Some creators want to negotiate deals like TV networks
Digiday ·
Creators have been brought onto traditional upfronts within the last year, but it's looking like they're ready for their own show.
Last week, European creator management firm Arcade held the region’s first-ever media upfront in London. It’s a sign of where the creator economy is headed: over the last year, creators have been pulled into TV and streamers’ upfront and NewFronts negotiations, while companies like Spotter, Forbes, Walmart, and the International Advertising Bureau (IAB) have held their own creator-centric versions of the traditional media sales event.
Those experiments are exposing a structural problem: the traditional TV upfront model doesn’t map neatly onto the creator economy. Creator inventory is effectively unlimited and scattered across thousands of channels, so the creator upfront negotiations that are starting to emerge are being built by creator-first firms and aggregators around small rosters of marquee talent, not the broader creator economy.
Arcade’s Sept. 17 event was both a sales pitch for several of its biggest creators and the company’s take on the future of creator media. IAB’s CreatorFronts leaned more toward a state-of-the-market update and the limitations of the creator economy’s half-built infrastructure. Spotter’s CTV event earlier this year was about selling its YouTube inventory.
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