Stop briefing creators like freelancers. Start building with them.

Start with a distinction the report leans on. An influencer rents attention. A creator owns a body of work, and the audience shows up for the craft. Treat the second like the first and you waste the exact thing that made them worth hiring.

The transaction trap

Here’s how procurement thinking quietly ruins good creator work. Brands get nervous about a creator having an opinion, so they optimise every partnership toward safe. The report is blunt that the industry is brilliant at spotting talent but far less good at briefing it, supporting it, and setting it up to succeed. The result is the safest, most forgettable version of what could have been made.

Finding your nerve means accepting that creator marketing cannot just be a cheaper, faster content supply chain. It has to add something the brand could not have made on its own: a sharper opinion, a more interesting format, a better read of culture, a creator's lived credibility.

The co-founding model

At the far end of the spectrum sits genuine ownership. The report’s rallying cry is that the creator economy is an asset class now, and brands still buying reach by the post are leaving the upside on the table.

The proof points are the ones you’ve probably heard. Alix Earle took equity in Poppi (the soda) rather than a fee, and rode it to a slice of a reported $1.95bn exit. Anna Archer did the same with Runna before Strava bought in. The pattern, in the report’s words: find your key characters, back them properly, and let them build alongside you, with their distribution, attention, and trust already in place.

You don’t have to hand out equity to think this way

Co-founding is a mindset before it’s a cap table. Most of its value shows up long before anyone signs a shareholder agreement.

Play the long game over the one-off. Influence compounds through consistency, not single moments, as Gymshark’s brand marketing director puts it in the report. A creator you work with ten times understands your brand in a way a first-timer never will.

Brief for a point of view, not a script. Give the creative freedom, and balance brand safety with room to be distinctive. If you’ve hired someone for their read on culture, don’t hand them a storyboard.

Bring them in earlier. Co-create the idea instead of just handing over distribution at the end. The best creator campaigns in the report started with a creator’s world, not a media plan.

Give the campaign range. The report’s itsu example used different creators for different jobs: a celebrity chef to carry the premium story, entertainment-led creators to make the product feel native to the feed. Different people, different signals, one consistent campaign.

And recognise what’s at stake with trust. In the report’s Flo Health work, the brand deliberately became a side character in creators’ real, lived stories about pregnancy and trying to conceive, rather than interrupting them with brand messaging. Credibility travelled because the brand didn’t try to own the moment.

What letting go actually looks like

The instinct that kills this is the urge to keep everything on-brand and on-message. The report’s Ritz-Carlton Yacht Collection work is a neat counter-example. Instead of the usual “yacht shot” perfection you’d expect from luxury travel, they let creators document the messy, real moments that actually made the experience memorable. Premium felt personal without losing the aspiration, and the report credits the approach with a 29% uplift in bookings. Control would have produced a prettier campaign and a worse result.

The through-line across their strongest work is the same: the brand steps back far enough for a real human signal to lead, then makes sure it’s still unmistakably theirs. That’s the balance co-founding asks for. Not no brand, but brand in the passenger seat when the creator’s credibility is what’s driving.

How to pick who to back

Since this only works when the fit is real, the casting decision matters more than the follower count. Back people who already use or clearly want what you make, whose point of view sits naturally next to your brand, and who you’d be comfortable giving room to disagree with you in public. If you’d only work with someone on the condition they never say anything surprising, they’re a media buy, not a partner. Price and brief them accordingly, and save the deeper relationships for the ones who genuinely fit.

The business case underneath it

This only pays off if you measure the relationship, not the last click, and if you give it time to compound. Co-founding a creator relationship and then grading it on a two-week ROAS window is a contradiction. Pick one.