Meet the CEO Closing the Billion Dollar Creator Money Gap (Arthur Leopold, Agentio)

0:00Welcome to Creator Upload, your Creator Economy podcast. I'm Lauren Schnipper. And I'm Joshua Cohen. Lauren. What? Do you know what carcinization is? No. It sounds menacing, right? Yeah. It was like carcinagic. What is that? Isn't that something? I feel like I'm watching a CSI right now. Go on. It's close to that. And also maybe equally menacing, if not more menacing. Sure. Carcinization is an evolutionary pattern where very different crustaceans independently evolve into a crab-like body shape over time. Oh. Have you heard about this? No, but I can't wait to see where this is going. Really thrilled.

0:39Really thrilled about the through line you're about to, the needle you're about to thread here. It's this idea of convergent evolution where unrelated species arrive at the same solution. So it's like crabs have this great form. form. They have a flat and wide body, a short and tucked under abdomen, and strong claws, which make them especially capable at walking on seafloors, squeezing in the crevices, and for defense and stability. Okay, great. Other animals that weren't crabs looked at crabs and were like, hey, I want me some of those. Sure. So over millennia evolved into crabs, including king crabs, porcelain crabs, hairy stone crabs, coconut crabs, false crabs, various squat lobsters.

1:18Stone crabs are delicious. Go on. And Australian sponge crabs. We all call these crabs because they evolved into crab-like beings over thousands, millions of years. Sure. And I think we're basically experiencing the same thing with online video and digital media. And there's the needle thread. Go. The needle has been threaded. There's this carcinization. Tell us how. Yes. There's this carcinization where just basically everything is becoming TikTok. Disney Plus being the latest. So they're playing copycat by announcing an upcoming feed that will deliver vertical videos in a TikTok style infinitely scrolling array.

2:01They unveiled this new vertical feed at CES in Las Vegas where Disney EVP of product management Aaron Teague said, quote, but we're obviously thinking about integrating vertical video in ways that are native to core user behaviors. So it won't be kind of a disjointed random experience. End quote. Definition is definitely going to be a disjointed experience. And we're going to try to make it not one. Go on. 100%. And this just shows like all the different ways where all these different legacy media companies are scrambling to get in front of all audience, but particularly younger audience that are used to vertical scrolling short form videos of infinite feeds.

2:43And other kind of things that have been happening in this ecosystem where legacy companies have tried to do new things to get in front of this audience. It's also been Paramount. They had these secret screenings recently where they invited a bunch of influencers into a movie theater. Didn't tell them what movie they were going to see, but made it like this really exclusive experience. Okay. And then showed them the movie Primate. What's Primate? Exactly. What is that? It's a horror flick. Terrible. Produced by Paramount. I hate horror movies. But they're basically like trying to make theaters seem cool and fun and hip again and exclusive and all the influencers that were there.

3:23Then obviously promoting it and talking about their experience there. I think you kind of deviated from our crab analogy in terms of like. 100%. There are some offshoots. Yeah. It went into how just these different ways legacy media companies are trying to like new things to just get in front of kids these days. Right. Yeah. Well, I mean, we know that. And I mean, like, this is not new, right? Like when I was at Instagram famously, they, you know, copied stories. And like I it was the most I cannot even begin to describe how clandestine this operation was that they were going to unveil stories.

3:56It was like, and frankly, how it was handled from a marketing standpoint was brilliant because historically people would be like, what? I don't know what you're talking about. We made this up ourselves or we didn't steal it from anybody. Whereas in this case, Kevin Systrom was very much like, yep. It was like the first of us kind of like, yep, Snapchat created this. We, props to them. We realized that we needed on our platform. and just sort of like, you know, call out the elephant in the room right away. And then everybody kind of moved on as opposed to like, well, what do you think about the fact that you stole it from Snapchat?

4:28You know, and ever since then, I think everybody's just adopted that. Like, yep, we've got to do short form because everybody's like watching short form. It's like it is what it is. And so I think it's also like if you think about it, and not to say that this is going to take away from TikTok's market share, but like it proves that like at the end of the day, tech is not really the differentiator because people can oftentimes just copy the tech. And so you have to figure out what else your differentiator is. They're doing this on Netflix, too, which I'm just like, I can't. It's just everywhere.

