Best of Frontier CMO: Colin and Samir on the CMO’s Guide to the New Creator Economy

0:00Samir Chaudry:One thing that we say to marketers quite a bit is you have to imagine for us as creators, when we evaluate working with a brand and how they show up in our world, it's very similar to us showing up to a party with our close friends and bringing a friend. Right. And everyone in the room is like, why did Samir bring this guy Steve? He's kind of strange and I don't get how he fits in here. If I do that over and over, then you're probably going to stop letting me have a plus one. And then eventually maybe you'll stop inviting me to the party.

0:36Culture doesn't wait for your planning cycle and it certainly doesn't care about your brand deck. Today, the audience is the boss. So to win in 2026, brands must stop interrupting and start connecting. I'm Josh Bania, VP of AI and Marketing Strategy at Google, and this is Frontier CMO. Joining me today are Colin and Samir, the definitive voices of the creator economy and advisors to the world's largest brands. We discuss the shift from the attention economy to the connection economy, why one-off ad placements are a legacy trap, and how brands move from being sponsors to characters in a creator's universe.

1:14If you've ever felt like the brand world and the creator world are speaking two different languages, this episode is your translation. Here is my conversation with Colin and Samir.

1:29I was actually flying to Singapore like about three weeks ago, I was reflecting on this because I watched the entirety of the Seth Rogen Apple TV show, The Studio, which is a love letter to Hollywood by Hollywood people. It's a very long flight. I watched all eight or nine episodes. And what was really striking to me was within that series, all about content production, YouTube creators featured once. And it was a disparaging talk down. They were the butt of the joke. And it just kind of blew my mind in basically 2026 that that's the case. And I started thinking about, as a marketer, speaking to you as someone on the marketing side, I spent my whole career on the other side of the table, commissioning, working with creators.

2:14There is a kind of unofficial hierarchy where directors, writers, producers are on a higher level than creators. And I was just wondering if you sense that when you deal with marketers as they approach you and whether there is something more or what can creators do more to elevate to the proper status of where they should be in the industry today?

2:36Samir Chaudry:I actually think that's a product of how people consume. If you're consuming a lot of creator content that you deem valuable, especially if it's on a television screen, I don't think you talk about creators in a disparaging way. I don't think you see them that way because you understand the value that they bring to you. I think thinking of a creator as someone who's creating something very low lift, maybe just taking a photo and posting it on a social platform, that's sort of like a maybe outdated version of what people think of when you hear the term influencer. I think that's where you get those disparaging comments of like, oh, this content is not worthy of people's time.

3:14Samir Chaudry:But I think it's actually like that's sort of a misunderstanding of where the value comes from and where also creators have come over the years and the types of content that they're actually producing. Yeah. And I think in the studio is a great example of like, you know, change is not easy in industries. I grew up here in LA. My first job was in Hollywood. Like what we do is very dramatically different from what has happened historically in content production. I remember when I first came across YouTube It was this moment in college when everyone watched this jenna marbles video and for people who don't remember jenna marbles comedian She made this funny video into her macbook Of this face that she would make when like a guy approached her at a bar And it was very funny and it was shared and it was on everyone's laptop in the school library and everyone was watching it And I craved being in hollywood growing up and I remember looking at that and I was like I want to make stuff that results in this that everyone is talking about that everyone is sharing And it was the first peak for me of being like, oh, I guess if I have a good idea and I just shoot it into my macbook It can have the same result I still think we're coming around to this reality that that happened in in terms of hollywood like reacting to what do you mean you can just Come up with an idea and then Just make it and then just put it out there and that people may actually like it because of the way it was made The fact that it was just shot into a phone adds a layer of value that some people don't understand, that you can actually feel closer to the person, that you're closer to the source of truth and what they actually wanted to say because of the way that they chose to shoot it.

4:48Samir Chaudry:I think what was maybe missed was that creators are, and especially unscripted creators, are the natural evolution of reality TV. That, you know, when the real world came out on MTV, that was pretty, that was different. That was actually a budgetary constraint that created, instead of making a scripted show about kids who just graduated college, they had to make an unscripted show because they didn't have the budget. And that really created what we know today as reality TV. The evolution of the platforms and the change in our culture and society is fascinating. So I'm representing the marketing side of the equation here.

