Latest / Influencer Marketing with Fexingo: Creators, Sponsorships, and Modern Endorsement Deals / How Creators Are Buying Their Own Advertisers
Transcript
- Lucas: So I was digging through some creator-economy numbers this week, and one stat jumped out at me. A single creator with just over three million followers can now command north of sixty dollars per thousand views for a dedicated brand integration. Luna: Sixty dollars CPM? That is way above what a lot of national TV spots pull in these days. Lucas: Right. And the interesting part is who is setting that rate. It is not an agency. It is not the platform. More and more, it is the creator's own in-house media buying team. We have spent the last few months talking about creators buying their own studios, their own ad servers, even their own talent agencies. But the latest move is bigger. Creators are starting to buy their own advertisers. Luna: Wait, buy their own advertisers? You mean like they are hiring people to go out and pitch their own inventory to brands? Lucas: Exactly. Think of it as the influencer equivalent of an in-house agency. Instead of relying on a third-party shop to package their audience and negotiate on their behalf, a creator hires a small team of media buyers and ad sales folks who work directly for them. They build the rate card, they pitch the brand, they handle the insertion order, and they manage the reporting. The creator keeps full control of the relationship and, more importantly, a much bigger cut of the deal. Luna: So it is not just about owning the production or the distribution. It is about owning the sales function itself. Lucas: Right. And this is quietly becoming a serious business. I have seen estimates that a top-tier creator can generate anywhere from two to five million dollars a year in direct brand deals. If a traditional agency is taking fifteen to twenty percent off the top, that is a lot of money walking out the door. Some creators are doing the math and deciding they would rather pay a full-time media buyer a hundred and fifty grand a year to run that entire pipeline in-house. Luna: And a single deal with a big national brand can cover that salary pretty quickly, I imagine. Lucas: It can. One creator I read about closed a single sponsorship with a major consumer packaged goods company for over a million dollars. That is one deal. And they did not have to hand a quarter of it to a talent manager and an agency. They had a two-person in-house team that sourced the deal, negotiated the terms, and managed the execution. The creator took home a much bigger slice, and the brand ended up with a faster, more direct line to the audience. Luna: So, is this a threat to the big holding companies? I mean, WPP and Omnicom have built their whole model on intermediating between brands and audiences. Lucas: I think it is a slow burn. The big networks are not going to disappear overnight, but the creator-led direct deal is becoming a real alternative. And the numbers suggest it is growing. I saw a report from earlier this year that said direct brand deals between creators and advertisers now account for something like forty percent of all influencer marketing spend. That is up from maybe twenty-five percent just two or three years ago. Luna: That is a huge shift. And it makes sense, because when you cut out the middleman, everybody gets a better deal except the middleman. Lucas: Right. And the thing is, this is not just about saving money. It is about control. Creators are tired of being at the mercy of an agency account manager who does not really understand their audience or their content. They want to be the ones telling the brand story, and they want to be the ones measuring the success. So they are building these little internal ad shops that function almost like a boutique agency, but with one client: themselves. Luna: It is like they are becoming their own holding company, in a way. A one-person conglomerate. Lucas: That is exactly the phrase I used when I was reading about this creator who runs a lifestyle channel with about eight million subscribers. He has built a team of twelve people. Four of them work on content, two on community management, and the rest are split between sales and analytics. He told a podcast that he thinks of himself not as a creator but as the CEO of a small media company. And in a way, he is right. He controls the production, the distribution, and now the ad sales. The only thing he does not own is the platform, but even that, he is trying to hedge against. Luna: And that is why we have seen all these creators building their own email lists and their own communities, right? To own the audience relationship directly. Lucas: Exactly. And the media buying piece is the newest frontier. It used to be that a creator would just get a fee for appearing in a video. Now they are being asked to guarantee performance, to hit certain click-through rates or conversion targets. And that requires a much more sophisticated operation. You need someone who understands attribution, who can set up trackable links, who can talk to the brand's analytics team in their own language. That is not something a creator can do on their own while they are also filming and editing. Luna: So they hire for it. And suddenly the creator's business starts to look a lot like a direct-response marketing agency. Lucas: Right. And this is where the conversation gets interesting, because it is not just about hiring a media buyer. Some creators are going further and actually acquiring small ad tech companies or buying their own demand-side platforms. There is a well-known creator in the finance space who recently bought a small ad tech firm that helps brands programmatically buy inventory across social platforms. He did not do it to use it for his own channel. He did it to sell it as a service to other creators. He is literally building an ad network for the creator economy. Luna: That is a big leap from just negotiating your own deals. That is becoming an infrastructure provider. Lucas: It is. And it makes me think about the broader trend we have been tracking all season. Creators are not just buying their own studios and their own agencies anymore. They are buying the entire stack. They want to own the customer relationship, the data, the measurement, and now the ad sales. The endgame is a fully integrated creator-led media company that competes with the traditional networks on their own terms. Luna: And if the creator is the one owning the relationship with the advertiser, does that change the dynamic of the actual content? I mean, when an agency is in the middle, they tend to push for safer, more formulaic content. But when a creator sells directly, do they have more freedom? Lucas: That is a good question. I think the answer is both yes and no. On one hand, the creator has complete control over the creative. They are the one pitching the brand, so they can frame the integration in a way that fits their channel's voice. On the other hand, they are also