Every Brand Is Becoming a Media Company Again

AI has made it easier than ever to start a business.

You can ship a product in a weekend. Build the page, generate the ads, write the copy, cut the demo, open the store, and make the whole thing look credible.

The barrier to entry is approaching zero.

The barrier to attention is not.^*

That is the shift underneath creator marketing right now. Traditional paid channels are crowded, expensive, and easier to copy than ever. Performance marketing still matters, but the old arbitrage is gone. Launching is getting easier. Getting people to care is getting harder.

The scramble is already underway

Every brand wants to become a media company until it has to operate like one.

You can see the scramble everywhere. PayPal posted a role for head of content in the CEO's office. CAA is forming a creator holding company. Fashion houses are studying TikTok like a merchandising channel. Accenture is moving into creator capability through Whalar.

Then there is Unilever. Its CEO has said social will rise from about 30% to 50% of digital media budget, while the company works with 20x more creators. The exact figures may have changed since that declaration, but either way, we are talking about billions of dollars from one company moving toward social and creator-led distribution.

The products are copyable. The playbooks are copyable. The one thing that isn't is a voice people actually trust, and at Cannes you could see who had built one. At John Hu's party for Stan you could feel it. The community was what made the product special. Beacons has been a staple of the space for years, and after meeting Jesse and his team, it's obvious why. People trust them. AJ Eckstein helped carve out a new agency category with Creator Match by making himself the channel. They built authority with their audience that converts, and that's the hardest thing to copy. Most brands aren't built to do it.

The pace of change varies by industry, but the direction is clear: creator-led distribution is moving from experiment to operating model.

When distribution becomes the product

Once launching gets commoditized, distribution stops being a marketing afterthought. It shapes what a company builds, who it hires, how fast it learns, and where the next dollar goes. Content cannot sit off to the side as a reactive posting function if it is one of the main ways demand gets created.

Most brands are trying to build that muscle with yesterday's architecture.

For over a decade, brands outsourced too much of the distribution process. Without a clear path to measurement, bringing it in-house was hard to justify. Agencies handled campaigns. Platforms handled targeting. Dashboards handled reporting. Social teams handled content generation. Affiliate tools handled conversion. Each made sense in isolation.

Together, they created a strange modern marketing stack: expensive creator bets with volatile impact, expensive agencies, orphaned tools, and no unified model of how attention actually moves and drives the business.

That fragmentation used to be annoying. Now it is becoming too much of a liability to ignore.

Social-native challengers move faster. They understand the feed before they understand the focus group. They can turn a TikTok presence into conversions before an incumbent has finished the agency brief. Cal AI is a useful signal here. It is not winning because calorie tracking was impossible before. It is winning because product, creator-native distribution, and social proof are collapsing into one growth motion.

Large brands are trying to become content houses for a reason: The goal is no longer just to advertise into a market. It is to have the taste, speed, and operating rhythm to help make the market.

But internally, the actual work is still fragmented.

One team buys influencer posts. Another commissions UGC. Another runs affiliate. Another manages ambassadors. Another owns organic social. Another owns paid. Another pays the agency. Another tries to explain performance to finance.

Everyone is touching the same system. Almost nobody is classifying it the same way.

The market has already voted

The creator spend number matters because it shows this is no longer just a social team conversation.

In 2025, U.S. brands are expected to spend $37 billion on creator advertising, according to the IAB's 2025 Creator Economy Ad Spend & Strategy Report. That is up 26% year over year. It is growing roughly four times faster than the broader media industry. Nearly half of creator ad buyers now call creators a must-buy channel, behind only social media and paid search.

So the old question is over.

Creators matter. The market has already voted with budget, headcount, agency M&A, and software spend.

Not an adoption problem. A classification problem.

The harder question is what brands are actually building.

A brand might pay a TikTok creator to post about a product. It might hire a UGC creator with 600 followers to make ads for Meta. It might sign athletes or college ambassadors or ask its own employees to post on LinkedIn or Instagram.

Internally, all of this gets called creator marketing.

Convenient, sure. Also a mess.

The creator economy does not have an adoption problem anymore. It has a classification problem: brands are putting different jobs, economics, and outcomes under the same label, then wondering why the numbers do not add up.

Ask anyone working in creator marketing and the pain points sound familiar: finding the right creators, proving ROI, managing fragmented tools, and agreeing on what good measurement actually means. The IAB report just puts numbers around what the market already knows. Better attribution, consistent reporting, and better operational tools are now the infrastructure the channel is missing.

But before a brand can measure creator marketing, it has to get clear on what kind of creator marketing it is running.

This is where a lot of strategies start to wobble.

Influencer marketing, UGC, affiliate, ambassadors, and employee-generated content are not interchangeable tactics. They have different economics. Different failure modes. They move through networks differently. They create trust differently. They compound differently.

If you treat them as one thing, the numbers will never make sense. Not because creator marketing is fake. Because the model is wrong.

Creator-led growth breaks when every tactic has its own dashboard and no one can explain how the pieces connect.

Attention moves sideways

The connection matters because attention does not move in a straight line.

A creator reaches an audience, but the real leverage often comes from that audience's audience: the group chats, comments, reposts, search behavior, and subcommunities that decide whether an idea keeps moving or dies in the feed.

The brands that win will not be the ones that buy the most creator posts. They will be the ones that understand what each motion is for, how the pieces work together, where attention is actually traveling, and where the next dollar should go.

That is why classification matters. Not because brands should keep every creator tactic in a separate box forever. Because if everything gets called creator marketing, nobody can tell what is working.

First, brands need a cleaner read on what they are already doing.

That taxonomy matters because the model determines the measurement. And if the measurement is wrong, the strategy will be too.

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Thanks to Shreya Nallamothu, who wrote an early draft that got this piece going, and to the Brand Muse team, Daniel Ward and Nadya Sudiro, for shaping it along the way. And to our advisors and contributors, Hong Qu, Adam Towvim, Dilan Dubey, and Ziad Hassan, for sharpening the thinking behind it.