5:24I personally think there is a crisis in creativity happening within the marketing industry today. The CMOs of today, the marketing departments of most of the large organizations have built on the principles of advertising from the 1950s and 60s and 70s. And so it's been a massive step change to embrace that there is a different way of working, new ways of actually getting content out in the world. And we're still wrestling with that. Then you throw in AI in the last couple of years, and the entire industry is sort of trying to find its way through this new paradigm. and into this i think creators play this incredibly role of like there is unbelievable creativity on youtube and other platforms from creators so do you sense this creativity crisis on the marketing side and when you deal with cmos when you deal with brands when they come to you relative to when you speak with creators and as you own creators yourselves i would define this more as

6:20Samir Chaudry:like a confusion in where taste lies now and who are the arbiters of taste. Because I think what happened with the rise of creators is that audiences became the curators of what was good. And what is traditional in Hollywood or in another system is that there was a group of executives or a group of people who got to be the arbiters of taste and say, that's good. We're going to finance that. That's not good. That's good. And all of a sudden, that system got pushed to the side and anyone can make anything. And then the audience became the curator of what was good. There's a democratic system of if it's good, people watch it and share it.

6:59Samir Chaudry:If it's not good, nobody watches it. And I think from a marketing perspective, there's a loss of conviction of what is interesting and what is good, where, you know, the 50s and 60s was led by really creative individuals like the Ogilvy's of the world and the Madman era, if you look at that, of like, there was people who had conviction in what was going to connect and what was taste. And I think when that has now been put into the hands of the audience, I think marketers operate in a place of fear of missing the mark where like the audience is all of our bosses now. And the only one who can fire us as creators is the audience, right?

7:37Samir Chaudry:And so like, we're all looking at the audience and trying to make sure that we're making stuff that is going to connect. So I think there's not necessarily a creativity crisis. I think it's more fear around getting fired by the audience or missing the mark to the audience when I think the people with conviction right now are creators on the internet. Creators who have been making stuff for 15 years or 10 years or five years who are chronically online, who are members of the audience. I would say whether they even want to take part in creating the conversation or they want to work with creators, they should be audience members first so that you even know where to place your bets.

8:13Samir Chaudry:If you look at like advertising in magazines or on television, the pipeline was controlled. So when you had a hit, you knew like that's the hit. This is the one place to spend money. Now, I think one of the most beautiful things about YouTube is there are certain creators who they don't even know are going to upload a video. Like there was this amazing documentary about birdwatching that came out this year that this guy spent two years working on, put it on YouTube and it exploded. No one knew he was going to do that. Yep. Right. So there are elements of YouTube that are incredible where there's this creativity coming every day.

8:43Samir Chaudry:And this is across all social platforms where you don't know what's going to be a hit that day. But at the same time, if you're a true audience member of these platforms, you start to recognize the creators and the niches on YouTube and across platforms that have consistent excitement, energy, viewership. And I think it's your job as a marketer now to understand and find those pockets. Can you just speak to, you've worked a lot with a number of brands. You've done your own brand partnerships. You've been doing this for 14, 15 years. You publish a whole bunch of other content. You do the training programs.

9:16You have your newsletter and information about the whole creative economy. So how do you describe yourself to Fortune 500 companies, or if you ever end up at Sun Valley or Deer Valley or one of these fancy places, how do you introduce yourselves and what you do in totality?

9:30Samir Chaudry:Historically... you know, it has been hard to describe yourself as a creator. I don't think it's hard anymore to describe yourself as a creator, which is amazing. So I think at the core of it, we say we're creators, but we, what we really talk about is that we break down and analyze the creator economy from the inside out. Like we're practitioners, right? We have been creators for 15 years. We continue to solve the problems that everyday creators solve. And that's why we host creators on our show and on our platform is because it's, it's kind of like actors on actors, right? Like it's, it's this peer to peer environment where we are exploring the new media landscape and translating it from the inside out.

10:05It's the published press.

10:06Samir Chaudry:Published press. Yeah. If anyone is listening to this podcast is not subscribed to published press and they work in marketing, they are not doing their job, I think. So just, but say a little about it. Yeah. The published press is a three times a week newsletter where we cover three stories in each edition about what's happening in the world of the creator economy and mostly why it matters, right? Like from a curation perspective, again, from the inside out. We are creators ourselves. So we're going to select stories that we think matter in this world. And we're going to tell you about what's going on, why they matter.

10:36Samir Chaudry:I think it's one of the best places for creator discovery. When we talk about how you should be a true consumer and you need to know who are the creators, what are the different niches within the creator economy. I think this is like the published press, I would consider the front lines of that conversation. And then within your own productions, I mean, you guys put out a lot of content yourselves. You're experimenting with AI yet, but it's not central to what you're doing? I think it's definitely central. Yeah. I mean, it's definitely made its way in over the past year, especially when it comes to concepting, scripting, research, even from a workflow perspective.

