Happy Monday, Creators 👋

The creator economy just hit $200 billion. The brands spending that money still can't figure out how to measure it. That's not a problem for you. That's your opening.

When Unilever's CEO announced in March 2025 that the company would shift 50% of its media budget to social and work with twenty times more creators, the industry lost its mind. Pitch decks updated overnight. The channel had finally crossed over.

What followed was messier. "One brand came to us asking to activate dozens of creators across multiple markets with near real-time optimization — basically treating creators like a paid media channel," said Jonathan Chanti of Reign Maker Group. The problem: no workflows, no measurement model, no approval process. Big ambition. No plumbing.

A year later, most brands still can't tell you what they paid every creator, how the content performed, or what it actually drove. The organic team pulls one way, the paid team pulls another, the media agency owns the YouTube budget, and the creator agency owns the integrations. Somewhere in the gap between all of them, the data that would tell a CMO whether any of it is working gets lost — Seb Joseph and Krystal Scanlon reported in Digiday.

This is the room you're walking into. Not a locked door. A wide-open space where nobody can find the lights.

Micro creators don't lose brand deals because of follower count. They lose them because they can't explain their value in business terms.

Alyssa Mercante maps at least eleven distinct creator business models — authority creators, utility creators, platform-native entertainers, hybrid journalists, and more. Brands think in these categories now, even if they don't use that language. The question they're asking isn't how big is this person? It's what are they, and does that match what we need?

If you don't have a clear answer, they'll move on.

I spoke with Aneesh Lal, founder of the Wishly Group and manager to over 50 B2B creators, about exactly this. His firm runs roughly 130 brand campaigns a month — and the creators who land deals aren't always the ones with the biggest audiences. The entry point, he told me, is emotional resonance. "If you can make someone feel something, I like to think: okay, this person has the potential to humanize a B2B brand." But feeling alone isn't enough. Lal filters every creator through what he calls the 3 C's: charisma, credibility, and character. Charisma is the storytelling. Credibility is whether there's original thought behind the content — not curation, not AI filler, but genuine point of view. Character, the hardest to assess, is reputation. "I can make four phone calls," he said, "and learn everything I need to know about you behind the scenes." [Full conversation here.]

The credibility piece is where most micro creators stall. Agentio CEO Arthur Leopold makes the point clearly: brands need to evaluate retention rates, view-through rates, and demonstrated audience trust — not just follower count, per Mercante's reporting. A focused creator with 30,000 engaged followers and a clear content thesis will beat a 300,000-follower generalist pointing at likes every time.

Ashley Wilson, a casting director who sources talent for television, YouTube series, and brand campaigns, makes the same case from the other side of the table. When I talked to her, she was direct: she's looking for a body of work that already proves the point. "They've done exactly what we're trying to do for the past two years — so we know they can do this." If your content doesn't already live in the space you're pitching, you're asking a brand to take a leap of faith they've been burned on before. She also flagged something almost embarrassingly simple: put your email in your bio. "If I'm reaching out to five people and they all had their emails but you didn't, I'm going to get around to DMing you — but it's going to be after I've already emailed these people." Opportunity doesn't wait for you to be findable. [Full conversation here.]

Know what you are. Name it. Be reachable. Build from there.

Brands are drowning in fragmentation. For a solo creator, that's a solvable problem. You don't have three agencies pulling in different directions. You just have to run your operation like a media business — because that's what you're asking brands to treat you as.

Since you asked…

Know your floor before any conversation starts. Lal shared the benchmarks from his own book of business — creators in the zero-to-30,000 follower range are typically seeing $1,000 to $3,000 per post, climbing from there. But audience size isn't the only lever. "The closer you are to the money, the more money you can earn." A niche B2B creator in sales or marketing commands more than a career advice creator with three times the following, because the brands in that space are chasing higher-value customers with bigger budgets.

Wilson echoes the same instinct from the buying side: always counter the first offer. "At least 70% of the time, the first offer is just where we would like to be — it's not the cap of what we can offer." One respectful ask for more is almost always worth it.

Jason Davis, writing in Forbes, argues the creator economy's defining companies will be those that unify social strategy, brand marketing, and talent management under one roof. Nobody has fully built it yet. For a micro creator, the translation is simple: be that integration yourself.

Your content strategy and your brand strategy aren't separate things. Your audience development is your commercial pitch. Your community is the product. Roc watched this play out on the production side — brands that found the right micro creator with the right demographic fit consistently outperformed those that blew the budget on one big name. On one $40,000 campaign, she split the budget across ten micro creators with five to fifteen thousand highly engaged followers rather than spending it all on a single macro name. The results weren't close. "I have always been an advocate for micro influencers actually having more reach," she told me.

When a brand can see — in one clear look — who you reach, why they trust you, and what a partnership would accomplish, you become the obvious choice in a market full of confusion. That's not a small-creator workaround. That's a structural advantage.

After Unilever's announcement, brands that had never seriously considered creator marketing — FMCG, financial services, automotive — started sending RFPs, according to Joseph and Scanlon. They're not all looking for MrBeast. Many need exactly what a focused micro creator offers: a specific audience, real trust, and a partner who makes the whole thing easy.

Lal puts the stakes plainly: only 6% of creators are currently making six figures. "There's a lot of money here," he said. "Enough to go around — right now, before things get really bloody."

The infrastructure will catch up. Measurement will standardize. The market will get more competitive.

Before that happens, the micro creator who already thinks like a business has an edge that scale alone can't buy.

Use it.

I hope this message finds you well. I’m sharing from my heart in hopes that you will be inspired to unearth and live out your God-given purpose. Hopefully, something I said resonated. I would love to hear from you if so. Please feel free to reach out to me on social media.

FYI: I’m mostly active on LinkedIn these days. If you were forwarded this message, you can subscribe here to receive thoughts like this directly in your inbox. And don’t forget to check out the latest episode of my podcast, ConvoRoom with Mark Allen Patterson.