Who’s Running the Internet Now? A Marketer’s Guide to the Creator Economy
Brands that still think influencer marketing is a 22-year-old holding their product and smiling are already behind. Here’s what the creator economy actually looks like in 2025.
The shift from “influencer” to “creator” is more than semantic housekeeping. It reflects a meaningful change in how these relationships work and what value they actually deliver.
An influencer, in the original sense, was someone with an audience whose opinion others followed. A creator is someone who builds and sustains an audience through the quality of the content they produce. The best people in this space are both, but the creator framing matters because it reorients the value proposition. You’re not borrowing someone’s audience for a moment. You’re partnering with someone who has built a trusted media channel of their own.
Ben frames it cleanly: “It’s one brand wanting to borrow the trust from another brand. Whether that’s a brand collab, or it’s an influencer, or it’s a celebrity endorsement. It’s the same thing. It’s humans wanting to feel comfortable choosing your brand.”
That is not a new idea. Celebrity endorsement has existed for as long as celebrity has existed. What has changed is scale and access. The creator economy has democratised influence. You no longer need to be a movie star or a sports icon to build a genuinely trusted audience. You just need to be consistently good at creating content people want to consume. The barrier to entry for influence is lower than it has ever been. The bar for quality, paradoxically, has never been higher.
Where Influencer Marketing Sits in the Funnel
One of the most useful things Ben and Steph address is the persistent misconception that influencer marketing is purely a top-of-funnel awareness play. It isn’t, or at least it doesn’t have to be.
The framing that holds up well: at the top of the funnel, creators earn attention through entertainment and education. They give your brand a thumb-stop in a feed full of wallpaper. Steph puts it well: “If they’ve got a trusted audience that are used to seeing content from them, they will go: oh, what has this person got to say? And so it will give you that scroll-stopping moment that a brand ad probably won’t.”
In the middle of the funnel, creators build trust. This is where product demonstrations, honest reviews, and considered opinions live. It is also where the alignment between creator and brand matters most. If the audience doesn’t believe the partnership makes sense, the middle-funnel work collapses.
At the bottom of the funnel, creators can drive decisions. A trusted voice recommending a specific product or service, with a reason to act now, works. It has always worked. It worked when athletes appeared in cereal commercials in the 1970s. It works now when a B2B SaaS company partners with a LinkedIn creator who reaches exactly the right buying committee.
Ben’s point on the B2B side deserves particular attention: “B2B buyers don’t really start with brands anymore. They start with people.” The research backs this up. Most B2B purchase journeys now begin with peer content, trusted voices, and community recommendation, not with brand advertising. Ignoring the creator economy in B2B is not a conservative choice. It is an expensive one.
The B2B Angle
The starting point is that most B2B companies already have an influencer. It is usually the CEO, the founder, or the head of sales. These individuals carry the brand’s credibility with buyers, with prospective talent, and with the industry broadly. Whether or not the company has a formal creator strategy, those people are already creating content, and their audiences are already forming opinions about the brand based on it.
The more sophisticated version of this is employee advocacy done authentically. Not the programme where everyone gets a branded LinkedIn header and a content calendar full of press releases, but the one where team members who actually have something to say are given the structure and support to say it. Ben draws the distinction clearly: “Some people do it really well and make it look organic and human. Others are very robotic.” The difference is usually whether the organisation is enabling genuine voices or manufacturing fake ones.
The B2B creator economy is also producing a new tier of professional voices with real influence over purchasing decisions. Eugene Healy, who has appeared as a guest on Canned; the Marketing Podcast, is a strong example: a brand strategist who has built a substantial LinkedIn following through consistently rigorous thinking, genuine point of view, and the kind of accessible academic framing that makes complex ideas land. His long-term partnership with Tracksuit works because the alignment is real: a brand strategy thinker and a brand measurement platform. That is not a manufactured relationship. It makes sense, and audiences can tell.
Orion Brown (Orion Meets World) operates in a similar space from a design and marketing angle, using product demonstrations and practical examples to build an audience of practitioners. Rob Mayhew has done something different and remarkable: built a comedy audience entirely within the agency world, turning the in-jokes of client servicing and pitch culture into content that marketers and agency professionals find genuinely funny. These are not generalist social media accounts. They are specialist publications, and for the right brand, they are more valuable than mass-market reach.
The Control Problem
This is where a lot of influencer campaigns go wrong, and Ben and Steph are characteristically direct about it.
Brands want control. Specifically, they want to know what the creator is going to say, in what order, using what language, and with what disclaimers. This is understandable. It is also, in most cases, the thing that kills the campaign.
The entire value of a creator partnership is authenticity. Not performed authenticity. Actual authenticity. The audience trusts this person because they have a track record of saying what they actually think, in their own voice, about things they actually care about. The moment you hand them a script, you are asking them to do traditional talent work. And if that is what you want, there are better and cheaper ways to get it.
Ben’s position is unambiguous: “Don’t script them. Never, ever, ever, ever script them. You have to enable them. If you want to script, do traditional television or radio.”
Steph adds the real-world context that makes this harder than it sounds: “I’ve got a CEO on my shoulder saying, I want to see the brief and I want to make sure they say X, Y and Z.” Most marketers reading this will recognise that pressure immediately. The answer is not to capitulate to it. The answer is to do the work upfront of choosing a creator whose natural content already aligns well enough with your brand that you can trust them to represent it. If you cannot trust the creator to talk about your brand without a script, you have chosen the wrong creator.
