Issue #39: Show Your Work 💎

Issue 39
July 2nd, 2026

I got two creator pitches this week, back to back, and I've been thinking about them ever since. The first one led with a number, big and bold, right at the top of the email: 400,000 followers. That was the whole opener. The second one led with a screenshot. Here's a campaign I ran for a brand in your space, here's the click-through rate, here's what it actually drove. Guess which one I kept reading.

For about a decade, that first email was the winning move. Follower count was the currency. It was the number on the media kit, the thing that set your rate, the reason a brand said yes or no. It was shorthand for "this person is worth something," and for a long time everybody agreed to use it because there wasn't much else to point at.

That agreement is quietly falling apart, and this week showed you why. On one side, brands are activating creators at a scale that would have sounded made up a year ago. Unilever ran a World Cup push with 50,000 of them. On the other side, those same brands are basically admitting they can't tell which of those creators actually worked. When you activate people by the tens of thousands but can't measure them, follower count stops being useful and proof becomes the scarce thing. The creators who can show their work are about to have a very good couple of years.

So this is a story about what your value is made of now, and it's shifting under your feet whether you're watching or not. Let's dig in.

In this issue:

Let's dig in.

Brands just learned to activate creators by the tens of thousands. They still can't tell you which ones actually worked.

Start with the number that stopped me. For its World Cup push, Unilever activated 50,000 creators, a scale one of its own marketers described to Digiday as "a Super Bowl every two days." We're talking global activation across brands and markets, physical pop-ups, and match-side access for influencers, all running at once. One quick and important caveat before we build anything on top of this: it's a brand-side case study, and we don't have the comp details, so I'm not going to pretend all 50,000 of those creators got a meaningful check. What matters here isn't the payout. It's the number itself, and what a number that big tells you about where this is going.

Because a few years ago, a "big" creator campaign meant a brand hand-picking a dozen names, negotiating each one, and babysitting the whole thing. Fifty thousand is a different species entirely. That's not casting, that's industrialization. It's brands treating creators less like a short list of talent and more like a channel you flip on at scale, the way you'd buy any other media. And when something becomes a channel, the question the people paying for it ask changes. It stops being "is this person cool" and becomes "did this actually do anything."

Which is exactly where the wheels are coming off, and it's the other half of the story. New Digiday+ Research out this week found that creator marketing is stretching well beyond the social feed, with brands now pushing creator content into retail media, connected TV, and display, not just Instagram and TikTok and YouTube (which still dominate). And the single biggest challenge those marketers named? A full 30% pointed at insufficient influencer performance data. Not budget. Not finding creators. Not fear of a brand-safety mess. The thing keeping them up at night is that they can't measure what they're already doing. (Fair caveat: it's a marketer-side survey and partly paywalled, so read it as a directional signal of how buyers feel, not a precise census.)

Sit with those two facts next to each other, because together they are the whole story. Activation has raced miles ahead of measurement. Brands figured out how to turn on 50,000 creators in a quarter. They have not figured out how to tell you which of those 50,000 moved a single unit. There is a giant, expensive gap between "we ran the campaign" and "here's what it drove," and right now nobody has cleanly filled it.

That gap is the best news a working creator has gotten in a while, and here's why. When measurement is scarce, whoever shows up holding it becomes disproportionately valuable. Think about it from the buyer's chair. You just ran a campaign with thousands of creators and you genuinely cannot say who performed. Then one creator emails you and says, here's the last three brands I worked with, here's the click-through, here's the promo codes redeemed, here's the before-and-after on the thing you actually care about. In a world drowning in unmeasured activations, that person is not another name on a list of 50,000. That person is the answer to the exact problem the survey says is keeping marketers up at night.

And notice what did not appear in either story as the deciding factor. Follower count. Reach got you into the pile of 50,000. It does not get you out of it. The thing that gets you out is proof, and proof is something you can build at any size, whether you have four hundred followers or four hundred thousand. This is the repricing in one line: reach is how you get considered, evidence is how you get chosen, and for the first time in a while those are two genuinely different things.

The bottom line: Stop leading with your follower count, and start building the one asset brands are openly telling us they can't get: proof that your work drives outcomes. You don't need a data team. You need a running record of what you've done and what it produced, kept somewhere you own, ready to hand over. The creators who win the next couple of years won't be the ones with the biggest audience. They'll be the ones who walked into the room already answering the question everyone else is too busy activating to ask. The Pro-Tip at the bottom is the concrete, do-it-this-weekend version.

Three numbers on the gap between activating creators and actually measuring them.

The headline figure is 50,000 creators, the size of Unilever's World Cup activation, described internally as "a Super Bowl every two days" across pop-ups, match-side access, and a stack of markets. Take it as the clearest sign yet that creator marketing has crossed from bespoke into industrial. A brand doesn't hand-negotiate 50,000 relationships, it runs a machine. The read for you isn't "the little guy is getting steamrolled." It's that being one interchangeable icon in a crowd of 50,000 is now the default, and the only way out of the crowd is to be the creator a brand can point to and say "that one worked." One honest caveat so nobody oversells this: we don't have the comp breakdown, so treat 50,000 as proof of scale and appetite, not proof that mass activation is a payday for everyone in it.

