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Last week, we made Agentio's biggest event marketing investment of the year. There was no pitch.
We brought together 50 of the most brilliant marketing and Creator minds in the country (plus José Andrés) at the iconic Blackberry Farm in the Smoky Mountains for Inflection/26, Agentio's inaugural CMO Summit. Two days of closed-door conversation, debate, and dinner-table measurement arguments, straight from the budget owners.
The theme that ran through every session? Dollars are finally shifting to where trust and attention already live: Creator content.
Here's what the room agreed on.
The reallocation is already happening
Eurie Kim, Managing Partner at Forerunner, put a number on it: roughly 45% of marketing spend will go to Creators, 45% to AI-related marketing, and the remaining 10% to everything else. Dollars always follow attention, which makes this shift inevitable.
For the marketers in the room, the question was no longer whether to move their budgets to Creators. It was how fast they could do it quickly, without scaling their teams.
The arbitrage window is open — and closing
Eric Decker (Airrack) put the window at 18 to 24 months before the outsized returns from Creator spend get priced in. The Marketers taking big swings now will benefit disproportionately.
His other point landed just as hard: Creators are CMOs marketing themselves, with their reputation on the line in every deal. They understand how to work the algorithm and create content better than most creative agencies. Which leads directly to a piece of advice the whole room nodded along to: stop giving Creators your agency's deck.
Full-funnel impact can't be measured through last click
Nick Fairbairn warned the room about the "last-click valley of death", and offered a reframe we haven't stopped thinking about: retire the word "brand" and replace it with non-last-click performance. That's how you win a market.
It's a language shift that changes the conversation with your CFO. Creator advertising shouldn’t be treated like an awareness line item that escapes measurement. It's performance that your last-click tools systematically undercount. (If this resonates, our measurement guide goes deep on exactly this.)
The more AI compresses, the more trust matters
AI is compressing everything in our field: production, media buying, reporting. And the more it compresses, the more value moves to two places - trust between Creators and their audiences, and trust between real people in a real room.
That second one is why we built Inflection/26 in the first place. The most valuable thing that came out of last week can't be automated: Marketers and Creators debating measurement over dinner, friendships forming across brand and Creator lines, a WhatsApp group that hasn't slowed down since everyone left.
What's next
Creators are voices of authority creating alpha for every channel across paid. The window to capture that alpha is open, but it won't stay open forever.
Inflection/26 was a special moment for Agentio, our partners, and our future partners. One-of-Ones. We can't wait for next year.
And the food? Insane. Almost as great as the company.
