Content creators are flipping the traditional agency model on its head, with a growing number of shops recruiting creators as in-house creatives or strategists to help meet a surge in demand from clients to create viral content—particularly on TikTok. 

“[Creators] are the modern way in which we have to build production teams,” said Jamie Falkowski, chief creative officer at Day One Agency. Over the past few years, the creative agency has hired several in-house creators to meet soaring TikTok content needs from clients such as Chipotle and Converse, and to keep up with the platform’s rapid trend cycle, he said. 

“When you have to make such a huge volume of short-form [videos] to be able to reach all the different [internet] niches and to be able to show up in all these different spaces for brands, we can’t just go in and do a two-day shoot that delivers one 30-second video,” Falkowski said. “It’s much more effective to go and create a whole family of assets with a number of creators.”

More: How Day One Agency immerses brands in internet culture

Though dozens of agencies with clients seeking to reach young consumers through TikTok are now hiring creators as full-time employees or freelancers, many of them have only begun doing so within the past year or so. As recently as 2021, just two agencies—Dentsu Creative and VaynerMedia—had incorporated content creators into their full-time staff, said Krystle Watler, TikTok’s head of creative agency partnerships, North America. “Now, I can’t even list [the agencies] off for you, because so many of them are leaning this way,” she said. 

Just last week, Razorfish launched its “Razorfish Creator Colab,” which leverages in-house creators as social strategists and video content producers. For the Publicis Groupe agency, the new offering isn’t only about streamlining the creation of TikTok videos but also harnessing the creators’ familiarity with platform trends and content formats that perform well on TikTok,  Cristina Lawrence, Razorfish’s executive VP of consumer and content experience, said in the agency’s announcement. 

In December 2022, Edelman began connecting clients such as Marshalls and TJ Maxx to a roster of creators to produce videos for those brands’ TikTok channels through its “Creator Bench” program. As of last May, the firm was working with about 70 creators on the program. 

Many agencies and brands now recognize the power of creator content. Nearly nine out of 10 advertisers surveyed by the Interactive Advertising Bureau “feel positive about creator content,” and 92% consider content from creators to be a “high-quality channel.” And 44% of those surveyed advertisers plan to up their spending on creator content this year by an average of 25%, per IAB's report—which makes sense, since nearly two in five consumers reported watching more creator content in 2023 than in 2022, according to the same report. 

Also read: Creator and influencer trends for brand marketers

Seeing that shift, Dentsu Creative expanded its “Social Creative Lab”—a team of copywriters, video editors, motion graphics designers, art directors and other creatives—over the past three-and-a-half years to include roughly 15 full-time content creators, said Bridget Jewell, executive creative director at the agency. Eleven of those creators—roughly one-eighth of the Social Creative Lab’s 80-person team—are tasked specifically with creating TikTok videos for Dentsu clients such as Burger King and 7-Eleven, she said.

“Small nuances in the way creators think and their focus on what the audience is going to react to instead of what the brand is trying to say is really, really helpful … instead of just treating [social] from a brand perspective, which is more like the new TV, where you’re pushing messages at consumers,” said Jewell.

A new career for creators

Despite agencies’ surging interest in establishing in-house creator teams, most creators are unaware that working at an agency is even an option for them. And though they’re skilled in creating TikTok content, they’re far less familiar with agency fundamentals such as deciphering a client brief, developing a storyboard—or even simply working with a team to create video content, since many creators produce their videos on their own. 

That’s why when The One Club for Creativity began hearing from agency CEOs and other executives that they were struggling to attract creators as full-time employees, the nonprofit organization set out to design a program to introduce creators to the possibility of a career in advertising and train them for agency roles. The One Club launched the tuition-free, 20-week-long program, called the ONE Creator Lab, last fall in partnership with TikTok and seven agencies: Dentsu, Ogilvy, Day One Agency, VML, Deutsch LA, ATTN: and Whalar.

Nearly 800 creators applied for the 22 spots in the ONE Creator Lab’s first iteration in the fall, and its second class begins in April. 

“I was like, ‘I think that I can turn this into a career—I just don't know how.’ And then in came ONE Creator Lab to show me,” said Jamar Rogers, a creator and musician who was part of the program’s first class of 22 creators, who graduated at the end of February. “I already knew how to edit. I already knew how to tell a story. I knew how to stop the scroll and how to go viral. But now I can actually monetize this, and I did not know that that was actually a viable option until now.”

The ONE Creator Lab effectively served as an advertising crash course for Rogers and his peers, teaching them about industry concepts such as paid and earned media, the psychology of advertising and how to conduct the ideation process—“so much that was completely off my radar,” Rogers said. The creators also produced TikTok videos based on briefs from the clients of the agency executives teaching the program’s classes, including Day One Agency’s Falkowski. And some of those videos were actually posted to the clients’ social channels, said Molly Crossin, chief growth officer at The One Club. 

Since graduating from the program, Rogers has begun freelancing for an ad agency in Los Angeles and is in talks with a few businesses in the city about potentially running their social media accounts, he said. And his classmate Ben Rhinesmith, a comedian and content creator, is currently applying for agency roles in content creation and brand strategy, Rhinesmith said. 

“Coming into this I never I never really considered [working for an agency],” he said. “It really was kind of eye-opening to see like, ‘Wow, a lot of these writing and content creation skills really translate over into the agency world.’ So, I’m trying to apply a lot of these skills to my own [social] content … I’m also definitely very interested in pursuing agency and brand work in-house, full-time.” 

Catching up with culture

Unlike the ONE Creator Lab, the curricula at most portfolio schools haven’t caught up to the new agency model focused on culturally relevant social content and quick timelines, said TikTok’s Watler. Many agencies are contending with a talent gap as ad school grads continue to lack training in modern agency needs such as short-form video production, she said. 

For agencies, “it’s about having talent that is not just copywriters or art directors coming up with 30-second TV spots,” she said. “In order to stay fresh and continue to solve modern-day brand challenges on new platforms, we need to have talent that’s tapped in. It’s not about saying one [type of] talent is better than the other, but it is about diversifying your talent and ensuring that you’re future-proofing your agency for today’s marketing needs.”

Taking on a full-time role at an agency is also a way for creators to future-proof. Though the number of Gen Zers interested in a full-time career in content creation continues to climb—57% of Gen Zers said they would become influencers if given the chance in a recent Morning Consult survey—few creators earn a viable income from content creation alone. Nearly half (46%) of full-time creators earn less than $1,000 per year, according to a report from Linktree, and only about 12% make at least $50,000 annually.

“We kept coming back to that stat that only 12% of creators make a living wage,” The One Club’s Crossin said. “So, we were like, ‘How can we allow creators to leverage their talent and skill that they clearly have in career track positions?’ And [the answer] is advertising.”