4:57None of us here are going to be able to have more than like a two word conversation. And like, like talk about an evolution of species. Like literally a hundred years from now, we're going to like literally just blink at each other and walk away because we can't even say two words to each other. So excited about that. It is pretty exciting. I've consumed movies in two minute increments, maybe like a quarter of them at a time. You've been double speeding for like years. I cannot double speed. Like I'm at 1.5. Ideally, like if I have the time, I'm a 1.2-er because it decreases the hem and haws as people are probably listening to this on like 2.5 speed because of all of the hemming and hawing I do.

5:32But 2x is dizzying to me. But you can't do that on shorts. What I would love is a short speed, vertically scrolling, infinite video that I can just make at a 2x speed and not go to each individual video and re-speed it. That's nauseating, troubling. Yeah, it'd be a fan. It's like, how short, how little time do you have? I'd love it. It'd be amazing. What do you get when you get, do you get the how many hours you've spent on your phone every week notifications? No, I don't pay attention to it anymore. But like, what would you get? Like, what are we looking at here? 100? How many hours a day? 23?

6:11Like, what are we talking? Several. It just says several. Uh-huh. It's just, there were the numbers. There's no numbers to describe for you, too. It's just several. Okay, great. But, like, in that vein, Lauren, some people, they need a little bit of a break, a little bit of a reminder, some stopgaps to keep them from infinitely scrolling through short-form videos. and youtube just made an announcement that hey for parents with teenage kids it's got your back in a blog post entitled new ways to support teens and families on youtube jennifer flannery o 'connor who's the vice president of product management at youtube laid out a bunch of new features that parents can utilize to both monitor and limit their children's accounts including this is the That's a big one.

6:57Parents can now set a time limit on how long teens scroll shorts. And soon they'll be able to set the shorts limit to zero, aka no shorts at all. Well, it's so interesting because this will surprise no one that like I am somebody who is very, you know, strict with, you know, screen time and all that sort of stuff. And I've sort of galvanized. She's arrived, kid. She's galvanized other parents at the school around this topic and actually hosted a coffee the other day about this and talking to a bunch of like minded parents. And what's really nice about it is a lot of people feel really alone with like wanting to limit or put controls on their kids screen time.

7:34But a lot of people don't know how to use this. So one woman told me a story. This didn't happen to her. It happened to a friend of hers. But like she has a daughter who like all of a sudden was sleeping like all day long and like they didn't know what was wrong with her. They take her to the emergency room. They do all these tests for days. And all the doctors are like, I don't know, man, she's fine. Give her more vegetables. And I'm like, what are you talking about? Take her home. And like this kind of shows what the parental involvement. Also, like Josh take notes. They find a bunch of chargers in the kids bathroom.

8:02Well, she had been sneaking the iPad in the middle of the night. She had been on the iPad all night. Now, I have so many questions around this. Number one, let's just start with a lock code to get in the iPad, like basic stuff, guys. But to your point, you can put time limits on these apps. You can cut off internet on specific devices. There are ways in which to do this. And most people don't know. So the fact that YouTube is coming out with this, it's only as good as they are effective in communicating how do you do this stuff. And parents are dying for it. And kids are suffering as a result of these things.

8:38And I mean, this kid was up what they didn't know. Of course, I told my kids the story and my older mom was like, she's so lucky.

8:47Kids want more screen time in any way they can. I'll tell you what, though, trying to navigate the parental controls on any type of Apple product, it becomes immediately apparent that Tim Cook has no children. Really? Really? If he did, they would be it's this Byzantine like conduit that you have to go through to figure out how to link your account to your kid's account and then which permissions you need on what devices. It's incredibly. It's complicated. Not relaxing. No, it's and it's it's funny because my husband has has said like, you know, like it's you are aware he's he's an Android guy.

9:24And he has said that, like, this is so much easier on the Google devices to do things like this. So, yeah. Sundar's got kids. Sundars gets it. Neil Mohan's got some kids. Got some kids. Tim Cook, no kids. No kids. Very hard to put up some parental controls on iPhones. I saw some Instagram the other day, speaking of social media, about how, like, stop shaming people because they don't have kids and telling them their lives are not stressful. And I'm like, fuck those people. Their lives are not stressful. I'm fine with everybody's life being stressful. I'm just, I'm Lauren Moore. I'm using this as just some evidence.