What Excellent Brand-Creator Partnerships Look Like
The examples Ben and Steph walk through are worth examining in some detail, because they illustrate a consistent set of principles.
Vanta operates in compliance software (SOC 2 certification and related services), which is about as unsexy a category as B2B gets. Their response to this has been to lean into comedy, partnering with comedians to turn corporate compliance into genuinely funny content that plays on office politics, the gap between sales and product, and the chaos of tech company culture. The result is a brand that gets attention in a category where no one was looking. The creator relationships work because the comedians are given latitude to be funny, not just asked to mention Vanta favourably.
ClickUp has taken this further, building a dedicated comedy channel on Instagram with a roster of creators including Vincent Marcus, whose recurring office-politics skits have built a following entirely separate from ClickUp’s main brand presence. The brand appears in the content, but it is the content that audiences are coming back for.
Duolingo represents the logical endpoint of this thinking: a brand that has effectively become its own creator. The Duolingo owl has a content programme on TikTok that operates with the sensibility of a creator account rather than a brand channel: chaotic, reactive, self-aware, willing to be weird. When they produced a fake TV show for April Fool’s Day in which everyone loved Ireland but no one spoke the same language, and the only solution was Duolingo, the idea was absurd enough to be genuinely funny and on-brand enough to reinforce the core proposition. That is rare, and it is the result of giving a social team genuine creative latitude.
The Alex Earl and Poppy Drinks partnership is perhaps the clearest example of what long-term creator alignment can do for a brand. Steph visited the US recently and was struck by the shelf presence Poppy had built, outsized for a relatively new brand. The creator relationship with Alex Earl was not a one-off campaign. It was sustained, and it built real commercial momentum. As Ben notes: “It’s an and to your brand, not an either or.”
The Sydney Sweeney and Gap example from last year is a useful counterpoint. That partnership generated significant cultural conversation. Whether it materially moved sales is genuinely contested, as Ben acknowledges “a lot of this is long-term brand trust” but it demonstrates that even imperfect creator alignment, when it generates attention, can have value. The lesson is not that all creator partnerships need to be perfectly calibrated. Sometimes leaning into a cultural moment matters more than optimising the brief.
A Practical Framework for Getting Started
For marketers who have never run a creator campaign, or who have run one and found it underwhelming, Ben offers a framework that is worth keeping.
The starting point is identifying creators with real trust. This means organic engagement, not purchased reach. The metric is not follower count it is whether the audience actually cares what this person says. High-follower, low-engagement accounts are a warning sign. Genuine community is the asset you are trying to access.
The second step is audience alignment. Your potential customers need to exist within the creator’s audience. This sounds obvious, but it is frequently ignored in favour of choosing someone the brand team personally likes or admires. Personal preference is not a media planning strategy.
Third is problem alignment. The best creator content is not product-focused it is problem-focused. Creators who educate or entertain around problems that your product solves are natural partners. The brief should start with the problem, not the product.
Fourth, and this has been covered above: do not script. Enable. Share what the brand stands for, what the product does, what matters to you and then let them do their job.
Fifth: involve decision-makers in the selection process early. Get the CEO or client in front of the creator’s existing content before anyone is under contract. The question is not “do they represent us well” it is “are you comfortable with the creative direction of this person’s channel?” If the answer is no, find a different creator. Do not try to change the creator.
Finally: amplify. Secure content rights ideally for six months, at minimum three and push the content across every appropriate channel. Outbound email, paid media, your own social, pre-roll. Get the creator to amplify it on their own channels too. The content is an asset. Use it like one.
Steph adds the operational reality that often gets underestimated: “Give yourself enough time to really understand what you’re getting.” Reviewing a hundred creator profiles properly takes time. Doing it under pressure, when a campaign is launching next week, produces bad decisions. Ben is direct: “Next week is not the brief. Come on marketers, do better.”
The Bigger Picture
The framing Ben returns to at the end of the episode is the one that matters most for understanding where this fits in your overall strategy.
“This isn’t really about influences. This is about how modern buyers, both B2B and B2C, build trust in brands.”
That is the right lens. The creator economy exists because attention has fragmented and trust has become harder to manufacture centrally. Brands that try to own all their communication, control all their messaging, and manage all their creative output are operating on an assumption that audiences will pay attention and believe what they are told. Most audiences will not.
What works is meeting people where they already are, through voices they already trust, with content they actually want to consume. Steph puts the principle cleanly: “If it is meeting your target audience, your target customer, where they’re hanging out and the kinds of things that they’re interested in, it’s an intersection of their interests and what you have to offer that’s a really great match.”
The brands winning in the creator economy are not the ones spending the most on influencer partnerships. They are the ones who have done the work to understand their audience, found the right voices, built real relationships over time, and had the discipline to step back and let creators do what creators do.
It is an and, not an or. It sits alongside brand, alongside paid, alongside owned. Used well, it is one of the most efficient ways to build trust at scale that modern marketing has produced.
The 22-year-old thought leader might be running the internet. The question is whether your brand is in the conversation.
Listen and Subscribe
You can listen to Episode 35 of Canned the Marketing Podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.
If this was useful, subscribe at cannedmarketing.com for weekly long-form content covering what actually matters in marketing.
Connect with Ben van Rooy at linkedin.com/in/benvanrooy/ and Steph Quantrill at linkedin.com/in/stephanie-quantrill/
Canned the Marketing Podcast is produced by Human Digital and Cue Marketing. New episodes drop every week.