creators bringing their situations up in media kits and outreach. Not all of them track it closely yet, “some savvy folks do and some don’t, Duncan said, but she expects that to change fast just like it did once creators started building affiliate and conversion numbers into their pitches. 

“It’s almost become like this sales thing more than anything with creators saying ‘look how valuable I am’,” said Duncan. “Right now it’s certainly the elevator pitch or the opening thing to get people excited more than creators saying ‘this is why I should get more money’.” 

For now, a creator saying “I got cited” is closer to an anecdote than a stat, a claim about one search rather than a number anyone can act on. But it won’t stay that loose for long. Not when brands are already asking creators how they’re showing up in LLMs, and most of that showing up happens on YouTube – the platform every major LLM leans on hard to some degree. A creator who can turn “I got cited” into a repeated pattern offers the exact proof point marketers have on their wish lists, just packaged before anyone thought to ask for it.  

“I don’t think that they’re at that stage yet but I can actually see that happening based on the journey creators have been on so far,” said Angela Seits, Dept’s vp strategy. “We saw creators start to think about the importance of things like affiliate networks and actually start to include some of those metrics around how they’re influencing sales. I could see a future in which creators start to actually think about how they influence LLM discoverability if this becomes more of a very well known, fundamental approach to creator marketing.”

Until then, this trend will keep building slowly, and in pockets. 

“Yes, we encourage all of our creators to send their metrics to brands,” said  Tristan Rhee, CEO of Launchpoint, a company that builds AI-powered tools for creators. “Many creators will have a portfolio page that they make where it is included.”

If it doesn’t build any faster than that, it won’t be for lack of effort. Parts of the industry are already willing this trickle into a tidal wave. Brands are already asking their agencies if they know which creators are already showing up in LLM results. Tech companies are building the tools to help answer that. And creators themselves are weighing up how much, if at all, it’s something worth prioritizing. 

One creator who is doing that is Lindsey Gamble, also vp of creator strategy and innovation at creator marketing agency IZEA. He’s thinking about it, at least in part because his employer is building it into its creator program proposals and strategies, showing marketers how different types of creators can influence different kinds of requests.

Whether it’s an agency like IZEA doing the showing or a creator doing it themselves, neither gets very far without measuring that influence properly. The old metrics, whether someone watched, clicked or engaged with a post, doesn’t map onto this. None of that indicates whether that same piece of content swayed an AI recommendation, shifted consideration or fed a purchase that happened somewhere else in the system entirely. 

“We’re definitely seeing chatter that creators, like all brands, are becoming more conscious of how LLMs are or are not citing them,” said Natalie Silverstein, the Chief Innovation Officer at the creator marketing agency Collectively. “I think we’ll start to see more specific metrics around creators’ likelihood of citation, maybe at the brand category level, for creators to share with brands.”

Silverstein’s read, like many of her peers, is that the industry is still in the foothills of understanding how content shapes a brand’s presence in LLMs at all, let alone what creators specifically add to that. How creators respond to do this will hinge largely on what the models themselves prefer — the format, the length, the structure they’re built to favor. Adapting to that isn’t a small ask so the payoff needs to be worth making it. 

“Agencies are already being asked to track whether creator content appears in AI results, and some are checking creators’ AI visibility when planning campaigns,”  said James Chandler, chief strategy officer at the Internet Bureau of Advertising U.K. “Measurement needs to be there from the start because showing up in an AI answer isn’t the same as causing a recommendation. Without that distinction, “AI influence” could quickly become another vanity metric.”

What we’ve heard

“The government’s ruling introduces a critical layer of transparency into the programmatic auction ecosystem by requiring AdX to share bid information with outside platforms. Whether an agency leverages The Trade Desk, DV360, or another demand-side platform, this open data flow will grant media buyers far greater control over their campaigns. Consequently, advertisers will be able to optimize their strategies more effectively and stretch their media dollars further.

— Joey Bridges, vp of global search at Mindgruv

Numbers to know

£1.2 billion: The total that advertiser investment into creator partnerships is forecast to achieve this year for the first time.

41.4%: Percentage by which social media apps’ share of time spent on mobile phones fell in July.

90%: Percentage of consumers that want AI recommendations sourced from real reviews

13th: Date in October when Digiday hosts its Media Strategies event in London

What we’re reading

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What we’ve covered

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Judge Brinkema’s remedies give publishers what the industry most wanted, forcing AdX to compete through Prebid and rival ad servers, but skeptics warn they leave DV360 and the buy side untouched, won’t kick in for 12 to 15 months, rely on a slow Google-friendly monitor, and only cover open web display, a shrinking slice of the market.