🤝 Who actually owns the creator economy now?

The pundits have been saying the agency model has been broken for years. But as traditional ad revenues undergo fundamental and uncertain shifts, agencies are just changing and responding to the times. The smart money has been on creators for a while and the big agency groups are no slouches. By buying up the plumbing of the creator economy we will likely see a more mature creator economy over time and they may shore up their own business models in the process. Happy Thursday, Simon.

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Accenture has acquired Whalar, the creator and social agency behind more than $600 million in campaigns across 40 countries. Whalar’s co-founder described it as the industry’s largest creator economy transaction ever. It will become part of Accenture Song, which has now spent the past two years quietly assembling a creator infrastructure empire, following acquisitions of Superdigital in 2025 and Unlimited in 2024. Publicis has been doing the same. It bought Influential for $500 million in 2024, then Captiv8, then 160over90. The pattern is hard to miss. The big communications companies have decided creator marketing isn’t a specialist add-on and started treating it as the main event. What’s underway now is a race to own the creator economy’s infrastructure outright.

Social has been the world’s largest ad channel for two years running. Bigger than TV. Bigger than search. Most agencies still haven’t successfully mastered the social space. Agency creatives still think TV is all about premium production while social production needs to look cheap. Feeds today are packed with movie trailers, polished fashion content and music videos. Audiences aren’t fooled by content designed to blend in. Brands that show up looking cheap get treated that way. This is the opening for creators. Agencies are structurally behind and brands are realising this. Creators who understand how social actually works, and can make content that genuinely belongs there, are filling a gap the traditional agency model was never built to fill.

Just in time before the world’s biggest sporting event, here’s something fun. Argentine influencer elscarso decided that New Zealand defender Tim Payne was the least-known player at the World Cup. So he made a video and asked his audience to flood Payne’s account with follows, likes and comments. In two days, Payne went from 4,715 Instagram followers to 660,000, overtaking the New Zealand Prime Minister. There was no brand behind it, no budget and no brief. Basically, a creator deciding someone deserved more attention than they were getting and an audience that agreed. They’ll both probably get a brand deal now.

The most interesting thing LinkedIn has said in a while is that its own platform is being diluted by generic AI posts. The company's line is that AI can help you write, but the thinking and the opinion still have to be yours. That puts a lot of templated thought-leadership content on notice. For anyone building a B2B presence, the takeaway is less about the tools and more about the substance. AI can polish a point. It still can't give you one.

We've mentioned the Osmo Pocket line before as the kind of thing that lands on every creator's wishlist, so now that the Pocket 4 has been out a little while it's worth seeing how it's holding up. The verdict is broadly the same everywhere. DJI focused on fixing the limitations of the Pocket 3 rather than just piling on new features, with much better low-light performance and a real jump in dynamic range. Reviewers are calling it a near-universal recommendation for anyone serious about mobile content creation. Worth a look if you've been holding out.

Anyone who's owned a Sony camera knows the feeling. You get it home, you turn it on, and you're immediately three menus deep wondering where anything is. This video is the fix. It breaks down the top settings worth changing the moment you unbox a new Sony body, so you spend less time fighting the camera and more time using it.

I'm always impressed by how much craft people hide inside something that looks like a silly joke. Food Jutsu is the latest example. People are pulling iced coffees and burgers out of thin air with an anime-style flick of the wrist, set to a track that refuses to leave your head. The editing is the real skill, and the seamless ones are hard to scroll past. It hasn't stayed about food either. Video crews have started making thematic versions with their own gear appearing mid-gesture, which is a smarter use of the idea than the original.

Announcing a product to an audience who has no idea who you are is a bit like introducing yourself by shouting your own name in an empty room. Technically a launch and not a good one. Our Content Director Jeko unpacks the better approach in our latest reel, a skit on how to launch when nobody knows your product exists yet. Go give it a look.