9:56Sorry. Because Tim Cook doesn't have children in his immediate life. Listen, he doesn't know the pains that parents have. I'm all I'm all like Josh, like subtly shame. So there's no shame. Yeah, no, no, no. Everybody has a stressful life. Sure. It's hard. Everybody has an equal opportunity to a stressful life. Let's put it that way. That's so nice. You're so. Oh, wow. All right. On that note, speaking of stressful, not stressful, we are so excited because today we are having Arthur Leopold on the podcast. He's the CEO and co-founder of Agentio, and they just released the ultimate 2026 YouTube creator marketing playbook.

10:35What an analysis of 10 ,000 plus YouTube integrations run on Agentio reveals about the right way to run and scale YouTube creator marketing programs. And there's some very, very interesting findings. So super excited to talk to him. Let's get into it. Arthur Leopold, welcome to Creator Upload. So happy to be here. Long time listener, first time caller. Oh, my gosh. As everybody knows, we only have fans on, so this is perfect. So before we get into Agentio's report, which is called the Ultimate 2026 YouTube Creator Marketing Playbook, which I actually love so much of the insights in here. Can you just tell the folks a little bit about Agentio, like what you guys do?

11:14What's the sort of log line? Agentio is a platform that automates the buying of creator integrations for brands. So prior to Argentio, you had brands who had to deal with all the complexity, all the friction, all the opacity of buying creator content. And we built a platform, thanks to LLMs, that makes buying creator content as easy as buying a Meta ad or a Google ad for a brand. And what this does in practice, it means that the very best brands in the country, from Uber and DoorDash and Skims, Olipop, Fiore, Farmer's Dog, Bombas, you name it, they're able to actually deploy paid media budgets to creators because of how easy it is to now, for the first time, buy creator content.

12:00So prior to Argentio, you'd have to go through all this negotiation, all these point solutions, try to find the right creators. And it's constrained the entire space. So you have about$10 billion of brand spend running directly from brands to creators. But you have$800 billion of spend running through Meta, through Google, through YouTube, through TikTok. 50 % of content consumption today happens through creator content. So about half of the content we consume is us watching creators. But for the first time, there's this huge dislocation where 50 % of attention and consumption is happening, but only 2 % of the ad spend is actually running through creators.

12:48So we are creating the bridge, the divide, to enable brands to partner with creators in a frictionless way and shift hundreds of billions of dollars to creators. We've started with YouTube as our wedge, as the first place for us to partner with creators. We've just put out a first-of-its-kind report that looks at over 10 ,000 YouTube integrations, where we also have the performance data and the first-party data from creators to help both brands, creators, and their teams more effectively partner with creators for long-term partnerships. Okay, this is fascinating. And before we get into the report, just because I'm a sucker for like a platform and what you guys have built.

13:28So just to sort of dumb it down for let's just say me, you're effectively helping brands find their creators and then spend with them on the platforms right now, the platform first platform being YouTube. So I found my creator I want to work with and I want to buy on YouTube through their channel. I can do that all through your platform or do I don't have to then go separately to YouTube to sort of spend against it? Is that accurate? it? Exactly. So we have brands that can spend or that have spent half a million dollars or seven figures, and they'll fill those budgets in a matter of hours, something that would typically take an influencer team or in-house team many, many months to do.

14:05So very similar to what, you know, Google and the trade desk did to direct ad buying, direct media buying 20 years ago. We're taking that approach and enabling brands to buy creator content in a frictionless way. So this is the big differentiators that you can spend directly with the platform through you? Directly with the creators. So just last year, we paid out tens of millions of dollars to creators. This year, we'll pay out hundreds of millions of dollars to creators. And these are new budgets. These are paid media budgets. They're not influencer budgets that we're able to tap into. And the only reason we're able to tap into those budgets is because it's so easy for brands to now work with the best creators in the world.

14:45Creators like Rhett and Lane. But then if they want to boost those spends on YouTube, do they do that through you or do they go to YouTube? They would go to YouTube to do it. They can license the assets. But for other platforms, they do the buying through Agenteo for paid ads. Got it. Okay, awesome. Thank you for that. Okay, so let's get into the report. The ultimate 2026 YouTube creator marketing playbook. So really interesting findings here. So your report suggests that not only is YouTube specifically like the most trusted source for creator marketing, but it's all about impact over time, which is like the thing that I thought was like kind of the most fascinating thing here.

15:21Because kind of historically, brands would sort of one off with creators, right? And then they'd be like, why don't I have like a million conversions? And I think there's been this sort of very not loud enough drumbeat. Like you've got to like have a longer term relationship with the creator. You've got it like you wouldn't have Michael Jordan wear shoes one game. You have them wear the shoes the entire season. So can you talk to us a little bit about what you guys mean by this sort of like impact over time? The beauty of partnering with creators on YouTube is that you're essentially buying the real estate, right?