Here's the number that turns the first one into an opportunity instead of a threat. In this week's Digiday+ Research, 30% of marketers named insufficient influencer performance data as their single biggest challenge in creator marketing, the top answer on the list. Read that as a want ad. The people with the budgets are telling you, out loud, that the thing they most wish they had is exactly the thing you can decide to give them: a clean, credible account of what your content actually did. The same research shows brands spreading creator content into retail media, CTV, and display, so the measurement problem is only getting harder for them as the surfaces multiply. The creator who arrives with their own numbers isn't just nice to work with. They're solving the buyer's number-one stated problem. (It's a marketer survey, partly paywalled, so treat it as a strong directional read on buyer behavior, not gospel.)

The number worth clocking from the streaming side is 2.3%, Tubi's share of total TV viewing in its strongest-ever showing on Nielsen's monthly Gauge report. Right on the back of that momentum, Tubi showed up at VidCon to actively recruit creators, which makes it the latest ad-supported streamer opening a distribution and licensing lane that runs straight around the traditional social feed. That's a real second door for your work, and a reminder that "where creators get used" is widening fast (which is the same force making measurement so hard for everyone). The caveat to keep straight: a 2.3% Gauge share is Tubi's platform momentum, not evidence that any individual creator is earning from it yet. Treat it as a lane worth watching and knocking on, not a guaranteed check.

What else shipped, and what to do about it.

Instagram expanded its "Your Algorithm" feature so viewers can now send category "quick signals" about Reels, telling the app to show them more or less of specific content types. Adam Mosseri framed it as giving people more direct control over their feed instead of leaving it all to the black box.

Why this matters for creators: This is a viewer-side control, so the impact on you is indirect, but it points at something real. As people actively tune their feeds by category, being unmistakably one clear thing gets more valuable, and being a bit of everything gets more expensive. If your account reads as "fitness, sometimes," you're easy for the algorithm (and now the viewer) to sort into the "less of this" pile. Sharpen your niche pillars so a viewer who wants your category keeps landing on you. That clarity does double duty, by the way. It's the same thing that makes your pitch legible to a brand, which is the whole theme of this issue.

TikTok rolled out branded microdramas through its Growth Max promotion offering, packaging episodic, serialized short-form as a format brands can buy into. Microdramas (bingeable, cliffhanger-driven vertical episodes) have been exploding in Asia, and TikTok is now selling them as ad inventory to Western advertisers.

Why this matters for creators: Be a little careful here, because this is an ad product first, and it doesn't automatically mean paid work landing in your lap. But it's a genuine signal about format. Brands are getting comfortable funding serialized, story-driven short-form, which is a very different muscle than the one-off viral clip. If you can actually write and sustain an episodic hook, that's a skill the money is starting to move toward. The move isn't to wait for TikTok to cast you. It's to test a serialized series on your own account now, so that when a brand goes shopping for someone who can carry a microdrama, you've already got the proof you can. (There's that word again.)

Meta announced WhatsApp usernames, letting people connect and be reached by an @handle instead of handing over a phone number. Meta is framing it mostly as a privacy and security upgrade for regular users.

Why this matters for creators: I'll be honest that the creator-hub angle here is my interpretation, not Meta's pitch, so don't overstate it. But the practical effect is real. The single biggest reason it was awkward to use WhatsApp as a community or fan channel was that it meant publishing your personal number to strangers. A username quietly removes that cost. That turns WhatsApp into a plausible owned-audience channel, a place you can reach your people directly without renting the connection back from a feed algorithm. If a chunk of your audience already lives on WhatsApp, this is worth an experiment, because a direct line to your fans is exactly the kind of asset that holds its value while everything else shifts.

Build the one-pager that answers the only question a brand actually has.

If this week bumped one job to the top of your list, make it this: build a proof-backed pitch one-pager, and stop leading with your follower count. The marketers literally told us this week (30% of them, top of the list) that their biggest problem is not being able to measure creator performance. So hand them the measurement. Be the creator who walks in already answering the question everyone else is too busy activating to ask.

Here's the whole thing, and it fits on one page. Up top, your niche in one clear line, so a brand knows exactly which "category" you are (the same clarity Instagram viewers are now tuning for). Then the part that actually matters: two or three receipts. For each past campaign, the brand, what you made, and what it drove, click-through, promo codes redeemed, signups, sales, saves, whatever your honest version of "this worked" is. If you've never tracked it, start now with your next post, a unique link or code costs nothing and turns your next collab into a data point. Screenshots beat adjectives. One real "this drove 1,200 clicks" is worth more than "highly engaged audience" every time.

And while you're building assets, milk your best work for more than one. This is where a tool like Riverside's new auto-generated newsletters from your recordings is handy (it's a fresh launch, so treat it as promising, not proven). The point underneath the tool is the real lesson: one recording should become a video, a set of clips, and an owned-audience asset like a newsletter, all pointing to a channel you control. That's how you build proof and an audience you own at the same time, instead of renting both back from a feed. The creators who get chosen out of the crowd of 50,000 aren't the ones shouting their reach. They're the ones who quietly show their work.

That's all for this week. Brands can turn on 50,000 of us at once now, which means the only real way to stand out is to be the one who can prove it worked. Go show your work. And if someone forwarded this to you, sign up to get your own issue every Thursday.