UTA heads Raina Penchansky, Ali Berman on creators, influencers, and AI

We’ve got another special episode of Decoder today, recorded at the Cannes Lions advertising festival in the South of France. I’m talking with Ali Berman and Raina Penchansky, who run the Creators division at United Talent Agency.

UTA is an enormous talent agency. Half the people you’ve ever heard speak or perform or who show up anywhere have UTA agents representing them. For full disclosure, that includes me! UTA handled the sale of the forthcoming Decoder book. Which means I paid them money, making this a reverse conflict of interest. Now you know.

Anyhow, that has nothing to do with Ali and Raina, whose Creators division represents some of the biggest creators and influencers in the world — stars as diverse as Charli D’Amelio and Markiplier, Kai Cenat and Emma Chamberlain. Alex Cooper and Alix Earle.

So I really wanted to know how Raina and Ali identify up-and-coming talent, how they work with that talent to build durable business, and what the machinations of being a top creator actually look like — after all, all of these folks are running multimillion-dollar businesses with several different revenue lines. You’ll hear Ali and Raina talk directly about what it takes to build those businesses, what kinds of deals they strike, and how it’s all very different than the traditional Hollywood model, where your agent just takes a cut.

Here, UTA is helping creators literally launch products — and it’s fascinating that the stars of today are going from making media to making products of their own. Not all of them can do it, so I wanted to know how Raina and Ali help their clients make the jump and what makes them successful at it.

Of course, we also talked about AI, and platforms, both of which seem like destabilizing forces for the entire creator ecosystem. I think you’ll find Ali and Raina to be refreshingly chill about it all — even though they represent some VTubers of their own.

There’s a lot going on here; I think you’re going to like it.

Okay: Ali Berman and Raina Penchansky. Here we go.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Raina Penchansky, Ali Berman. You are the co-heads of the Creators division at United Talent Agency. Welcome to Decoder.

Raina Penchansky: Thanks for having us.

I am really excited to talk to both of you. I need to disclose right away: I’m a UTA client. This is a reverse conflict of interest. I think I pay UTA money, but that’s fine. So it’s a good conflict. I’m hoping it causes a journalism scandal and this gets shared widely.

I’m very curious about how the Creators division works. You guys have been in the game forever. One of our ideas here on Decoder is that the structure of organizations tells you a lot, and Creators has been reorganized. You guys are the new heads. It started in 2024.

We’re here at Cannes. It’s creators everywhere here. They are the future of advertising. There’s so much money floating around this festival and in advertising. Tell me how UTA works with creators, how this division is structured, your backgrounds, how we got here.

AB: I’m going into my 16th year at UTA. I’ve only ever worked at a talent agency, for better or for worse. I started my career at another agency, then after a few years, moved over to UTA in a very Jerry McGuire meets Entourage-esque moment and worked on the more traditional literary side of the business. But I was in love with the internet and what the internet was at the time, which was very blog-centric. Self-discovery was really up to you. You didn’t have algorithms feeding you. It was obviously a very different era.

At the time, UTA had a burgeoningdigital department that was really a catchall for anything that was nontraditional film or TV. I went into that division as an entrepreneur, and really gravitated towards artists who were forming their own communities and going direct to consumer. I really believed that there was going to be a day where you could monetize those communities, and so helped shape what at the time was the digital talent division.

Right around that time, our third co-head, who’s not here today, Oren Rosenbaum — he’s at Cannes, but not physically in this room, he’s doing another interview downstairs — he was doing the same thing but on the audio side of the business. UTA was the first agency in Hollywood to think about artists in a way other than what you traditionally thought of them. We’re actually celebrating our 20th year as what we now refer to as the Creators division.

Oren was building similar to what I was building, but on the audio-focused side. We acquired two companies, one on the gaming and esports side. And then I’ll kick it over to Raina and then we’ll pick it back up to where we are today.

RP: I was one of the cofounders of Digital Brand Architects (DBA) 16 years ago, before Instagram had even launched. I came from a traditional marketing background. What I was drawn to in terms of seeing the bloggers that Ali referenced, the bloggers at the time were people who were building these communities directly with their audience. I’d come from fashion and marketing and I was used to the top-down relationship with the consumer, and it was so exciting to see at the time all these street style women who were building this relationship with their audience and who were essentially the next generation of editors and the next generation of media properties and they just didn’t know it yet.

Iin my time at the brand that I had been with, I was working with a lot of these women in fashion and they would come to me organically and say like, “Oh, such and such brand wants me to post. What should I charge?” Or, “So-and-so wants me to be in a lookbook or a fashion show.” I became like a fairy godmother of sorts, just answering questions in the vein of, “How do you build?”

