Matty Matheson built Just A Dash in his home kitchen. No network. No production budget. Just a chef, a camera crew, and a YouTube channel that started in 2019.
Netflix just acquired global exclusive rights to it. That's not a feel-good creator story. That's a signal flare.
At the same moment Netflix was moving on Matheson, Fox Entertainment launched Fox Creator Studios, a new division explicitly designed to develop original IP with creators like Gordon Ramsay and Rosanna Pansino. Fox CEO Rob Wade's framing was direct: "Creators are today's production companies, storytellers, and superstars."
Meanwhile, Night, the talent management firm behind creators like Kai Cenat, Sam & Colby, and Safiya Nygaard, closed a $70 million funding round to build, operate, and acquire businesses embedded in internet culture. Reed Duchscher, the company's founder, put his thesis plainly: the next generation of writers, producers, and directors is already on social platforms, and they will increasingly retain leverage over the intellectual property they create.
This is the landscape brands are operating in right now. And most of them haven't adjusted their playbook.
Creator economy M&A hit 81 deals in 2025, up 17% year-over-year, with average transaction sizes climbing. Publicis acquired Influential for $500 million. Bending Spoons bought Vimeo for $1.38 billion. The most sophisticated players in media, private equity, and entertainment have reached the same conclusion at the same time: creator content isn't marketing collateral. It's IP. And the window to get ahead of it is closing fast.
For most of the last decade, brands thought about creator partnerships in one of two ways: reach plays or engagement plays. You paid for eyeballs or for comments. Either way, you paid per post, shook hands, and moved on.
That model is being structurally disrupted in favor of long-term partnerships.
The shift isn't just that creators have gotten more expensive (though they have.) It's that the most valuable creators are being developed by entertainment companies, not courted by brand teams. Fox isn't buying a sponsored video from Gordon Ramsay. It's co-developing franchise-ready IP with him, with the production capabilities, ad infrastructure, and global distribution to scale what they build together.
That's a different kind of relationship. And it produces a different kind of asset.
Paul Towner, Head of Programming at Viral Nation, has watched this shift happen in real time. His read on where we are right now: "We are living in what I think is the most exciting time in entertainment's history. This is the golden age of TV, if you wanna call it that. And what is TV? TV is any screen you watch with anyone you think is talented, and you wanna spend your time with."
That redefinition matters enormously for brands. If any screen is a TV, and any talented person with an audience is a media property, then the brands that treat creator relationships like long-term media investments will compound their advantage over time. The ones still writing campaign briefs and cutting checks per post are renting attention they'll never own.
Studios understand something that most brand marketing teams haven't fully internalized yet: audiences follow people, not platforms. They follow Matty Matheson from YouTube to Netflix, not because Netflix is better, but because Matheson is who they came for.
That's audience loyalty as a portable asset. And entertainment companies are paying serious money to acquire it, lock it in, and build around it.
Fox Creator Studios' model is instructive. They're not just signing creators for sponsored content or one-off collaborations. They're building what they call "long-term cultural operating systems" with their creator partners. Fox handles distribution, production infrastructure, and advertising sales. Creators handle what they do better than anyone: build genuine communities that keep coming back.
The result is content that doesn't feel like advertising because, structurally, it isn't. It's programming.
Towner sees this as a genre shift, not just a production trend: "Vertical micro programming is becoming a very, very important part of the entertainment business. It isn't just a trend. It isn't just a great headline or clickbait. It is a new genre within entertainment programming."
For brands, this is the challenge. You're not just competing with other brands for creator attention. You're competing with Fox, Netflix, and well-capitalized PE firms who are offering creators something brands historically haven't: creative ownership, long-term development, and a seat at the table.
Drew Brucker has been on both sides of this. As a creator who's built digital products, turned down five-figure brand deals, and worked with companies as a partner rather than a vendor, he has a clear diagnosis of where most brand-creator relationships break down.
"Briefs are good, but they do more damage than people realize. You're essentially handing someone your version of the story and asking them to retell it. The best creator content comes from things the brand never thought to put in the brief," he said.
This isn't a creative philosophy. It's a structural problem with how most marketing organizations are set up to engage creators. Briefs exist to control the message. But control is what kills authenticity, and authenticity is what the audience actually responds to.
