Issue #30: Top Billing 💎

Issue 30
April 30th, 2026

I was watching an episode of Shrinking on Apple TV the other night (the Jason Segel and Harrison Ford one, please watch it, it's wonderful) when a moment slid by that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. Liz, the deeply-involved-mom character, finds out that her son Will and his girlfriend Peyton are pregnant and plan to keep the baby. Liz asks the obvious question: how are you going to support a kid? Peyton's answer, said with total earnestness: "I'll join MomTok, do brand deals."

The joke is that Peyton is naïve. The thing under the joke is that the writers' room of a prestige Apple TV comedy reached for "MomTok and brand deals" as the default answer a young person would give about how to make a living. Five years ago that would have been niche. Today it's the line a writers' room writes when they want a young couple to sound a little out of their depth, but not crazy.

That's mainstream. That's the test.

This week, the same thing happened in two more places that weren't on TV. POSSIBLE 2026, the marketing industry's biggest annual conference, wrapped yesterday at the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach with the creator economy explicitly at the center of its programming. And the IAB officially declared creator marketing a "core media channel," which is the kind of language buyers use when something stops being a test budget and starts being a line item.

Three different worlds, same week, same direction. Let's dig in.

The marketing industry's biggest conference rebuilt itself around the creator economy. Here's why that actually matters.

POSSIBLE has quietly become marketing's largest annual gathering. It is not a creator conference. It is not a startup conference. It is the room where the people who design how Fortune 500 brands spend their advertising dollars sit down with the platforms and the agencies that help them spend it. In 2023, POSSIBLE drew 2,500 attendees. This year, it pulled close to 7,000 across three days, with more than 100 speakers, two hotels (the Fontainebleau and Eden Roc), and a full programming spine running from Monday morning to Wednesday night.

The structural change is the news. POSSIBLE 2026 added a Creator Economy Academy for the first time, a dedicated multi-stage program billed as "where creativity and collaboration converge to shape the next era of influence." The conference also launched "AI Verse," an immersive stage focused on AI applications in marketing. Two years ago, creators got a side track. This year they got a wing. The headline speakers reflect it. Issa Rae closed the conference yesterday with a session titled "The New Storytellers: How Brands Are Shaping Entertainment." MrBeast's SVP of Global Media Beau Avril was on the speaker lineup. So was Sarah Bishop, the NFL's VP of Global Brand and Consumer Marketing, and Alexis Ohanian, founder of Seven Seven Six. Google was the Premier Presenting Partner. Pinterest, Salesforce, and Walmart Connect were Platinum.

You don't put a roster like that on a stage about an emerging trend. You do it about something you've already decided is the spine of the next decade.

Issa Rae's keynote is worth pulling on. Earlier this month at TheWrap's Creators x Hollywood Summit, she said something that's going to keep echoing: "Hollywood is in an identity crisis right now," and as a result, the industry has "turned to creators and social media in an attempt to bring them into the system." Read that carefully. The framing is reversed from how this conversation usually goes. It's not creators trying to break into Hollywood. It's Hollywood, in crisis, trying to absorb the energy and audiences of the creator economy because its own pipeline has stopped working. POSSIBLE is the marketing industry version of the same realization. Brands aren't deciding whether to work with creators anymore. They're deciding how to rebuild their organizations around the fact that creators are now the most efficient way to reach the audiences they need.

What this looks like for creators on the ground is already shifting. Brands are sending fewer one-off briefs and more retainer-shaped offers. The conversation in the rooms at POSSIBLE this week, according to several attendees I've talked to, was less "should we work with creators" and more "how do we put a creator partnership team next to our paid social team without it becoming a turf war." That's a different question than the industry was asking even six months ago.

The bottom line: If you've been pitching brands and feeling like you're educating them about why creators matter, stop. The room you're walking into already believes it. Reframe your pitch as an operational question, not a persuasion question. "How does a creator partnership fit into your always-on media plan?" lands better in 2026 than "here's why influencer marketing works." The brands at POSSIBLE this week aren't going home to debate whether to do this. They're going home to figure out how to scale it. Walk in with the answer, not the case.

Three data points that tell a bigger story.

The IAB's 2025 Internet Advertising Revenue Report, released this month with PwC, contained a sentence that quietly resets the conversation. Creator advertising "has become a core media channel," moving from add-on to always-on. The numbers behind it: U.S. creator economy ad spend hit $37 billion in 2025 and is on track for $44 billion in 2026, with brands now embedding creators into long-term media strategies, operational workflows, and even product development. The IAB framed 2026 around three structural shifts: AI as advertising's infrastructure layer, creator advertising as core, and streaming becoming performance-capable. The phrase "core media channel" matters because that's the language buyers use to justify line-item budgets to CFOs. Once a category is core, it gets standing budget instead of test-and-learn allocations. If you've been chasing one-off campaign deals, expect more retainers and always-on partnerships to come available in the back half of the year, especially with brands trying to lock in their 2027 plans now.

