🤔 Is your audience quietly quitting social media?

I could hardly let this week slip by without mentioning The Odyssey. That BTS reel we shared last week by Reece Feldman has hit 14m views. It was just a small part of the creator promo juggernaut for the year’s biggest movie. The stars hit creator media as hard as traditional media. They were everywhere from foodie reels like Top Jaw to gaming shows like 100 Questions with Tom Simons and Brittany Broski's Royal Court. The one thing director Christopher Nolan and studio Universal held back for the establishment? The first look, reserved for critics. Critics own credibility, creators own distribution. Happy Thursday, Simon.

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The audience that built the creator economy, quietly wants out. New research surveying 1,000 respondents found that more than half feel maintaining an online presence feels like work. Among Gen Z that figure is closer to 60%. 55% are posting less than they were five years ago. 47% have deleted a social media app because of stress or anxiety. Those who have stopped posting reported feeling a zen-like peacefulness. For creators their audience is going quieter, restricting who sees their posts and treating the feed as something to manage rather than enjoy. Creators need to understand this shift and change tack building content that relaxes its audience and is worth their effort to consume. What do you think?

The IAB has launched IAB Global Creator Week, running September 14-18. Its aim is to unite 17 markets across the US, UK, Brazil, Germany, South Africa, UAE, Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia around creator marketing standards, measurement and governance. The US will host IAB CreatorFronts, the first upfront-style marketplace built entirely around the creator economy. The UK is running its biggest ever creator marketing event. Brazil is dedicating two full mornings of its flagship advertising event exclusively to creators. The IAB’s focus is on investing in creators with transparency, consistency and proof of impact. The fact that the world’s largest advertising trade body is now running a global creator week tells you where the industry believes the real marketing influence lies.

Mastercard has launched an episodic social series built around foodie creator Nicolas Nuvan visiting under-the-radar restaurants, handing each a $10,000 grant and letting Nuvan produce the content himself. The goal isn’t just awareness, it’s pulling more small businesses into the Mastercard ecosystem by letting creators find them first. Over at Visa, they’re betting that employee creators can spread their message as well as anyone by launching a Visa Employee Creator Network. Employees are given creator kits and encouraged to share their #lifeatvisa journey. Visa has been leaning into the creator economy and has a dedicated creator resources page to help creators with business fundamentals. Both financial giants clearly agree with the IAB.

It looks like Singapore wants chatbots to show their ingredients. IMDA has introduced voluntary “chatbot info cards”, described as the AI equivalent of a nutrition or medicine label. The cards explain what a chatbot can do, where it is unreliable, how it handles personal data and where users can report problems. Google, Meta, DBS, OCBC and Singapore Airlines are some of the organisations planning to reference the guidelines. Creators building branded bots, virtual personalities or AI-led experiences should pay attention. Trust may soon need to be designed into the interface, rather than buried somewhere inside the terms and conditions.

Television cameras used to set you back six figures and a lot of that was for a really good, versatile lens. I remember wondering what happens to the old lenses? Well it seems a few at least are getting a second life rigged up to new cameras and some of their secrets like the long and fast zoom are being rediscovered.

Provenance and process are becoming more important in creativity. Why? Documenting the human touch helps verify authenticity. This is a great example of taking the process to the next level. An event branding system was designed around the germs of the attendees. Yep, you read that right. Superbly creative and all too human.

Marvel's Comic-Con panel got the comic book crowd going again last week, which has been fun to watch from a distance. We’ve got Ryan Gosling as the new Ghost Rider and David Jonsson as the new Black Panther, but the bit everyone actually cared about was the fresh Avengers: Doomsday footage. It's been dissected frame by frame across every feed since, with people theorising about Doom's backstory and who survives. I couldn't tell you who half these characters are, but the enthusiasm is hard to miss.

Some of the best production advice is the least glamorous, like thinking about how footage gets reused before you've even shot it. Our Head of Video gets into that in our new reel. His point is that if you walk onto a shoot assuming the material will be repurposed, you plan your setups and coverage completely differently. It's the kind of habit that quietly saves you weeks later on.