Your Film Doesn’t Need a Trailer. It Needs a Creator.

What Does Creator Marketing 2.0 look like?

Last week, I jumped headfirst into the Creator Economy frenzy, attending a Night-Before-VidCon party hosted by creator-focused investment firm RockWater Industries and Creator Economy Jobs (we can guess what they do). The event was a great mix of people building the creator economy infrastructure — investors, talent managers, marketing executives, and platform founders. And I seemed to be the only one representing what felt like a dying breed: traditional media.

To be honest, it took a few minutes to catch my Creator Economy sea legs. My first conversation — before I even reached the bar, mind you — was with a tech founder in a fedora whose platform facilitated creator-brand equity deals. “We’re the on-ramps and off-ramps of the creator partnership ecosystem, just here to reduce friction and get all stakeholders moving the same direction.” Uh-huh. Just as I was on the verge of grasping what his company actually did, his speech pattern ramped up a notch, hitting a cadence somewhere between Aggressive Elevator Pitch and My App Will Fight You.

I kindly excused myself, got a drink, and looked for a friendlier face.

The rest of the evening was great. I chatted with some very ambitious, seemingly successful folks, all of whom were navigating this admittedly shifting landscape. There was a palpable energy in the place, not just because everyone was in town for this massive Creator-focused conference, but for the industry in general. As I wrote about following Sundance this year, the energy and enthusiasm coming from the Creator Economy is not just headlines about Mr. Beast, Ms. Rachel and Dar Mann. The folks working behind the scenes and building to the tools for success are firm believers, excited about all the opportunities in front of them. It’s pretty cool to be around, especially juxtaposed to the dour vibe at traditional media gatherings right now.

With each interaction, I took the opportunity to test the waters of the potential impeding merger of tradition and creator-led media, floating ideas about how independent film could tap into the creator economy's massive audiences. The conversations were encouraging—there's genuine interest in bridging these worlds, and a seeming an openness to bring the OG content creators (filmmakers) into the lush gardens of the creator economy.

The EP Partnership Vision

The idea that kept generating excitement was my thought about treating creators less like traditional influencer marketing hires and more like executive producers. In speaking with one Creator Marketing strategist who works with major studios like Disney and Universal, the current practice of paying a creator to post once or twice when your film is complete, or devising some kind of social stunt, was yielding inconsistent, if not bad, results.

This appears to be a very silly creator “activation” for Barbie. I wonder how many of his followers bought a ticket to the film?

I proposed the idea of bringing creators in early as storytelling partners for the film, and incentivizing their promotion with backend equity. This caught his attention: a creator with 2 million engaged followers becomes invested in your film's success from development through release. They're not just posting about your movie—they're helping shape it, document the process, and create content that makes their audience feel part of the journey.

I floated the idea to a few other folks: a creator talent agent, a manager, another tech founder, and a a group of fractional marketers (this was a new job I had never heard of — just means they do marketing for different clients. The more you know!) The responses were enthusiastic all around — and some of them were astonished this wasn’t already happening.

The Conversion Problem

Well, it is happening!

Ben Odell

even laid out this exact model in his latest

Open Gardens

post about how to finance a YouTube show:

Step one: leverage other people’s distribution first…Partner with a creator who has an audience. If you’re credible, you have currency. Dan Jinks won an Oscar; Nebula gave him a show on their platform to oversee because of that. If David Bernad (The White Lotus) wanted to make micro-dramas tomorrow, big creators would answer the call.

But then came the reality check: creator audiences don't necessarily convert to paying customers. Turns out, even when creators have equity stakes in brands they promote, their followers often don't translate into purchasers. It's a pattern that's emerged across industries, from consumer products to streaming services. The seemingly powerful relationship that makes creator marketing feel so powerful doesn't automatically translate into transactional behavior.

For independent filmmakers, this could be a particularly brutal hurdle to overcome. You might partner with a creator who has built an audience of millions, give them meaningful equity in your project, and still struggle to fill theaters or drive digital rentals.

The Engagement Gap and the Opportunity Ahead

One potential solution opened my eyes. I spoke with an entrepreneur whose company uses AI to respond to creators' DMs and aggregates data from those interactions. His insight was simple but profound: creators are losing enormous engagement by failing to respond to comments and direct messages from fans.

A DM represents active interest—someone taking the extra step to reach out directly. But most creators, even with smaller audiences, can't keep up with the volume. Meanwhile, these engaged users represent the most convertible segment of any creator's audience. The data his company collects reveals patterns about which followers are most likely to take action beyond just consuming content.

For independent filmmakers shut out of traditional distribution, creator partnerships represent a massive potential unlock. The audiences are there, the engagement exists, and the economics of revenue sharing can work for both parties. But realizing that potential requires going deeper than just leveraging a creator's reach. It means actively cultivating audience feedback, tracking engagement patterns, and building systems to convert parasocial relationships into transactional ones.

This is ChatGPT’s best attempt at illustrating the potentially positive relationship between filmmaker and creator (don’t worry, human illustrators — your jobs are still VERY SAFE!). But I needed a cover image for this post, so here we are.

Filmmakers currently look for big name celebrities to EP their films. These attachments appease one audience: the film and television industry (more specifically, studios and awards voters). They seldom do anything to attract actual audience, because those celebrities don’t have active relationships with their fans. Creators, on the other hand, have incredible audience development infrastructure. Independent film needs to figure out how to plug into it—not just as a marketing channel, but as a genuine partnership model that bridges the gap between attention and action.

It's a step in the right direction, but we're still far from an airtight solution. The question isn't whether creators can help independent films find audiences. It's whether we can build the systems to turn those audiences into paying customers.