What Creators Really Think About Brand Deals, the Future of Platforms and Creativity

“There’s still such a disconnect,” DelMonte said. “Sometimes I get a deck and it boggles my mind.”

At ADWEEK’s Creator Roundtable, four top creators interviewed one another about how they hone their craft and work with brands that are still unfamiliar with ever-changing platforms.

Attendees included DelMonte; Tefi Pessoa, a pop culture-focused TikToker with 1.7 million followers; Hunter Harris, whose culture criticism Substack draws 80,000 subscribers; and Kahlil Greene, who makes educational videos on TikTok about overlooked parts of history and has been nominated for two Emmys for his work on Nick News.

While the creator economy has in many ways reshaped culture, a through line at ADWEEK’s Creator Roundtable was that the current business of being creative still requires the fine balance that artists have managed throughout history. You have to be popular, but you can’t bow to trends to the point where you’re inauthentic. It pays to own your audience, but you can only build an audience on a channel you don’t own. Brands pay the bills, but they struggle to find compelling narratives.

“I’m convinced that if we [were] born even 20 years earlier, [creators would] be like MTV VJs or Carrie Bradshaw,” Harris said. “The work, in execution, is different. But it’s functionally not that different.”

Creativity can’t be hacked

When DelMonte—who has made a career out of publicly advising firms and celebrities on branding—scrolls TikTok, she notes all the videos that are particularly engaging or make her want to buy a product. But that’s where the inspiration ends for deciding how to shape her own content.

“The more that you figure out the algorithm and follow the tips from other people who study [it], it’s doing even more of a disservice to you and your creativity,” she said.

Harris was a staff writer at Vulture before starting her newsletter, which features witty cultural musings like who emerged most powerful after each Succession episode or why Jennifer Lopez always wears nude lip gloss. She avoids picking broadly popular topics to write about.

“You can show someone exactly what they think they want and they won’t click. They will scroll way past,” Harris said, adding she hasn’t written about shows like Selling Sunset or Vanderpump Rules because she doesn’t watch them, even if her audience might.

“You present something in a surprising way, and then that’s your highest traffic [and] most engagement,” she said.

Brand deals still feel unnatural

If creators can’t guarantee that their content will be popular with audiences, they also can’t bet on successful brand partnerships, especially when directions can be unclear.

“I wish in the brief that instead of [the brand] saying, ‘We just want you to do what feels natural to you,’ they were clear about what they wanted,” Pessoa said.

She prefers that brands give an example of a creator who made content they liked. No matter what a brand claims, they have a vision of what they want, she said.

“[As] a generation obsessed with individuality, how can we give creators freedom but be in our voice still?” Pessoa said. “That’s hard.”

As we’ve heard before, the best partnerships are a true collaboration, when both the creator and the brand each have value to offer, and it’s the creator’s ideas—not just their follower count—that are appreciated, DelMonte said.

Platforms aren’t the endgame

All four creators told ADWEEK they don’t see social platforms as an end destination for their careers. They are all looking for, or currently engaged in, opportunities within traditional media.

“I really am having one foot outside the creator industry,” Greene said. “I’m using the creator industry right now as a means of growing my platform, of honing my skills as a writer, director, educator, researcher and journalist.”

Tech companies are famously erratic. Greene noted that TikTok has incentivized him to make videos using TikTok Live and TikTok Shop, which don’t make sense for his educational, structured content.

I really am having one foot outside the creator industry.

Kahlil Greene, educational content creator

“By and large, it was with the content you create, you go viral,” Greene said of an earlier era of TikTok, before the platform was as focused on pushing features out to creators. “Now it’s you create content, you play into TikTok’s desires, and then you go viral. That can be very frustrating.”

Creators like Greene are more likely to bet on platforms where they can own their audiences, like Patreon or Substack. Harris, for example, said she sometimes turns down opportunities to write for traditional magazines and saves her best ideas for her Substack.

Still, the only way to monetize an audience directly is by owning it.

“It is harder to build an audience of a newsletter immediately versus building an audience somewhere else and creating your own momentum,” Harris said.

For now, building audiences elsewhere means relying on traditional media, which faces existential challenges, or platforms like TikTok, which risks getting banned by lawmakers in the U.S. But creators can also work to own brand relationships at the same time as they work to own audience relationships.

“When a brand wants to work with me, I would say I hope like around 90% of the time they don’t want to work with me because of the number of followers that I have,” DelMonte said. “If TikTok goes away tomorrow, I have these relationships with these brands who don’t just use me as a creator and somebody to post an ad, but they view me as almost like a colleague and a co-worker.”