More than 50 million people around the world now consider themselves part of the creator economy, giving it a global market size valuation of $13.8 billion, according to Statista. At Cannes Lions, Adweek gathered global marketing leaders to talk about the opportunities and challenges of this 10-year, still-growing phenomenon.
“The creator economy is exploding right now,” said Todd Kaplan, CMO of Pepsi, in a discussion moderated by Adweek’s chief content officer Ann Marinovich.
“As you look at all of the different platforms—what’s been happening on TikTok and Youtube and now even in the NFT space—culture is having a special moment right now where things are coming from the ground up. As a brand, you have to pay attention, and you have to be where your consumers are, be authentic where they are and play where they are.”
According to Ukonwa Ojo, the outgoing global CMO of Prime Video and Amazon Studios, even the fact that we now call it a creator “economy” shows how deeply creators are engrained into brand identity.
“We used to think of creators as a ‘nice to have,’ but we’re now in a space where it’s a critical part of how we go to market and how we succeed—that’s been the biggest shift over the last few years,” she said.
Kaplan said a lot of marketers are still spending their time creating 15- or 30-second ads, and then they look at the creator space and see all of the views their content is generating and want to get involved. He said entering the creator economy with the sole purpose of getting views or going viral should not be the goal.
