This article is part of a special section of the DealBook Summit, which brought together business and policy leaders from around the world.
Bernie Banks filmed a cute video of himself changing his son’s diaper. His mother-in-law suggested he post it on TikTok. His partner agreed. So he did.
“I gained 100,000 followers and over 5 million views in 24 hours just by changing one diaper,” said Banks, a former professional dancer and current esports host. Ta. “Why? Certain areas of content creation seem to explode in popularity at different times. We’ve seen an explosion in parenting and content creators.”
More than a year and a half after that post, Banks now has 1.7 million followers on her TikTok handle @iammrbanks, and her posts have racked up 48.6 million likes. He currently has sponsorship deals with Pampers, a baby food company, and a clothing brand, as well as an agent who handles all negotiations on his behalf.
This is the randomness and power of the creator economy. The creator economy is all about posting content and gaining followers and likes. is a loosely defined collection of people who collect and get paid for their reach. What is not random is the economic scale of the creators. By 2027, that valuation is expected to be around $480 billion, according to Goldman Sachs Research.
“We think of the creator economy as people posting about beauty products on Instagram and making money off of it,” said Derek Good, senior vice president of creator marketing at 160over90, a brand agency owned by entertainment company Endeavor. There are many people who do.” “That’s just part of it.”
“The creator economy is people who create content and make money from it,” Good said. “It could be someone taking Spanish lessons at home on a subscription platform. It could be a doctor selling advice. We see a lot of this in the fitness field. It’s much more than an Instagram influencer. It’s big.”
In October 2022, six months after posting that post, Banks said he had 1.2 million followers and received a message from an agent looking to represent him. “When the agency asked me who I wanted to work with, I thought realistically and said who would want to work with me and who would I have a long-term relationship with?”
The process of connecting brands and creators is not gradual or free. “We’re getting a lot smarter about how we vet creators,” said Misha Moore, vice president of influencer marketing at public relations and marketing firm Edelman. “We make sure the person and the brand match.”
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But sometimes brands want a niche rather than a huge number of followers. “What we often see is that the more followers you have, the less connected you are to them,” Good says. “If you don’t have a lot of followers, you’re going to grow them yourself. It’s manageable. Micro-creators with 25,000 to 125,000 followers have more influence for some companies.”
Haley Hunter, a rinkside broadcaster for the NHL’s Pittsburgh Penguins with 66,000 followers on Instagram, fits into this category. She was a golfer at Ohio University and hoped to play professionally. But then she moved on to the world of sports broadcasting.
She has a deal with PGA Tour Superstore to curate her own clothing line. That means it won’t be clothing that she creates on her own, but rather a combination of different brands that she promotes.
“I’ll be sharing all my looks on my Instagram page, talking to the camera and explaining why it’s something you can wear to the course as well as to work,” Hunter said. “My followers know that I am very true to myself and they trust me and what PGA Tour Superstore stands for.”
Meanwhile, the golf retail chain wants to reach people who love golf but don’t tune into network broadcasts to stay informed about the sport.
“We have a huge number of golf fans who are not traditional spectators,” said Jill Thomas, chief marketing officer for PGA Tour Superstore. He said, “We need to approach new golfers and non-traditional golfers in a different way.”
But that doesn’t mean influencers can post whatever they want whenever they want. Content agreements contain terms and requirements similar to other sponsorship agreements.
“There’s nothing we’ve posted on our social channels that hasn’t been what we wanted,” Thomas said. “There’s a lot of stuff on the cutting room floor.”
In most cases, these campaigns are planned months in advance, giving creators time to pivot if they do something that doesn’t align with their brand.
“We’re working with humans,” Moore said. “We’ve had to remove people from the campaign who have been involved in crimes. We always make sure our brand is featured.”
The vetting process is at the core of what any government agency does. And given the digital footprint of almost every creator, it should be easy to dig deep into people’s online pasts. The exception is the new area within college sports, or NIL, where student-athletes receive compensation for the use of their name, image, and likeness.
Contracts like this aren’t just given to the best football or basketball players. One of NIL’s highest earners is Louisiana State University gymnast Olivia Dunn. His annual contract value is approximately $3.5 million. “When you tell companies to work with college athletes, their eyes go crazy,” Moore said. “The examination is very strict.”
All of this raises the question of how the Federal Trade Commission regulates brands’ partnerships with influencers: what influencers can say, and how they can speak for brands. I’m curious. Pretending it’s not a paid post is legally risky.
“The most important thing to me is that the first word in the caption is ‘advertisement,'” Banks said. “You don’t have to make your content look like an ad. You want it to look like an organic video, but you need to tell people it’s an ad. That’s why diapers [diaper] The video was so spot on that I realized as I went along that this was a great product. ”
The future of influencer marketing is likely to be highly specialized, with a clear division between influencers who brand themselves and lead the conversation, and creators with a more mom-and-pop vibe. You can see differentiation.
“We’re going to start seeing divisions,” Moore said. “Creators who really want to stay in games will learn how to use AI and take their creativity to new levels. I’ll take a look.” People who have fun and earn a little passive income are going to have a hard time generating it. ”
It will also become something that is seen as a profession like any other profession. “A new generation is moving away from alternative routes to mainstream careers,” said Mark Zabro, CEO of influencer marketing firm Cogent World. “It is built on the key pillars of community, authenticity, and digital craftsmanship, which is the ability to create digitally.”
But none of this will work if viewers don’t believe what’s being said is genuine by creators who built bonds with their followers before ad dollars existed.
“The only real limit is when you don’t find an authentic relationship between the brand and the creator,” Good says. “If a beauty creator is trying to sell beer to an audience and they’ve never done it before, it’s not going to work.”