It was totally organic at the time and I was inspired by these women and thought like, “Oh, there’s something here.” I think like most entrepreneur stories, I wasn’t connecting the dots as to what the business was. I was inspired by the storytelling component of it and what they represented in terms of where there was like, “Oh, wait, there’s something here.”

That’s 16 years ago. UTA acquired DBA in 2019, and now it sits within the realm of UTA Creators. I have the role of CEO of DBA and then co-head with Ali and Oren. They’re church and state in terms of management and agency, but we have a back of house that services both.

We have a brand partnerships team and a products development team and this massive data and analytics. And we sit at the epicenter really of everything that’s taking place in the overused word of “creator economy.” To your point, every single conversation is around creators, that’s fine, but then what does the next chapter ever look like?

What Ali and Oren and I come to the table with is that we’ve been in this long enough to know it so well, but are also able to anticipate and be excited about the next chapter of it. And that’s our love language for the three of us.

AB: What continues to inspire us is setting the bar, which is what we did 20 years ago, and we’ve been building this for 20 years. Where are we going to place the next bar? That’s what we’re constantly talking about and thinking about.

When you look around at this festival, the opportunities are absolutely limitless. For the first time I think in the history of this ecosystem, if there’s a tagline for 2026 especially, I say it often, but it’s, “we’ve arrived.” This direct-to-consumer creator, storyteller, artist world is everywhere. And it’s inescapable. It’s inescapable for brands. It’s inescapable as an artist. So it’s really exciting.

RP: I keep looking around and I keep thinking of the version of Cannes Lions from 10, 15, maybe even five years ago. And then I’m looking at it today and all these people are capturing content. It just must feel so different for the people who have been doing this for a long time to see, but it also has a different vibrancy to it. It feels really energized. You can tell that there’s just a little bit of a shift.

I think that’s really interesting. I’m struck very much by how much everyone seems to have only just discovered the creator economy —

AB: I know. Tell us about it.

Or just pretending that it’s brand-new. I can sense that from both of you.

Help me just unpack a little bit of agency world for one second. You described the church and state split between agency and management. I think most of the audience thinks agency and they still think of Ari Gold from Entourage. That’s obviously not the kind of business you’re running. And I want to talk about that because it seems like you’re building businesses for folks in a way that isn’t just signing deals with Hollywood studios. Explain the difference between management and agent.

RP: I can speak to it from the creator space, which is different than the traditional space. Creators have so many hats and they’re doing so many things. There’s a nuance to it, whether it’s capturing content, whether it’s content strategy, whether it’s … not being PR, but certainly talking about perception and talking about overarching things around your brand, thinking of roadmaps to all the various things that exist.

A lot of these creators are doing things that live offline of their content that’s on platforms and they’re building experiences and they’re building events. And so the relationship between manager and agent and the creator space is incredibly nuanced, because the agents are also nuanced and multifaceted. It’s not like you’re walking on set and you have a thing and you do a thing and you book this. There’s so much that goes into it and so much of that is very intangible and organic.

The manager has a lot to do with that in the day-to-day of managing the nuance of what it takes to capture content, build the thing, build whatever offline, the book, all the things that are going along with that. And then the agent is obviously involved in the more business side of it, but it’s a delicate balance. And I think you obviously, Ali, can speak more to the agent side of it as well.

AB: The other thing that I’ve been reflecting on a lot is, obviously, and I keep saying it in this interview, but we built this division 20 years ago, but there’s no better time to be a creator, influencer, whatever you want to call it, and be represented at an agency because of how multifaceted careers have become. At a time in the creator economy, it was really just driven by brands. And we were working with clients who we’d say, “Oh, their business is …” And I don’t mean to use the word “just” because I don’t mean to minimize it. Those businesses are incredibly healthy and vibrant and important, but their business is just going to be brand deals, endorsement deals.

Now I would argue that if we go and we look at our roster, the majority of our clients are doing way more than just brand deals. When you’re being represented in an agency and especially when you’ve got a creator division inside an agency, they’re really quarterbacking their careers inside all the different dimensions and facets that there are to entertainment. And we’re so fortunate to be seated at a place like UTA where we’ve got experts and market leaders in literally every area.

