.png){kind=logo}
Forbes published a piece today by our CEO Arthur Leopold: Why The Head Of Creator Media Is The New Head Of Growth. The argument is simple. Ad dollars have moved to creators. Org charts have not. Most companies still run paid media and creator partnerships as two teams with separate budgets, separate targets and separate reporting lines. The split has become one of the most expensive gaps on the org chart.
The fix is a role. One person who owns every dollar a company spends with creators, whether the content lives on a creator’s channel or runs as an ad from the brand’s own accounts. Arthur calls the role Head of Creator Media. Read the full piece on Forbes. The short version is below.
Two teams chasing the same growth
Most marketing orgs look like two trees with no branch between them. Paid media owns Meta, YouTube, search, CTV and AEO. They are measured on CAC and ROAS and need creative in volume. Creator partnerships owns podcasts, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and Substack. They are measured on reach and sentiment and own the creator relationships.
The split made sense a few years ago. The two jobs needed different skills, different tools and different leaders. Both chased growth. They had little reason to overlap, so they did not.
3 shifts broke the split
1. Paid media became a creator content pipeline. Our analysis of 65,000 Meta partnership ads shows a winning creator ad fatigues after 36 days on average. A paid media manager who wants to hit target needs new creator content every month, in volume. The job stopped being about running a tool and became about sourcing creator-led content.
2. Creator media became programmatic. Until recently every creator deal was handled by hand: outreach, negotiation, contract, brief, review, payment, one creator at a time. Agentio is the first platform to buy creator media. A brand partners with hundreds of creators in a few clicks, the same way they buy media anywhere else. The craft still matters. The operations are automated.
3. The skills converged. Paid media needs what creator partnerships has: relationships and taste. Creator partnerships now gets the technology built for paid media teams. The gap between the two roles is closing fast.
Why technology alone does not fix the split
A company adopting new tools without changing who owns what ends up with the engine and no driver. The paid media team needs creator content, but the relationships sit with another team, on another budget, on another calendar. So paid teams improvise. They buy UGC from long-tail creators through agencies or generate creative with AI. Neither converts like a real partnership. The same creator video converts 10% better when the creator runs the ad as a partnership ad than when the brand runs the same file from its own account.
A CMO with ten other functions asks the two teams to collaborate, and they do, right up until a tradeoff appears. Then each team protects its own number. Only a leader who owns both numbers makes the call that protects the company’s.
What a Head of Creator Media owns
The full creator budget, organic and paid. One person reporting to the CMO or VP of Marketing. One team. One measurement stack for paid and creator. One budget for everything a brand does with creators. The mandate: set the strategy, control the budget, choose the creators, negotiate the rights, and report results in reach, cost per view and incremental revenue.
The two original teams do not disappear. They finally report to the same place.
The growth hacker parallel
In July 2010, Sean Ellis published “Find a Growth Hacker for Your Startup.” Two years later, Andrew Chen wrote “Growth Hacker Is the New VP Marketing” and the title spread through every startup in Silicon Valley. A role nobody had in 2010 became one of the most sought-after in marketing within five years, because the 2010s were the decade of data and the org chart caught up with the technology.
Creators are a $30 billion-plus global market, growing 1.5x faster than overall marketing budgets. The spend has moved. The org chart has not. Head of Creator Media will follow the same path "Growth Hacker" did, and the companies that hire first will have a structural lead over their competitive set.
