antone.

We’ve generated nearly $500M in revenue for our clients through creator marketing. Here are 8 things we’ve learned after spending millions on creators: Advertising has become commoditized. Anyone can produce thousands of ads with AI. Genuine influence, audience trust, and distribution are becoming increasingly valuable. 1.) Align incentives. Long-term ambassadors with recurring compensation, affiliate revenue, or performance bonuses tend to outperform transactional sponsorships. Economic alignment changes how creators advocate for a product. 2.) Audience density matters. A creator with 20K followers and enormous credibility in a specific niche can outperform someone with 2M. We care about the concentration of influence, not simply reach. 3.) Make integrations organic. Some of our best-performing UGC incorporates products into routines, stories, and experiences. The content should be interesting enough to consume independently of the sponsorship. 4.) Obsess over hooks. The first three seconds determine whether the remaining 57 matter. We give creators compelling premises and creative freedom because they understand their audience better than any agency. 5.) Identify emerging talent. We look for accelerating audience growth, consistent engagement, and creators gaining cultural relevance. There’s tremendous arbitrage in identifying influential people before the market prices them accordingly. 6.) Engineer distribution. A great creator video can become the foundation of an entire campaign. Licensing, clipping, paid amplification, and secondary distribution can multiply the value of a single piece of content. 7.) Understand attribution. Impressions are only one input. We study branded search, acquisition costs, conversions, and customer lifetime value. The creator who influences a purchase rarely gets all the attribution. 8.) Manufacture familiarity through repetition. Coordinating multiple trusted voices within the same community creates compounding exposure. Repeated recommendations can gradually turn an unfamiliar product into a category staple. My biggest takeaway? As the supply of content approaches infinity, the value of credible distribution increases. The next generation of great advertising companies will be built around understanding, accessing, and monetizing human attention.