$30B Is Being Spent on Creators Every Year. Most Brands Are Doing It Wrong.
This Is How to Work With Creators in 2026 and Why We Still Turn Down 98% of Brands that Come Inbound.
Last week Swan Beauty sponsored Acquired Style’s bachelorette party and walked away with over 20M+ impressions and 1.2M+ engagements, according to People Brands and Things, and the internet spent days trying to reverse engineer the deal. That should tell you everything you need to know about where brand spend is going right now, because when you zoom out, this is not about one creator or one campaign, it’s a signal that the way brands and creators work together has already changed, and most brands are still operating on a model that no longer works.
Over the last two months, I’ve turned down or walked away from multiple partnerships willing to pay me over
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