15:51The integration that a brand does with a creator lives essentially indefinitely on the platform. And we hear from so many of our partners who partnered with creators many years ago that some of those creators are still driving conversions many years later. The challenge, however is that it's been too hard historically for brands to buy creative content so brands have been spending in these small sort of uh campaign specific budgets rather than always on spend by making it much easier for brands to buy creative content these integrations that means that we can get evergreen ad dollars and that means that brands are much more open to partnering with creators for a longer period of time and creators now better understand how they should price themselves and what market rates are and why a certain brand is a great potential fit for a creator thanks to lms and the technology that we've built what we found is that on average brands need to spend across about 10 verticals if they want to see the best performance on youtube So what that means is for a very popular green supplements brand, they had historically worked with a lot of health and wellness creators.

17:07But the LLM, the Argentio platform, identified a lobster fisherman in Maine named Jacob Knowles. And Jacob Knowles had talked about getting sick often. He's on a boat for 12 hours a day. But we also have all the ad performance data across hundreds and hundreds of the world's best brands who spend on Argentio. And we were able to identify that he had performed well for other subscription products. And since every creator connects their social accounts to Argentio, his audience was fully aligned with what the brand was looking to target. So you had the optimal content type, the right audience, and the right type of creator.

17:50It was a non-obvious match. But now Jacob Knowles has been working with this company for a year and a half, and he's been their top converter. So these evergreen budgets mean that brands can invest much longer term into new verticals and across creators for longer term partnerships. So, yeah. So what I'm hearing, it's like non-obvious on paper kind of partnerships that like what, you know, Agencio can sort of help find for creators. But also what I was really excited is I read a stat here of 40 % of views and 30 % of clicks happen 30 plus days after a video goes live. So thinking about things from a longer term perspective, which I think historically people would think about in other forms of media, but not with creators because it's so immediate.

18:34And, you know, we as an industry were probably kind of a bit responsible for that. But thinking about it from a longer-term way, and also, correct me if I'm wrong, but also, like, to your point about the fishermen, like, working with them in a longer-term capacity, not like a one-off capacity, and really building something with people, creators that, based on data, kind of makes sense from a longer-term perspective. Is that fair to say? Yeah, absolutely. The head of performance marketing at Coterie likes to use a great analogy of a brand needs to essentially buy the monopoly board. And the creators, you identify the creators, you identify the verticals, you work with them a couple times, you work with them at efficient rates.

19:16and when they perform, then you're continuously adding more creators within that vertical. And the views continue to compound over time. So you're building essentially this bench, right? Like the first time around the monopoly board of creators who are performing well for you, who are driving consistent views, and you're continuing to invest across new channels. That is a long-term view of a channel. It's a very media focused view of buying a channel. it's not what historically has been thought of when buying YouTube integrations. Can we talk a little bit and then Josh will jump in, but can we talk a little bit about you had some sort of findings as it relates to macro creators versus micro creators.

19:59A lot of talk about micro creators and how you define that. People have different variations of that. But a lot of times micro creators can lead to a lot of conversion because they've got such dedicated audiences because it's sort of smaller versus what can be expected. from like a macro creator. Can you talk a little bit about those two kind of buckets? We do not care at all about subscribers. And the old ways of like partnering with influencers, people would consider subscribers or followers. It's meaningless, right? These are numbers that can be gained. What is most important is, is the creator consistently driving an audience to watch their content?

20:40Do they have a true parasocial or a true relationship with their audience? And if they do, then they're able to actually convert on behalf of brands. And if they convert, then they can partner with brands on a much longer term basis. What we see today is that creators who have typically between 25 ,000 and 50 ,000 views, they'll drive the most efficient conversions on behalf of brands because the audience is really tight. whereas with macro creators youtube is more likely to recommend the video and and they're more likely to actually hit a larger audience and that means that the audience might be more international it might be a new audience that's learning about this creator and because of that they're less likely to convert but they can drive incredible top of funnel reach so for media buyer they want they think about the entire funnel right they want top of funnel reach and awareness They want consideration, which is the middle of the funnel, and then they want to actually convert and have these creators in the content lead to people going and buying the product or trying the product that the creator is discussing.