the one on the hook for performance. So they might be just as conservative as an agency, if not more, because they do not want to risk a bad campaign for their own bottom line. Luna: So it is a different kind of pressure. It is not coming from a middleman, it is coming from the direct relationship with the brand. Lucas: Exactly. And that is actually where the in-house team becomes valuable. A good media buyer is not just writing insertion orders. They are helping the creator think strategically about which brands to partner with, how to position the integration, and what metrics to promise. They are like a strategic partner, not just a salesperson. And that is a role that did not exist for creators a few years ago. Luna: I imagine this is starting to attract talent from the traditional agency world. Are we seeing media buyers leave WPP or Omnicom to go work for a creator? Lucas: Yes, and I have a friend who actually made that jump. He was a digital media buyer at one of the big holding companies for about six years, and last year he left to join a creator who has about five million followers across YouTube and TikTok. He told me the compensation is comparable, but the difference is he actually gets to see the impact of his work. He is not just a tiny cog in a giant machine. He is the entire media department, and his decisions directly affect the creator's revenue. He says it is the most satisfying work he has done in his career. Luna: That is a pretty compelling pitch. And it makes sense that as the creator economy matures, it would start pulling in experienced professionals from the traditional media world. Lucas: And that is exactly what we are seeing. There is a whole new category of job postings for 'creator media buyer' or 'influencer partnerships manager' that are appearing on LinkedIn. And the skills required are the same as for a traditional media buyer: you need to understand audience data, you need to know how to negotiate, you need to be comfortable with analytics dashboards. But the context is completely different. Instead of buying a national TV spot, you are buying a shout-out in a YouTube video. Instead of a thirty-second commercial, it is a two-minute integration. The media is different, but the discipline is the same. Luna: And the stakes are a bit higher, because the creator's whole reputation is on the line with every post. If a brand deal flops, it is not just a bad campaign. It is a hit to their credibility with their audience. Lucas: Right. And that is why some creators are not stopping at hiring a media buyer. They are building out full in-house creative teams that work alongside the media buying side. They want the content and the paid distribution to be coordinated from the same place. And when you have that, you start to look a lot like a modern direct to consumer brand's marketing department. You have the brand team, the content team, and the media team all under one roof. Luna: So at this point, what is the actual difference between a top creator and a traditional media company? It seems like they are converging. Lucas: I think the main difference is the source of the audience. A traditional media company builds a brand and then tries to attract an audience to that brand. A creator builds a personal relationship with an audience first, and the media company grows out of that. The trust is the starting point, not the end goal. And that changes how you can sell ads. When a creator recommends a product, it is like a friend making a recommendation. That is incredibly valuable to advertisers, and it is why they are willing to pay those high CPMs in the first place. Luna: And the creator is now capturing that value directly, instead of giving a cut to an agency. That is a big deal. Lucas: It is. And it is a trend that we are going to see accelerate, because the tools are getting better and cheaper. There are now platforms that let a creator set up their own programmatic ad buying in a matter of hours. They can plug into the same demand-side platforms that big brands use, but they are doing it on their own behalf. The barriers to entry are falling fast. Luna: So what does this mean for the future of the influencer marketing industry? Are we going to see a consolidation where a few mega creators become their own networks, and the long tail gets left behind? Lucas: I think there will be a bifurcation. The top one percent of creators will continue to build out these in-house operations, and they will become increasingly professional and sophisticated. But the long tail, creators with fewer than a hundred thousand followers, will still rely on platforms and affiliate networks to monetize. The middle, though, is where the shift is most interesting. Creators with a few hundred thousand to a million followers are starting to realize they can hire a part-time media buyer or use one of these new software tools to cut out the agency and keep more of the revenue. That is a huge opportunity for them, and it is going to put pressure on traditional agencies to offer more value or lower their rates. Luna: And if you are a brand listening to this, what is the takeaway? Is it better to work directly with a creator or go through an agency? Lucas: It depends on what you are trying to do. If you want to run a large-scale campaign across hundreds of creators, an agency can still help you manage that complexity. But if you are looking to partner with a specific creator who has a really engaged audience, going direct can give you a more authentic partnership and a better price, because you are not paying for the middleman. The key is to do your homework and make sure the creator has the in-house capability to deliver on their promises. And that is where the new breed of creator media buyers comes in. They are making it easier for brands to work with creators directly. Luna: It is a win-win for the creator and the brand, and a threat to the traditional agency model. It is one of those quiet revolutions that is happening right under our noses. Lucas: Yeah, and it is one of those things that seems obvious in hindsight. Of course creators would eventually want to control their own ad sales. They already control everything else. And now they have the data and the tools to do it. The next few years are going to be really interesting to watch, especially as some of these creators start to scale their in-house ad operations beyond their own channel. They could become the next generation of media networks, built on individual talent instead of corporate infrastructure. Luna: And that would be a fundamentally different kind of media company. One that is built on trust and personality rather than on scale and distribution. Lucas: Exactly. And to bring it back to something we have talked about before, this is another step in the creator economy's evolution from a bunch of individuals chasing brand deals to a real, professionalized industry with its own infrastructure. It is exciting to see, and I think we are only at the beginning of it.