In the back half of season three of Apple TV's Shrinking, the parents (Liz and Derek) find out their son Will and his girlfriend Peyton are expecting. When the conversation turns to how the couple will pay for a baby, Peyton answers, with no hesitation, that she'll join MomTok and earn through brand deals. The scene is played for a laugh because the couple is unprepared for the realities of parenthood. But the writers' room reaching for "MomTok and brand deals" as the realistic-sounding plan is the cultural data point. Writers don't put fringe things in mainstream comedies. They put things the audience will recognize and react to. And there's a real foundation under the joke. The cast of Hulu's The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives (the show that essentially invented the term "MomTok" in mainstream culture) reportedly earns hundreds of thousands per TikTok deal. When a prestige scripted comedy treats creator income the way an early 2000s show would have treated "I'll wait tables," the cultural acceptance is done. It's just the math that's catching up.

YouTube opened its proprietary deepfake detection tool to actors, athletes, musicians, and other public figures eight days ago, and the part of that announcement that got under-covered was who came along for the ride. CAA, UTA, WME, and Untitled Management all formally signed on. That matters because the same tool has been available to a subset of YouTube creators since last year. Now it's the agreed-on industry standard for talent across both creator and Hollywood representation. Enrollment is a government-issued ID and a brief selfie video, the verification takes up to five days, and the system flags potential impersonations the same way Content ID does for music. Voice protection is on the roadmap for later this year. If you're a creator big enough that someone might want to deepfake you, this just became one of the few creator-economy tools that has a Hollywood agency stack of trust signals behind it. Get enrolled.

What else shipped this week.

TikTok quietly changed how the For You feed reset works, and the change is more meaningful than it sounds. Hitting "Refresh your For You page" used to wipe your interest signals and start retraining immediately. Now the reset takes several days to complete, during which TikTok serves you broadly trending content while it rebuilds a model from your recent behavior.

Why this matters for creators: If you've been telling friends or audiences to "reset your FYP" to find new niches, the experience just changed. People who reset will spend several days seeing trending content that may not be their actual taste, which means your niche videos won't surface in their feed during that window. On the creation side, this also implies TikTok's recommender is leaning harder on recent behavioral signals than long-tail interest history. If you post in a clear lane, that's good for you. If your account zigzags across topics, your audience is more likely to drift on resets. Pick a lane and stay in it.

On Tuesday, Creator Authority joined the LinkedIn Marketing Partner Program as the platform's first dedicated B2B influencer marketing partner. The agency offers full-service campaign capabilities (sourcing, contracts, content review, measurement) for brands that want to run partnerships with LinkedIn-native creators.

Why this matters for creators: LinkedIn has been quietly minting a small but absurdly valuable creator class. Software, finance, recruiting, leadership, consulting. The audiences are smaller than TikTok or Instagram, but they convert at a rate that makes B2B marketers cry happy tears. Until now, the deals happened ad hoc through DMs. With Creator Authority in the partner program, brands can now source and run LinkedIn creator campaigns through standard agency infrastructure, which means budget that previously sat in "test and learn" buckets is about to flow into LinkedIn-native creator deals. If you've been posting consistently on LinkedIn in any business or professional vertical, set up a media kit, fill out your "open to work with brands" signal, and reach out to any agency in this space proactively. The window before the gold rush is short.

Stop calling it "influencer marketing" in your pitch decks.

This sounds like a small thing. It isn't. The IAB just gave you a vocabulary upgrade, and most creators are still using last decade's words to describe what they do.

When a brand puts together its 2026 media plan, it allocates budget to channels: paid search, programmatic display, connected TV, social, email, retail media, and now creator. Each of those is a "media channel." Each one has a planner attached to it. Each one gets a number on a slide. Words like "influencer marketing" or "sponsored content" don't slot cleanly into any of those buckets. They sound campaign-shaped, not channel-shaped, which is exactly why creator deals have historically gotten test budgets instead of standing budgets.

So change the language. In your media kit and in every pitch email, refer to your audience as a media channel. Talk about "always-on creator partnerships" instead of "campaigns." Describe your rates in CPM terms when you can, because that's the math the planner on the other side is doing whether you give it to them or not. Reference the IAB's "core media channel" designation by name. It's a small phrase that signals you understand how the room you're trying to walk into actually works.

The other shift is structural. If your default offer to brands is a one-off Reel or Story, build a second offer next to it: a six-month or twelve-month retainer. Most creators I know have been quietly told by repeat brand partners that they'd rather be on a retainer than re-signing the same paperwork every quarter. The conversation at POSSIBLE this week confirmed that at scale. Brands are looking for "always-on" because it's easier to plan, easier to budget, and easier to pull metrics from. You can be the creator who hands them that proposal first.

The mainstreaming moment is real. The work is using the right words to claim your share of it.

That's all for this week. If a writers' room at Apple TV is putting MomTok in a punchline, the rest of the world is already where you've been. Walk into the next pitch like the room knows. If someone forwarded this to you, sign up to get your own issue every Thursday.