XX Artists made the audience part of the act.

Consider the peculiar assignment: YouTube wanted people on Instagram to spend more time with YouTube creators. The answer could have been another trailer. Instead, YouTube and XX Artists gave viewers a choice. A split-screen Story presented two possibilities; Instagram’s voting tools let people pick. A little decision became a reason to stay.

The series, This or That, ran through 47 Instagram Stories in 2020, featuring creators from eight countries. Themes ranged from gaming to Thanksgiving. Its appeal suggests a useful starting question for anyone running a brand account: what, exactly, is the person holding the phone supposed to do next?

A side project finds its audience

Kyle Kuhns arrived at this problem by an unusual route. In his 2021 account of starting the business, he described abandoning a vocal-performance degree, moving to Los Angeles and struggling to get hired in entertainment. He worked at Starbucks, then became an executive assistant at a custom-costuming company. His boss let him take one day a week to develop his own venture.

That venture began with indie music clients. Artist management gave way to a company concerned with the daily relationship between a public figure and an audience. By the time Kuhns told the story, XX Artists had become a social marketing agency. The rejection letters had blocked his intended entrance to entertainment; managing artists supplied another.

There is a distinction worth keeping. An artist manager must think about the person people choose to follow, the expectations attached to that person and the consequences of getting the voice wrong. Applying that perspective to a brand means asking whose attention it has earned before deciding what to publish.

“Creating community through content.”XX Artists’ company tagline

The work happens between the posts

XX Artists’ services included social strategy, creative production, channel management, audience engagement and influencer campaigns. It also ran a talent social practice. At the July 2022 combination, the agency worked with more than 40 musicians, actors, artists and public figures, alongside its corporate clients. That mix put individual voices and institutional brands inside the same business.

At that point, S4 Capital described a majority-female, majority-diverse team of 125, with more than a third identifying as LGBTQ+. Workplace recognition in 2021 included Fast Company and Ad Age. Those are dated descriptions, but they help explain what the agency chose to emphasize about itself: representation was part of its public identity while it was selling cultural judgment to clients.

A practical example appears in YouTube’s Hispanic Heritage Month programming. XX Artists paired creators across generations and cultural backgrounds, collected separately filmed answers and edited them into conversations. A virtual-dinner format turned responses submitted as video, photographs or text into social posts. The expertise was partly editorial: selecting people, framing questions and assembling contributions without sanding away their differences.

For a marketing team, buying this service means getting help with the sequence from idea to publication: who participates, what they make, how it fits each channel and how audiences respond. The commercial model is professional services. The closest buying alternatives are an internal social team, a specialist social agency or a broader creative agency.

A challenge with something at stake

The YouTube Shorts Pride Challenge made the invitation explicit. People could create a Pride-themed Short using a reimagined version of “I’m Coming Out” by Halsey. YouTube committed a dollar to The Trevor Project for each Short described in the campaign. XX Artists engaged more than 100 global creators and celebrities, supported by social editorial and paid promotion.

The campaign’s award entry reported 17.3 million social engagements and 185,000 social mentions. Those figures describe activity around the campaign; they do not establish incremental sales or prove that every participant became a lasting community member. Their value here is more specific: a recognizable cultural moment had been translated into an action people could take.

The approach also depended on judgment about timing. During the pandemic, YouTube and XX Artists’ #WithMe campaign moved from Stay Home messaging toward At Home programming and prompts such as Take Care and Simplify. As the emergency became everyday life, the editorial emphasis changed. A recurring format could survive because its usefulness could change with its audience.

The price of joining a bigger stage

In July 2022, S4 Capital announced that XX Artists would combine with Media.Monks. Its transaction adviser described the appeal as a perspective informed by artists and influencers. The acquisition placed a specialist social business inside a network with broader content, media and technology capabilities.

The numbers require care. S4 Capital’s 2022 annual report recorded expected purchase consideration of approximately £20.5 million, including £11.8 million in initial cash. Separately, it classified £35.8 million of employment-linked contingent consideration as employee remuneration. Treating the first figure as the complete economic story would miss that distinction. Neither figure tells a brand what a campaign costs.

Later records show the connection continuing: S4 Capital announced deferred consideration shares in June 2024. That year, XX Artists also received community-management credit on Google’s 25 Years in Search, a multi-company campaign awarded a Silver Pencil. The credit is narrow, and useful: community work has a place inside a much larger production.

Copy the invitation

Media.Monks became Monks in 2024, with marketing and technology practices. For understanding XX Artists, though, the most transferable idea remains the small one inside that Instagram poll. Begin with a behavior. Make it easy. Find people whose participation means something. Build a format that can return without asking audiences to learn the rules again.

That approach depends on an audience willing to participate, credible creators and a brand prepared to share some authorship. A tightly controlled announcement may have little room for it. The lesson for marketers is to examine the invitation as carefully as the message. A content calendar tells you when to speak. XX Artists’ work asks what happens when somebody answers.