Media Briefing: Why the Creator Upfront Is Taking a Different Shape

Creator upfronts are starting to take shape, but the economics behind them look very different from traditional TV.

Digiday examined how companies including Arcade, IAB and Spotter are experimenting with upfront-style events as creators become a bigger part of media buying conversations. Go Fish VP of Social Media Lauren Lyster pointed to a structural difference that complicates the comparison: creator inventory is effectively unlimited, isn’t seasonal and is distributed across hundreds or thousands of sellers.

That helps explain why the emerging creator upfront may center on smaller groups of marquee talent rather than trying to recreate the TV model across the broader creator economy.

Key Takeaways

Creator inventory doesn’t have the scarcity that defines traditional upfronts. TV and NewFront inventory is finite. Creator inventory, Lyster explained, is effectively unlimited and spread across hundreds or thousands of sellers, making the traditional upfront model difficult to apply across the creator market.

Smaller creator rosters could provide a more workable structure. Lyster expects talent agencies and creator networks to play a central role in developing creator upfronts, with smaller rosters rather than a market-wide approach. She suggested the model will likely apply to the top 1% of creators with massive followings rather than most participants in the creator economy.

Scarcity may come from creators limiting availability. Lyster said an upfront-style model could involve a select group of creators putting scarcity around their calendars and offering industry exclusivity. That would give advertisers more defined opportunities to plan and buy around sought-after talent.

Aggregation could make a fragmented market easier for buyers to access. Creator-focused companies can organize opportunities across multiple creators rather than requiring advertisers to pursue talent individually. Culture Genesis, for example, has introduced a programming schedule showing where its creators expect to appear around events including Coachella, the Grammys and NFL programming.

These events are also helping advertisers understand how creator media works. Digiday reports that IAB’s CreatorFronts focused on building better infrastructure around the creator economy and making creator investment easier for buyers to understand and support internally.

The Go Fish Perspective

Creator upfronts may make one part of the market easier for advertisers to buy without solving the fragmentation that makes creator media different from television.

The emerging model described by Digiday points toward curated rosters, programming calendars and selective exclusivity. Those mechanisms give buyers clearer packages and defined opportunities to plan around. They also favor creators large enough to create scarcity around their time and inventory, which is why Lyster expects an upfront-style model to apply primarily to a small group of marquee talent.

For marketers, that distinction is worth watching. A more organized sales process could reduce some of the friction involved in creator buying, while the broader creator market remains distributed across thousands of sellers. The development of creator upfronts may therefore tell us as much about how the industry is packaging its most valuable inventory as it does about creator media adopting practices from traditional media.

Read the Full Story

Digiday examines how creator companies are experimenting with upfront-style sales events, why the traditional TV model has limitations in creator media, and how agencies, networks and aggregators are developing approaches better suited to creator inventory.

Originally Published by Digiday: Some creators want to negotiate deals like TV networks.