11:11Samir Chaudry:When we film one of our episodes, we use a tool called Autopod that will cut all of the angles according to who's talking. You know, that's something that used to take half a day to an entire day of time. And now our editor can do that in about three minutes and move on to the story and to the B-roll. I think the best use is like, honestly, having a collaborative partner with Gemini of like, hey, what are the gaps in this, right? So if we're researching a topic, it's one of the greatest tools to go, tell me everything about this topic. I've definitely used Gemini to ask about YouTube. So, you know.

11:44We use it to ask about ourselves. Yeah,

11:48Samir Chaudry:for sure. You guys know the creative economy better than anyone. write about it every week, talk about it every week. Just give the audience, give me an overview of where the state of the creator economy today, as you guys see it. If just look at the mediums, and where our content is viewed, it's representative of the state of the creator economy. So when we first started, most of our content was viewed on desktop. That moved then from 2011 to 2014, started producing a lot more for mobile. But at that time when we were making YouTube videos, we'd make a 30 second or 45 second video. That was totally fine video to upload to YouTube.

12:25Samir Chaudry:Long form content was like six minutes long at that time. And I remember when we would talk about like making a long form series, like six to seven minutes. And by 2014, we started concepting series. We're like, oh, maybe we should make like a series. Like what if we treated this like a season that people could binge? And I think this was around the same time where you looked at in entertainment, people were launching, you know, Netflix really introduced bingeable content. And I think as we look at where the creator economy has gone in the past 10 years from there, the fact that YouTube is the most watched app on connected TVs is mirrored with the fact that creators are making long-form content today means 30 minutes.

13:03Samir Chaudry:And it means repeatable formats. If we look at a creator group like Dude Perfect, they make repeatable formats that are 22 minutes plus that are viewed by millions of people on connected TVs. We are TV show producers. We're showrunners. We're making shows. that you can take and you know it's just on a delta flight you can take michelle caray challenge accepted put it on delta as six episodes and it makes sense yeah every episode has the same format we operate like studios even when we're looking at our content calendar for next year we're trying to build series and events out of our you know drops of shows and those then get sold to to marketers as packages of hey you can be a presenting sponsor of this you can buy media around it we will produce ads that you can run as media around the content.

13:49Samir Chaudry:We have just evolved from, you know, what was experimentation to now adopting something that is much more familiar to the world of marketing, the world of television, the world of studios. I would say when I look at the creator economy, I think the thread that stayed consistent and if anything is increasing is the desire of audiences to interact with the content. I think that was something that even from the early stages, Samir and I knew that we were not just making content for an audience, we were making it with an audience. We'd put out a video, we'd get their feedback in the comments, we'd get ideas from them of what we should make, and then we'd deliver on that idea.

14:25Samir Chaudry:And that created a relationship with our core audience of trust, of, hey, they're listening to me. And that was in the early stages. And I think what you're seeing now is that, especially when it comes to live streaming or podcasts, there is an incredible desire to take part in what's happening on screen, specifically with the creator, to comment in chat and make sure that you can see yourself represented in what happens. You guys, you just mentioned it to me. You have a content calendar. You're planning out your year. There's the CEOs of a business. And there are opportunities for brands, for marketers to engage with that.

15:00how much of your slate or however you want to call it is sort of once it's ready once you think you're building what you're going to build you then go out into the marketplace or how much is organically you just call up someone at adobe who you've worked with before and go hey you want

15:14Samir Chaudry:to do this it varies like you know i think that we still operate as creators with a level of experimentation that like i can sit with you right now and we could put something out next week that i have no idea we're going to put out because we have an idea and we decide we want to make it into a short. That still happens. And that's one of the great things. We can just do that if we want. But I think all of us as creators are operating a little bit more with that foresight into what's going on with our slate. And it's more advantageous to the business too, because our ideal scenario is we build really deep relationships with a few sponsors versus what we looked like five, six years ago was more like that.

15:47Samir Chaudry:Hey, next month, I have a slot open. Maybe I could find a DTC brand to come in and sponsor it. But now the whole industry has changed in a way where we can have a presenting sponsor for a series, where we can have a category sponsor. One thing that we say to marketers quite a bit is you have to imagine, like for us as creators, when we evaluate working with a brand and how they show up in our world, it's very similar to us showing up to a party with our close friends and bringing a friend, right? And so if you bring someone to that party and everyone in the room is like, why did Samir bring this guy Steve?

16:25Samir Chaudry:He's kind of strange and I don't get how he fits in here. Like, what does he bring to the party? If I do that over and over and have no context to my friends of why I brought Steve or why, you know, Steve doesn't add any value to the party, then you're probably going to stop letting me have a plus one. And then eventually maybe you'll stop inviting me to the party. So I've heard you guys talk about being strategic on like treat creators are you also strategic entrepreneurs? Yeah, for sure. I think sometimes we get treated as talent, but we're distributors, right? We have to think about how an audience is going to react to what we put out there.