Brucker's framework for evaluating creator partnerships has evolved beyond the standard reach-and-engagement calculus: "In the early days, I used to evaluate creators by reach and engagement, just like everyone else. That's the trap I see brands fall into."
What he looks for now is what he calls trust density: the concentration of followers who would act on a recommendation without needing a second opinion. Reach tells you how many people saw something. Trust density tells you how many people did something because of it.
"A creator who consistently recommends good things builds something close to automatic trust in their audience. One bad recommendation craters it. Which is exactly why the best creators are selective, and exactly why that selectivity is the signal brands should be looking for."
Tyler Denk, CEO of creator-focused email platform Beehiiv, applies similar thinking when his company evaluates creator partnerships. For him, that means looking at open rate, click-through rate, replies, lifetime value, and conversion to paid subscriptions. For social platforms, the signal shifts toward view-through rate, comments, and what Denk calls "some sort of impression ratio or comment-to-impression ratio to show that the audience actually engages with this type of content, comes back for more of this type of content, and is actively seeking this content."
The common thread: both Brucker and Denk are looking for evidence of influence, not just evidence of reach. Those are very different ways to measure social media ROI.
What the collaboration model actually looks like
Brucker describes the gap between vendor relationships and genuine collaborations with unusual clarity:
"Most brands never find out what creators actually want because they never let the creator past the brief. Brands think creators want money and exposure. Sure, those matter. But most creators worth partnering with long-term want creative input. The best partnerships I've been part of gave me a seat at the table. I got to see the vision and shape the work, instead of just executing a brief someone wrote."
He's direct about what happens when that doesn't exist: "When a creator feels like a vendor, they produce vendor work. When they feel like a collaborator, the output looks different."
The practical version of this is giving creators real access, not just a product and a deadline. Brucker: "If you put a creator in the passenger seat for a few months, they'll say things about your product that your own marketing team hasn't even figured out how to articulate yet."
That takes a different kind of organizational trust. It requires sharing things before they're polished, which most marketing teams aren't built to do. But the payoff is content that compounds. For brands, the implication is significant. Sponsored posts are transactions. Long-term creator partnerships, structured with real creative access and even co-branded offline events, produce a compounding content asset. That's the difference between renting attention and building equity.
Towner frames the audience side of this with equal clarity: "No one goes home at the end of the day and goes, 'I wanna watch a brand deal.' No viewer does that."
But audiences absolutely go home wanting to watch creators they trust. The brand's job is to show up inside content that's already worth watching, not to produce content people tolerate. That's only possible when the creator has enough latitude to make something worth watching in the first place.
When it works, Towner says, the dynamic shifts entirely: "The brand moment becomes part of the experience. It's not something that the audience doesn't wanna watch. It's something they look forward to."
The brands that are getting this right share a few structural characteristics.
They identify creators based on trust density, not follower count. They look for evidence of organic product affinity before the partnership begins. They give creators access to roadmaps, real vision, and pre-launch context. And they measure success with behavioral metrics, not vanity metrics.
Perhaps most importantly, they commit for longer than a campaign cycle. One creator with six months of real access consistently outperforms ten creators handed a brief and a deadline. Almost nobody's doing it that way, which is exactly why there's still a competitive advantage available to the brands that do.
Building this kind of infrastructure requires partner-level thinking, not vendor-management thinking. It means vetting creators with the same rigor you'd apply to a co-development partner, because that's increasingly what they are. It means navigating rights, deal structures, and creative frameworks that most brand-side teams weren't set up to manage. And it means operating at the speed and scale of social, which moves faster than any traditional media buy.
The entertainment industry built the playbook. The smartest brands are now adapting it.
Fox Creator Studios, Netflix, Night, and the PE firms circling the creator economy aren't patient capital. They're moving with urgency because they understand what's at stake: the most valuable creators, the ones with real audiences and real trust, are becoming long-term strategic assets. Once they're locked into development deals with entertainment companies, they're not available for brand campaigns, no matter the budget.
The brands that win the next decade won't be the ones who spent the most on creator content. They'll be the ones who recognized early enough that creator relationships are IP relationships, and structured their partnerships accordingly.
The real question for any marketing leader right now isn't whether to invest in creators. It's whether the deals you're signing today are building anything you'll own tomorrow, or just generating posts that disappear into the feed.
One post at a time is a renting strategy. The studios and streamers figured that out. The question is whether your brand will, too.