Influence Weekly

Your agency is sending offers out under your logo right now. Somebody on the other side is reading them and deciding whether your brand gets a reply next quarter.

Gigi Harville manages talent, and she has been doing it since 2009. She sees what hits creator inboxes: three TikToks, a story, six months of exclusivity, ad rights, $250. She says no on the spot. Then she tells the other managers, and they tell theirs. No one sends you an...

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...

Your customers are not asking you how they found the product. They saw a video from someone with 500 followers, trusted her, and bought. Then Google took the credit for the sale, and the number sitting on your brief, the one your agency keeps optimizing against, had nothing to do with it.

Here is the part that should land in your budget review. There is no agreed price for any of this. Kristen Wiley, founder and CEO of Statu...

In this October episode, hosts Ceci Carloni and Nii Ahene break down three stories that together show what brands are actually paying for in creator marketing right now: what a view is worth, what a fee is buying, and who owns the content after the campaign ends.

Your UGC is dead by Thursday. Not underperforming. Dead. Most creator posts stop moving two days after they go up, and the next batch does the same thing, and the l...

Your customers are spending their evenings in small rooms where the host knows their names. Seventy percent of what they watch comes from accounts they never followed. Your media kit still prices a deal off a follower number, because that is the number your CMO recognizes and the number your agency keeps putting on the slide.

Nobody in the room will say the quiet part. The roster that looks strongest upstairs is the roster that conv...

Your creator quotes came back higher again this year, and the number arrives as one line on an invoice. Nobody can tell you what is inside it. Not the creator, not your agency, and not the manager who says the rate is the rate.

So you do what everyone does when the check looks too big. You cut the usage rights, because that is the line that feels optional in the room. It saves you a few hundred dollars in a budget your CFO i...

Four years ago, a brand opened a media kit, looked at the follower count, and priced the deal off it. Shirel Benji, founder and CEO of Creator Origin, says that number hasn't disappeared, but it's stopped being the thing that actually predicts a campaign's results. In this episode, she breaks down what changed in how platforms distribute content, why relevance now matters more than reach, and why the industry still can't agree on w...

Your customers are starting to ask ChatGPT which brand to buy. The answer it gives them comes partly from creators. And nobody can tell you how it decides. Not the platforms, not the agencies, not even the people who built it.

That should worry anyone who has ever had to defend a creator budget. Three years ago finance won the argument: prove the sale or lose the spend. Now the AI rewards the awareness those same creators bu...

In this September episode, hosts Ceci Carloni and Nii Ahene break down three stories that together paint a clear picture of where creator marketing stands heading into Q4—who's winning, who's scaling, and why measurement is still the industry's biggest unsolved problem:

🛒 TikTok Shop Has Arrived—But Most Brands Aren't Ready: American consumers spent $11.8 billion on TikTok Shop in the first half of the year, double ...

Influencer marketing is becoming a math problem, not a creative one.

For years, brands have believed that great creative is what makes a post go viral. James Nord, founder and CEO of Fohr, says that's backwards. In this episode, he breaks down the data behind why distribution has almost nothing to do with the content itself — and everything to do with probability.

James walks through how Fohr uses mathematical models borrowed f...

Follower count isn't dead. Brands are just using their biggest names wrong.

Everyone in the creator economy has decided mega-influencers and celebrities are washed up — that follower count doesn't matter anymore. Tinashe Chaponda, founder of Sosani, says that's exactly backwards. In this episode, he breaks down why big names still move the needle, and why the real problem is brands don't know how to work with them.

Tinashe pull...

In this August episode, hosts Ceci Carloni and Nii Ahene break down three stories that signal how seriously the broader economy—from tech platforms to universities to major retailers—is now taking the creator economy as infrastructure:

🔍 Google Gives Creators Search Data for the First Time: Google launched Platform Properties inside Search Console, letting creators see how their social posts perform in Google Search and...

Kaleigh Moore is an independent B2B content strategist and LinkedIn creator who helps SaaS companies improve their visibility in AI-generated answers. She publishes the newsletter Context Window, tracks the intersection of creator economy and AI search, and coined the Source Signal Stack framework to diagnose why brands rank in traditional search but still get ignored by LLMs.

Ceci chats with Kaleigh Moore, writer and B2B creator st...

In this July episode, hosts Ceci Carloni and Nii Ahene break down three stories that capture the creator economy's maturation—from institutional capital entering the space to brands cracking creator performance marketing to Forbes confirming the industry has officially crossed the billion-dollar threshold:

💰 CAA Bets $250M on Creator-Led Media: Creative Artists Agency and Integrated Media Company launched Compound Creative Ho...

CYLNDR Studios is a Los Angeles-based creative and production studio that operates at the intersection of strategy, design, filmmaking, and influencer marketing. The company serves brands looking to move beyond transactional creator partnerships by embedding creators into the creative process from the brief stage, treating influencer work as a craft discipline rather than a content assembly line.

Ceci chats with Leah Chaney, Directo...

Waypoint Partners is a specialist M&A advisory firm supporting high-growth businesses at the intersection of creativity, technology, and intellectual capital. With over $2 billion in completed deal value across 40 transactions, the firm advises founders, buyers, and investors navigating critical strategic moments across creator economy, marketing, entertainment, and talent businesses—including advising on the Sister Group...

Pop.Store is an agentic AI commerce platform built for creators, combining a social-first storefront where creators can sell digital products, bookings, and affiliate deals with an AI operating system that runs key business tasks autonomously. The platform serves creators of all sizes—from aspiring entrepreneurs to established talent—and is the title sponsor of VidCon Anaheim 2026, where it is launching Echo Me, its mul...

In this June episode, hosts Ceci Carloni and Nii Ahene break down three stories that reveal how brands are thinking about creator investment—and where the line is between genuine cultural impact and expensive noise:

🎨 Lenovo's Creator Odyssey: When a Campaign Becomes IP: Two years, three chapters, fifty million views. Lenovo and agency Portal A built a creator program around a simple but powerful brief—don't make it abo...

CESD Talent Agency is one of the leading talent representation firms operating across both Hollywood and the creator economy, with offices in Los Angeles and New York. The company's digital department represents content creators across YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and podcasts, applying traditional Hollywood representation principles to building sustainable creator careers.

Ceci chats with Eddie Pietzak, SVP of Digital at CESD Talent...