creator-marketing
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Newhouse Knows the Internet Still Wants Something It Can Touch
The New York agency’s best work begins with an object, a room, or a small piece of theater - then gives creators a reason to carry it far beyond the guest list.
The Advertising Agency That Went for a Walk
A 1957 agency changed owners, changed its name, and picked a fight with advertising's oldest false choice: build the brand or make the sale.
The Agency That Learned a Good Idea Can Wear the Wrong Name
Allen & Gerritsen spent four decades building an integrated independent agency. Then one successful acquisition taught it a sharper lesson: the work can be right while the wrapper is wrong.
The Agency That Wants to Be the Whole Funnel
Avenue Z is assembling PR, paid media, AI search and commerce into one operating system. The interesting part is not the menu of services - it is the bet that reputation and revenue have become the same problem.
The Three-Creator Rule: How Dopamine Studios Chose Depth Over Scale
Most talent agencies make money by adding names. Dopamine Studios has made a more awkward bet: give each manager only a few creators, then build careers that can outlast the feed.
The Podcast Was Four Episodes Old. House 17 Found 32 Million Reasons to Keep Watching.
A young Boston agency learned that the useful unit of modern advertising is not the campaign. It is the moment worth clipping, distributing and answering before the audience moves on.
Pitchblend Put the Press Release Inside the Experience
A 20-year-old communications agency has a peculiar answer to the attention problem: make the story, the room and the media plan behave like one object.
The Agency That Wants to Make the Middleman Useful Again
Majors Management Group sells something the creator economy routinely misplaces: the disciplined middle between a good personality and a useful partnership.
The Agency That Put Mashed Potatoes in a Blender
Spool built a people-first PR agency, then proved its taste for odd ideas with Thanksgiving smoothies, pocket-filled jeans and whisper-quiet pickleball paddles. The joke is visible. The operating discipline underneath it is not.
The PR Agency That Outgrew PR
Vicariously began with two game journalists and a suspicion that press releases were not enough. Eight years later, the name had become the least accurate thing about the business.
The Influencer Agency That Put 50,000 Creators Through a Filter
Hello There Collective built an agency around a useful suspicion: a large following is not the same thing as influence. Its answer is part talent network, part content studio and part performance-marketing lab.
CURATIONS sells the campaign. It also owns the audience.
The Los Angeles agency combines human editors, eight named AI assistants and a local publication. Its most interesting offer is a $2,000-a-month restaurant program with somewhere to put the story.
amp&go puts a finish line on influencer marketing
An Apple alumnus built a business around a deceptively simple question: when is an influencer campaign actually finished? At amp&go, the answer starts with the metric you agreed to buy.
EAG Sports Management and the job nobody put in the contract
A playing contract can make an athlete rich. Denise White built EAG around everything that comes next: the interview, the endorsement, the charity event, and the call nobody wants to get.
The Craftsman makes advertising you can play with
Chocolate couture, a museum takeover, and a robot cat built from LEGO. The Craftsman turns brand stories into things people can do, then gives those moments a second life online.
Gaiax wants its employees to outgrow the company
The Tokyo startup studio lets teams turn their departments into independent businesses. Its next experiment asks what happens when those businesses share more of what they know.
Pixability Bet Brands Would Pay to Make YouTube Less Chaotic
YouTube has the audience, Google has the auction, and advertisers still have a thousand ways to waste an impression. Pixability built its business in that gap - selling data, judgment, and control to brands that cannot afford to guess.
Crispin Made a $50,000 Chicken Famous. Now It Has to Make Integration Interesting
The agency that taught the early web to obey a man in a chicken suit is rebuilding for a messier brief: make culture, media and measurement work in the same room.
Bellesa’s First Model Failed in Public - Its Second Built a Pleasure Brand Where Ads Couldn’t Go
A consent crisis forced the Montreal startup to tear out its original engine. What followed was a sharper business built on owned products, creator distribution and the radical idea that the checkout page is part of sexual wellness.
Collectively Built the Influencer Machine Big Brands Actually Trust
The agency turned a messy trade in sponsored posts into an operating system for brand influence. Its real product is not reach - it is repeatability, from the creator brief to the sales report.
Graza Put Olive Oil in a Squeeze Bottle - Then the Grocery Aisle Copied It
A shower-bottle sketch, two verbs and a no-strings gifting list turned an ancient commodity into a modern kitchen system. The useful lesson is not “use plastic” - it is to make a premium product easier to understand, easier to use and hard to miss.
Glossier Built the Comment Section Into a Beauty Counter. Then the Counter Moved.
Born from a beauty blog and built for Instagram, Glossier made customers part of the product team. Its second act is a harder experiment: keeping that intimacy while selling wherever beauty shoppers already are.
Bazaarvoice Built the Plumbing Beneath the Five-Star Economy
Every star rating looks tiny. Bazaarvoice turned billions of them into retail infrastructure - then began teaching that infrastructure to speak to creators, social platforms, and AI shopping agents.
Icon
Icon is a New York startup that launched in 2024 as 'the world's first AI Admaker' - software pitched as ChatGPT plus CapCut for churning out short-form video ads in minutes. Founded by serial entrepreneur Kennan Davison (aka Kennan Frost) and backed by a $9.2M seed round led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Icon paid a reported $12M for the icon.com domain and drew backing from OpenAI, Cognition and Pika executives plus celebrity angels. After users complained the fully-automated product fell short, the company pivoted toward human-filmed UGC ads (six ads for $999) branded 'The Human Admaker,' before reports in early 2026 said it had gone quiet.
Duel Tech
Duel is a London-founded B2B SaaS company that runs a Brand Advocacy Platform, helping consumer retail brands recruit, activate and scale tens of thousands of customers, creators, fans, employees and ambassadors into a measurable word-of-mouth growth channel. Founded in 2017 by adventurer-turned-entrepreneur Paul Archer and games developer Naio Tsarouchis, and certified as a B Corp, Duel powers advocacy programs for brands including Charlotte Tilbury, Lush, ELEMIS, Victoria's Secret, Abercrombie & Fitch and Pandora, and raised a $16M Series A in September 2025.
Upfluence
Upfluence is an all-in-one influencer and creator marketing platform that helps ecommerce and D2C brands find, contact, manage, and pay content creators while tying campaigns directly to sales. Built around a searchable database of millions of creator profiles across seven social networks and deep integrations with platforms like Shopify, Upfluence positions influencer marketing as a measurable revenue channel rather than a branding expense. Its distinctive Live Capture technology surfaces influential creators from a brand's own customer base, and its Jaice AI co-pilot automates campaign briefs, creator matching, and outreach.
Statusphere
Statusphere is an AI-powered influencer marketing platform that helps enterprise retailers and consumer brands turn micro-influencers into a scalable, measurable growth channel. It automates the messy parts of creator programs - matching, product fulfillment, compliance, content rights and reporting - so brands can generate authentic user-generated content at scale and improve product discovery across social and AI-powered search. Founded by Kristen Wiley in 2016, the company has powered tens of thousands of creator collaborations for brands including Fenty Beauty, Express and Kendo Brands.
Reacher
Reacher is an AI-powered platform that automates creator marketing for TikTok Shop, Instagram, and YouTube - turning the chaos of influencer outreach, sample logistics, and affiliate tracking into a single workflow. Founded in 2024 by Jerry Qian and Bora Mutluoglu, the YC S25 startup serves brands like Under Armour, Hanes, and Logitech, claiming 1,000+ brands and 3.4M+ indexed creators.