21:52So what we recommend for brands is to have a full funnel approach where they're working with these larger creators who, on a per view basis, are much more efficient. So the CPM is going to be more efficient. It's going to be cheaper. but they're getting larger reach they're not able to convert as well and then also work with mid-tier and micro creators to help bring people through the funnel through these niche audiences so it is very much a full funnel approach and you know especially since i know you have creators and managers and agency folks who um love the love the show and listen to it uh it's very important to consider the marketing funnel when trying to pitch creators because oftentimes creators are pitched as an integration and a price tag associated with the integration rather than the likely outcome that the creator could drive for a brand and because of this like old school sort of like unscientific finger in the air way of pitching it constrains the space it means that the real capital, which are performance media, paid media dollars, doesn't shift to the creator space.

23:06This is very important for us to consider the entire funnel when discussing creative content. I love it. All right, Josh, you go. Arthur, love this stuff. Thank you so much for coming. So you've talked a lot about paid media and you're talking a lot about paid media because paid media buckets of money are multiples, if not orders of magnitude more than influencer buckets of money that these brands have. What's that internal conversation like? How do you actually unlock the paid media? Take us through, because I imagine you first talked to a brand and you're not talking to the paid media team or an agency and you're not talking to the paid media team.

23:43Maybe now you are. But tell us about that conversation and how it gets flowed through to that individual. We almost exclusively work with paid media teams for a couple of reasons. number one the ability for paid media teams to shift budget quickly is unparalleled and whereas influencer teams are often constrained by campaigns and to your point much smaller budgets it's very important to tap into paid media teams who understand that they need to get more alpha they need to get more efficiency out of the channel and paid media teams also see all the data and they see that creator content by and large in their paid ads outperforms anything that a creator creative agency could put in front of them so for us the pitch is not only do you get to work with the world's best creators but you get to work with them as in a way that is as easy and frictionless as the way you buy media elsewhere and you get to build deep relationships with the creators who are most performant so that you can then take those relationships and your influencer team can work with those creators for 360 deals or for ambassador deals.

24:55So think of Argentio as the funnel from the paid media dollars to creators to sell through a much higher percentage of their inventory through brands or with brands that are going to spend more consistently, that want longer term deals with creators, and they want to be in a position where once a creator works, they are just continuously putting spend behind that creator because the partnership is working really well so we're consistently pitching these paid media teams on the breadth and quality of the creators that they can partner with on the power of this channel right we see view through rates which is somebody watching the integration from the second it goes live on youtube to when it ends of on average about 85 to 86 percent and these integrations are usually around 90 seconds long So that means that 85 % of people are watching an ad for 90 seconds.

25:49There's absolutely no other ad unit out there that is remotely as powerful as these YouTube integrations. And paid media teams, they want to tap into that, right? They don't want to be shifting all their spend to platforms where they might get one or two seconds of somebody's time and they're still paying a lot for it. they want the trust that the creators have built with their audiences and they want to tap into the equity that the creators have built with their audiences over time. So it's been a huge unlock. And so you're able to get these paid media teams on board because you're saying, hey, this creator content looks, walks, quacks, flies, swims, like the search or display ads that you're buying on these other platforms.

26:34So, hey, your team's fully well-equipped to deploy a ton of capital into this ecosystem like it is in those others and it is so easy to buy right because the pay media teams have not spent in the space because of how hard it is to buy they don't want to negotiate with you know 10 different firms and individuals they don't want to try to figure out who the right creators are they don't want these like crazy rate cards that are going to be thrown their way they want to be able to buy efficiently um very similar to you know how you might book a flight or book an uber today rather than trying to call around to every single hotel or every single restaurant in in your city to figure out who might have availability and now what price is that availability and then you don't get a call back you don't get an email back it's a really frustrating uh process that has constrained the space for too long we have built the tech to enable this frictionless buy and that's why i paid media dollars are now flooding to creators that's super interesting.

27:33I think it's great for like obviously Agentio, but also the market at large that paid media dollars are flowing into this space and this ecosystem. Arthur, thank you so much. Everybody, please go check out the ultimate 2026 YouTube creator marketing playbook. Where can people go to learn more about Agentio? Agentio.com Sounds great. All right. Thanks for coming on. Arthur, this was a blast. Thanks so much. Thank you, Dustin. Thank you so much to Arthur. Really interesting findings in this report. I love what they're doing. And then just seeing it laid out with a bunch of this data. And, you know, I'm a huge fan of the data, obviously.