16:59Samir Chaudry:We're not just show up and get on camera. We're sitting in a room thinking through what's going to connect. So we're also the studio executive, right? We're the studio executive, we're the producer, we're the director, we're the writer, and we're on camera and we're overseeing the edit. So, you know, bring us in at that stage, at the early stage where you're like, this is what we're trying to do. What do you recommend? And I think a lot of the reason we like the category exclusivity or the like ambassadorship type model of, you know, the year long relationship is because you're actually getting to a point where you're communicating and improving in step, in lockstep with the brand.

17:37Samir Chaudry:You know, a lot of times if you just do this one-off deal. Creators often don't even get data back. They haven't built that relationship and the brand hasn't built a relationship with the creator to say, hey, here's how this actually went, but here's how we think it could go better. And that's what I really like about the year-long relationship is once you know that your value props are aligned, you know, we always say for us like to educate and empower the next generation of creators is a big part of our value prop. A lot of the brands we work with have a very similar value prop. When we work with Shopify, that's a similar value prop for them.

18:07Samir Chaudry:So we know we're in lockstep, at least on that value prop. So let's work together over a long period of time to figure out how to best deliver messaging and improve. How giddy were you when you got your first like real branded partnership deal? And who was it for? Do you remember? Well, I remember the first one that came through and it was for no money. The exchange was just, we will give you these Felix Gray blue light glasses. And there's a funny email exchange between Samir and I. And Samir is like, well, I don't know if we should do this. there's no money involved. And I'm like, I just want the glasses.

18:39Samir Chaudry:Yeah. Colin's like, we have to do this. This is absolutely worth it. And we put so much time into that video for Felix Gray that came out on our channel. And I think the good that came of that is that it was our first opportunity to experiment with what it even meant to create some sort of integration, to work with a brand and to deliver that to our audience. How often today do you get inbound requests for effectively no money or pittance on a dollar and just basically yeah if we do i don't even see it we do get asked this question of from creators early stage creators that are like should i do a a cpa campaign like a cost per acquisition campaign and my belief system from felix gray where we did that for for zero dollars and colin got blue light glasses to the next deal which i think was probably audible or squarespace or one of those early stage conversion brands that was very conversion focused at that time.

19:32Samir Chaudry:And I remember feeling like it felt bizarre to me that it was so conversion focused in the first 30 days because like this brand was a part of our creative and a part of our content at that time forever. We weren't, there was no, like, we weren't going to take it out. It was just, you're part of this. And I remember thinking it was very bizarre that we were getting treated like Facebook ads in a way, or like performance marketing, that it was dollars in dollars out. And I think in podcasting that started to work. And so it came to YouTube, but we started to graduate even for us internally. We, we just looked at it and said, how do we want this product to show up?

20:07Samir Chaudry:What is our ad product? And I think that's the work for creators of when you do it, let's say you take one of those free deals early on, or you take a CPA deal. I would never advise to do it, but if you do do it, the only reason to do it is to develop your ad product and then to put that into deck and go to marketing and go, now I know what is a good ad product for my audience. This is the ad product I'm comfortable with. And I think having conviction in that for creators is really important. And that's what we started to develop. We were like, you know what? We think there is a good ad product here.

20:37Samir Chaudry:As we started to put the podcast on YouTube, there's a presented by slot. There's a natural integration that we'll give you and talk about the brand. There is a CTA link in the description. And then if your success metric is conversions, then I have to actually be really familiar with where people are landing. So I'm saying all this to recognize the relationship that marketers and creator groups have to have, right? With different goals. I do think we're entering the era where people are recognizing that awareness and consideration can happen through creators because we are the celebrities of today, right?

21:12Samir Chaudry:That if we're being watched at millions and millions of views and impressions for long periods of time on a connected TV screen, like we are the stars. So what you used to do with a celebrity which would never be considered you know performance marketing it was always consideration awareness and lift you can also do that with creators and the bottom line i'll say it over and over probably more in this podcast like communicate what success looks like to the creator early i want to make this practical list off the four five six seven whatever it is like golden rules of you need to tell marketers to work well with you to work well with creators I think it's that first one of like, ask the question, what does success look like?

21:55Samir Chaudry:What does success look like? And do you have examples you can send me that were successful in the past? I would say number two is become a member of the community. Super important. Because again, as a marketer, you have to be able to empathize with what it's going to be like to receive your message. And if you become the member of the community, you recognize, oh, that's what it feels like to receive a message from a brand in this context, in this show. as a member of this community, look at what people are talking about, how they're engaging with each other. Like these are real diehard communities because it's interactive media.

22:29When you say community, do you mean the Colin and Samir community or do you mean this of the YouTube platform or TikTok platform community?