How to build a long-term career as a creator
Social media fame can arrive fast, but maintaining it is another challenge. We talk to agents and creators about how to build lasting relationships with audiences and brands, plus the power of niche content
Just a few days before the Social & Creator Lions were announced at Cannes, over in Manhattan the Tribeca Festival (‘film’ was dropped from the name in 2020) was celebrating the launch of its Upnext Creators category. Among the 11 storytellers featured, with a combined following of over 14 million, was AriAtHome, a mobile beat-maker that takes his outlandish DJ booth rig through the streets of SoHo and Washington Square Park and who, fresh from a profile in the New York Times, now has a brand partnership with US tech company Sandisk. Alongside him was peanut butter skincare expert Walker Ward (a parody, lest anyone’s tempted to give it a go), who includes contact details for business inquiries in his bio.
The selected creators were given the full red-carpet, big-screen premiere treatment at the festival, taking their place alongside feature film directors and documentary makers. Meanwhile at Cannes, the fact that the category had changed its name from last year’s Social & Influencer Lions was mightily telling. We’ve moved from the age of the influencer to the age of the creator. The former, all about personal branding, lifestyle review content and audience growth, are being increasingly elbowed aside by the latter who, as the name suggests, are all about creativity, producing content that entertains and engages.
And, as Rafael McDonnell, founder and managing director of the Talent and Brands agency suggests, really all you need is a bit of confidence and a decent idea. “Anyone with an iPhone can be a content creator,” he says. “A 19-year-old creator in their bedroom can generate 16 million views that are targeted at the audience for a beauty or makeup brand. But it’s like everything else. There’s so much opportunity, but only people who have real skill and creativity and talent will win through.
“There’s been this explosion of creators over the past three years or so, the market is oversaturated. You have creators with lots of followers who are struggling to make a living, despite this dream that if you get the followers, brands will just throw money at you. It’s not like that.”
McDonnell started out working with FMCG brands (big ones, like Coca-Cola and Walkers Crisps), before joining EMI and then Creative Artists Agency. With Atomic, who acquired Talent and Brands in 2023, he co-founded (and is managing partner of) the Supernova social creator agency. Atomic had been initially attracted to McDonnell’s burgeoning creator empire largely off the back of his work with Rob Mayhew.
McDonnell’s aim now is to build long-term careers for his team of creators, to fully establish them as brands in their own rights. Student nurse Destiny Harold, better known as Chip Shop Diva, became a TikTok sensation after posting videos of her work at Merchants Fish and Chips. From there, and with McDonnell’s guidance, she’s gone on to partner with brand names like adidas, Pepsi and Burger King. As McDonnell tells it, this all happened in the space of six months.
A change in the way TikTok algorithms behave has, as McDonnell explains, led to a shift from followers to viewers. “The platform promotes content that people want to see, so you can have a small following but still have plenty of reach. It’s actually quite difficult to grow follower numbers on TikTok these days. And so now we have a new creator model, one based around having an engaged audience, driven by content.” Chip Shop Diva, for one example, has ‘only’ 200,000 followers on her main account, but her videos reach millions of people around the world (McDonnell describes follower numbers as a “vanity metric”).
@chippydiva Get ready with me???? using @elfcosmetics @Benefit Cosmetics UK @Beauty Works @hudabeautyshop @unicorn_cosmetics ????#fyp #ChipShopDiva #diva #viral #chipshop #grwm #makeup #elf #benefits #foryou #huda #blonde
That in turn has prompted the emergence of more niche creators and content, something that should give new faces the chance to establish some sort of social beachhead, find a specific identity and, potentially, eventually, attract the interest of agencies and brands. Five years ago, Mayhew was one such newbie. A former account handler at Grey London and Ogilvy, UK head of influence and retail at FleishmanHillard and, most recently, creative director at Gravity Road, he went hyper-niche with a series of TikToks taking a comedic aim at agency life, finding a loyal audience that grew as he began to stretch out and focus on the more general vagaries of office working.
“If you’re launching a new product, rather than working with David Beckham, why don’t you work with some fun, interesting niche creators who have the audience that you’re looking for?” Mayhew, now based in New York, says. “Rather than putting all your money towards one creator, why don’t you split that up over 20 creators and do something a bit more interesting? And I’m seeing that happen more and more.”
I get that you have trust issues, that you’ve got these messages you need to land. There are things I can and can’t say. That just makes my job more interesting
Mayhew is convinced that workplace-related content is a pathway many others would do well to follow. “I’ve said this, and I can’t say this enough: if you create a video a day for a year, it will change your life. Whatever it is, if you’re working in HR, or if you’re working in IT, in a year’s time, you’d probably be able to quit your job and be a full-time creator. There’s such an appetite for that sort of content and it’s only going to grow and grow.”
Employee-generated content has also become a thing, created in-house and often featuring lo-fi representations of staff going about their daily business (pouting members of the comms department at Loewe’s HQ toying with a salad at one end, the Home and Furniture team at Marks & Spencer’s Romford branch goofing around on the shop floor firmly at the other). It’s showing a more human side to brands, but also a glimpse behind-the-scenes, fostering a sense of belonging, of – a key word in creator circles – community.
Perhaps given Mayhew’s industry background, it’s not surprising that he has the modus operandi of an agency creative director, offering clients three ideas and fully-fleshed scripts, one of which might be a safe bet, another a little less so and the third a more edgier proposition. “When I pick up a brief, I want to have a full brand induction, I want to understand the brand,” he says.
He readily admits that the search for compromise can be a source of frustration for anyone involved in any creative endeavour, but for a partnership to succeed both parties have to give and take, something the larger, more corporate-minded brands may occasionally struggle with.
The smart brands are using creators more than just being a voice. And that’s when things start to get more interesting, when you have that more embedded relationship
“I get that you have trust issues, that you’ve got these messages you need to land. There are things I can and can’t say. That just makes my job more interesting, because I’m like, OK, how can I tell the story in an interesting way within your boundaries?” Once a script’s been settled on, he then offers a further three rounds of amends.
“When brands come to work with me, they’re not just paying for three hours of my time to write a sketch and film it,” Mayhew continues. “They’re paying for my experience. I know what’s right for the audience and I know how to make people watch my content. I like to bring humour into it and my challenge is always how I can integrate the brand into my sketch so that it feels like it’s part of the story.
“And that’s often how creators work. It’s about trying to make the brand relevant to the audience.” And, as McDonnell points out, followers are rarely backwards in coming forward, particularly if they’re unhappy about a poorly-executed, or ill-advised, collab.
Mayhew says he’s increasingly being asked to help out with pitches and strategising, to give further guidance on content and messaging: “The smart brands are using creators more than just being a voice. And that’s when things start to get more interesting, when you have that more embedded relationship.”
Higher levels of professionalism bring their own pressure. “The industry now sees there’s money to be made, there’s a lot more eyeballs on the work that agencies and brands do with creators,” Mayhew explains. “That’s fantastic, because it is a huge part of the marketing mix and can really drive results. The challenge is to justify the fees that we charge, to educate the brands and the agencies of how we work. All you need is a brand to have a bad experience and then they’ll think they can’t quite justify this bet. And so we need to make sure we keep an eye on measurement, an eye on results and creativity as well.”
And then there’s the daily demands of being in the public eye. McDonnell sighs. “I was walking down the road with Rob and it was like being with a Hollywood celebrity. It’s the same with Chip Shop Diva, the number of selfies that get taken. They are more famous than somebody who’s on breakfast TV.”
