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Good morning - Michael here, writing from the frontlines of Massif & Kroo: Here's what you need to pay attention to in media today:

That's how much U.S. advertisers spent on the creator economy last year — sponsored partnerships, paid amplification, and planned adjacency buys around creator content. Up 26% from the year before. Growing four times faster than the overall media industry. And now ranked behind only paid search and social as a "must-buy" in the IAB's annual advertiser survey.

That number is the line brands finally crossed. Creators are no longer a digital add-on. They're a media channel.

Here's what actually changed — because the money alone doesn't explain it.

For years, influencer marketing was a one-off spot buy. A brand would pay a creator to hold up a product, post it, and hope something happened. There was no planning infrastructure, no measurement framework, and no way for a CFO to compare it to a television buy or a paid search campaign. It was marketing's version of "post and pray."

That era is over.

What's replacing it looks a lot more like how brands have always bought television — except the "network" is a person and the "programming" is their content calendar. The shift is happening across four dimensions at once, and they're all reinforcing each other.

The first is always-on programming. Brands aren't buying single posts anymore. They're buying weekly and monthly creator series — ongoing content relationships that look more like a show deal than a sponsorship. The creator becomes a recurring presence in the brand's media mix the same way a prime-time ad slot used to be.

The second is roster strategy. Instead of booking 200 random creators for a product launch, the brands seeing the best results are building a talent slate of 10 to 30 creators they can run repeatedly. Think of it like a network managing its on-air talent. You invest in relationships. You learn what works with each creator's audience. You iterate. That consistency compounds in ways a one-off never can.

The third is repackaging. A single creator video now gets sliced into short clips for paid social, repurposed for retail media, wired into affiliate programs, and boosted with paid amplification budgets that sit outside the original creator deal. The content is the seed. Everything around it is distribution. This is why the $37 billion number is bigger than what most people think of as "influencer marketing" — it includes all the paid media that gets built around creator content, not just the creator fee itself.

And the fourth is measurement that finally looks like media. Reach, frequency, brand lift, cost per acquisition, return on ad spend — the same scorecard finance teams apply to every other channel. This is the part that unlocked the real money. When you can walk into a budget meeting and show a CFO what creator spend actually returned in the same language they use for everything else, the conversation changes completely. It stops being "should we do influencer?" and starts being "how much more can we allocate?"

Not because creators got more popular. Because the infrastructure around them finally matured enough to justify real budgets with real accountability. A key detail most coverage misses: $37 billion is not the same thing as "influencer marketing spend."

You'll see other forecasters peg influencer marketing at a lower number — sometimes significantly lower. That's because the IAB's figure includes the paid media wrapped around creator content and the planned adjacency buys, not just the creator fees.

Both numbers are correct. They're just measuring different things. The gap between them is actually the story — it shows how much additional investment flows into creator content once a brand starts treating it like a channel instead of a line item.

Because this is the economic engine underneath the entire media shift we've been covering in this newsletter. When we talk about platforms changing algorithms, or social overtaking television, or TikTok launching local feeds, the money follows attention, and right now $37 billion of it is flowing to individual creators and the content ecosystem around them. That's not a trend. That's a structural reallocation of where advertising dollars go. And it's reshaping who has leverage in media, what kind of content gets made, and how audiences discover everything from products to news to entertainment.

If you're a creator, this is validation — but also a warning. The money is real, and it's growing. But the brands writing the checks are getting more sophisticated. They're measuring outcomes, not impressions. They want consistency, not virality. The creators who build like a media company — with a schedule, a point of view, and results they can prove — are the ones who'll capture the next phase of this spend. The ones still chasing algorithmic lottery tickets are going to get left behind by the very professionalization that's making the money bigger.

A 20-year-old plaintiff took the stand this week in a California case against Meta and YouTube, testifying that specific product features — endless scroll, autoplay, appearance filters, and algorithmic recommendation loops — directly harmed her mental health.

This isn't a lawsuit about "too much screen time." It's a lawsuit about the mechanics underneath the screen time — the design choices that make the product difficult to stop using. If the plaintiffs win, it could force platforms to redesign core features, not just add parental controls on top of them. That's a fundamentally different kind of legal exposure than anything the industry has faced before.

The proposed class action alleges that Runway scraped YouTube content to train its video generation models without permission. If you just read a lead story about $37 billion flowing into creator content, this is the other side of that coin: creators are producing the most valuable content on the internet, and AI companies are using it as training data without paying for it.

The case follows a wave of similar suits against AI companies from publishers and artists, but this one hits different because it's a creator — not a legacy media company — bringing the fight. The outcome could define whether the people making the content that fuels the creator economy actually own what they make in the age of generative AI.

YOUR NEXT MOVE: Run creators like a channel, not a stunt. If you're a brand, split your budget into creator production and paid amplification so you can actually see what's working. Build a roster of 10 to 30 creators you run repeatedly instead of 200 random one-offs. And measure like media — set two scorecards, one for brand lift and one for performance, and stop reporting "views" like they're outcomes.

If you're a creator, the message is just as clear: the brands spending real money want partners who show up consistently, produce content that can be repurposed across channels, and can point to results beyond a view count. Build like a media company. Because that's exactly what the $37 billion is buying.

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you tomorrow.

Feedback, thoughts, suggestions? Hit the reply!

Michael Wildes is the founder and CEO of Drive Phase Holding Company, a permanent-capital firm focused on building category-defining companies across business, media (owner of Massif & Kroo), aviation, and impact. After leaving a career as a professional pilot, he spent a year as Business Editor at FLYING Magazine writing 330+ articles on aviation's transformation. Now he builds permanent-capital companies focused on long-term trends that compound over decades. Based in Arlington, Virginia.

Connect: mikewildes.com | [email protected]

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