Whalar Group grew from an influencer agency to a creator economy holding company

Dozens of content creators, professional athletes, Hollywood producers and ad industry executives rubbed elbows at a two-day festival in February celebrating the opening of Whalar Group’s first physical campus, The Lighthouse, in Venice, California. The blending of those once disparate worlds—the booming creator economy and the traditional media and entertainment industry—at The Lighthouse’s grand opening event was the culmination of nearly a decade of efforts by Whalar Group to uplift creators and prove their power to skeptical advertisers. “[Advertisers] are still a little stuck in the tradition of ‘build a TV ad, and it gets distributed across social media.’ But slowly but surely, they’re coming to the people who are social media natives and who are experts in the creative that delivers the best results across social media: creators,” Whalar Group co-founder and co-CEO James Street told Ad Age. “That’s the shift we’re trying to create in the industry.” See all of Ad Age’s 2025 Agency A-List winners here In 2024, Whalar Group made significant headway with the goal of centering creators in more marketing campaigns and brand social strategies. The company secured 41 new client wins, including Nike, Crocs, Unilever, Neutrogena, Disney and Apple Mac. For two of its new clients, NBCUniversal’s streaming platform Peacock and Nestlé Health Science, Whalar is their creator agency of record, said Jo Cronk, North America president of Whalar agency. That surge of new business, coupled with growing, eight-figure investments from existing clients such as Amazon, Spotify and Google, drove Whalar Group’s revenue up 19% to $125 million in 2024, according to the company. While several influencer marketing agencies have been snapped up by holding companies in the past few years, Whalar countered that trend by restructuring its services into a holding company model encompassing six offerings: Whalar Agency, Whalar Group’s social and creator marketing shop; Sixteenth, the company’s talent management arm (formerly known as Whalar Talent, but renamed after a merger with U.K. talent management company Sixteenth in October 2024); Moby Ventures, its creator brand and product incubator; Foam, Whalar Group’s talent management software unit; Umi Games, its in-game marketing studio; and The Lighthouse, the company’s physical campuses for creator collaboration and events. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Sixteenth (@sixteenthtalent) The company adopted the “Whalar Group” name in April 2024 and now positions itself as a “creator economy company,” co-founder and co-CEO Neil Waller said. “People were always searching for labels on what we were, like ‘Are you an advertising agency? Are you a talent management business?’” he said. “But the piece that every single part of our group touches is helping creators build their careers. In the creator economy, the only word before ‘economy’ is ‘creator,’ so if you’re not building around and supporting creators, there’s not a lot left to it.” Whalar similarly puts creators at the core of its work with brands, often tapping creators to participate in focus groups for brand clients, attend meetings with those clients and even assist with product development and package design, Waller said. Nowhere was that creator-led approach more apparent last year than Whalar’s expanded partnership with the NFL and YouTube for the second year of the league’s “Creator of the Week” program. View this post on Instagram A post shared by NFL (@nfl) The program, which allows creators to film content from the sidelines, interview NFL players and share other exclusive content with their online audiences, has played a pivotal role in the league’s strategy to attract a broader, younger and more international audience, Ian Trombetta, the NFL’s senior VP of social, influencer and content marketing, previously told Ad Age. In 2024 alone, the program generated more than 160 million impressions, nearly 51 million views and more than 2.2 million engagements across videos from dozens of creators. Whalar Group’s Moby Ventures arm also led the launch of lifestyle creator Ashley Alexander’s brand Nami Matcha in July 2024. Its first wave of matcha products sold out in just 12 hours among Alexander’s 38,000 “Matcha Mob” superfans, who were given early access to the launch, and drove $100,000 in sales in just 43 minutes. Less than a year since its launch, Nami Matcha has already reached six figures in gross product sales. View this post on Instagram A post shared by nami matcha (@namimatcha) Whalar Group also inked a partnership with iHeart Media last year to help creators start podcasts on the network or grow their existing radio shows or podcasts, as well as connect advertisers to those creators. The company collaborated with the Tribeca Film Festival to introduce a new creator-oriented vertical last June, too—both examples of Whalar Group’s aim to break down the wall dividing creators and traditional media. “It’s really about trying to put the creators on a stage in these arenas and show that this is an industry that deserves to be here,” Waller said. See all of Ad Age’s 2025 Agency A-List winners here

Whalar Group grew from an influencer agency to a creator economy holding company

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