The Creator Economy Is Not a PR Tactic, with Gregory Curtis from Empower Media

Your shoppers are not browsing anymore. They are following one person who eats, breathes and posts a single subject, and they buy what she tells them to buy. Your deck still ranks that person by follower count, because that is the column your agency sends you.

Here is the part that should keep you up. Your creator money is sitting in the wrong line item. It is filed as publicity, as social, as a nice moment, which means when finance pulls the report there is no media plan to point at. You are spending real dollars in a place your CFO has no column for, and that is a budget you cannot defend twice.

Gregory Curtis is Director of Brand Marketing at Empower Media, the agency behind an award winning JD Sports campaign. He pulled a report on a 22,000 follower account with a gorgeous feed and found the audience was 60 percent real. He watched a brand fall in love with a 50,000 follower page whose audience was 70 percent in India. And he has sat in the room where a marketer had to explain the numbers after the fact.

His verdict, said flat: creators are media assets, and most brands are not buying them that way.

If you own a creator budget and you can already hear the question coming from finance, this is the episode that tells you how to walk in with an answer.

Chapters
00:00 Cold open
00:22 The number on your brief stopped meaning anything
05:01 Why the small creator pitch is different this time
08:36 Ten thousand followers beats a hundred thousand, every time
11:20 When the big name is still worth the money
15:33 Filed as publicity: how creator spend loses the room
22:32 The beautiful feed that was 60 percent real
29:32 The bots your agency is not flagging
32:44 Walking into the budget review with proof
37:04 What the best creators are building next

Music licensed through Soundstripe.

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