I’m just going to put forth an idea of structure here and you guys can react to it. It just sounds, as you’re describing it, a traditional media company from 10 years ago would have a bunch of infrastructure, right? They would have accountants and finance people and a licensing division and they would have talent and they would pay the talent, whatever number. Maybe UTA would negotiate that talent rate, but that would be the end of UTA. And then the business, whatever big old Hollywood studio would have rooms full of accountants making the business go.

This is my imagination of what old Hollywood was like, but that was basically Sony’s business. “We’re going to make a show, we’re going to pay everybody and then we’re going to license that show to whatever networks around the world.”

It sounds like UTA and what you guys are doing is we’ve decentralized the talent. They don’t all work for studios in the same way. And you’re providing that infrastructure layer so that creators don’t have to think about, “Okay, how does my business actually work?” You have a playbook or you have an approach for each of those creators.

Is that a good way to think about it? Because I’m constantly thinking about where the centralization and decentralization come. And the big media businesses, in my opinion, don’t seem like they have a future. They can’t support all that overhead.

AB: That’s a tricky one because our clients are the modern-day media businesses.

But they don’t have rooms full of accountants. I hope that you’re not telling them to hire rooms full of accountants.

AB: No, no, but they’ve got extensions of their teams that are helping them think through what is their P&L. We do have some clients who have in-house accounting because it’s necessitated. We’re certainly decentralizing it, but I think the centralization happens within their own orbit, within their own organization.

Big media companies are struggling in a lot of ways. And a lot of the reason they’re struggling is their distribution has got way away from them. If you own a broadcast network, that is very lucrative, but there is a time limit on how much money that thing is going to make and how many people are going to watch it.

I don’t think a lot of people are turning on their TVs to watch over-the-air broadcasts anymore. That number’s going down. They are all opening Instagram every single day, probably while they’re watching TV. And the cost structures of making that content are changing. And so I think that means the structures of the companies that make that content have to change with them.

RP: One hundred percent. Yes.

And it just seems like you two are figuring out a role to play inside of those structures.

RP: Yes. And we’re figuring out how to optimize for the new version of what those media companies are. To Ali’s point, they’re their own media companies. So what does that entail? Is there going to be physical product? Are we going to do events? What is the TV component of it? We are working within the world of, “How are we taking all of this and turning you into the next media company?” But yes, to your point, it’s completely become decentralized, but we sit at this epicenter of connecting those new dots in the decentralized world.

This is why I’m asking the structure question. So many times on Decoder, my joke is, “Tell me your structure, tell me your org chart, that’s like, 80 percent of your problems” and it’s like the 20 percent where the magic is. And here it just seems like, this isn’t an org chart. You have a bunch of clients who are building businesses and you two are playing some huge role in structuring those businesses so they’re predictable, so they’re monetizable, so they operate this difference between management and agent.

RP: I think that’s why there’s such nuance in talking about it, because the pie is so big and there are so many things that creators have the ability to do because, again, of the community and the relationship to audience. Because of that seismic shift, the opportunities are endless. Our job is to sit at that intersection of like, “How are we connecting the dots between this person’s content and then the plethora of opportunities?”

One of the things I’m really curious about, Ali, I read a story you were quoted saying, “Platforms come and go. Other people perceive that as a threat, that’s the opportunity.” Just to be all Marshall McLuhan about it, I believe that the medium is the message, that your distribution shapes what you make pretty directly. A TikToker is different than a YouTuber. I think we all understand this intuitively now.

Those distribution platforms, they have an infinite array of content, the algorithms come and go. Most media businesses are shaped by their distribution in real ways. A print newspaper company understands, “Our whole flow has to generate the stories by the end of the day so the print newspaper can go out.” A broadcast television company understands its distribution. They make something for that distribution. Content creators have to understand every distribution and it’s ever-changing. How do you build a business around distribution that is not really in your control or is not really predictable that way?

AB: I want to go back to the first part of your comment/question, which is, the distribution determines what the content is or what the product is. What we believe in is at the end of the day, a star is a star. It doesn’t matter what the platform is or what the distribution is. If you’re a star, you’re a star, whether you’re a YouTuber or a TikToker or a podcaster. That’s why we formed this Creators division, because we believe that anyone who’s going direct to their audience and building these communities and our stars, it’s irrespective of where they fall.

AB: And then, repeat the question?

I think a lot of corporate structures tend to mirror their distribution, at least in media. In here, the distribution is like the Wild West. It’s just constantly changing. If the goal here is to help people build media businesses and distribution is just a constant wildcard, how do you think about building those businesses in a way that’s sustainable as Instagram changes or TikTok changes or everyone quits Vine or whatever it is?

AB: To be clear, the universal goal for everyone isn’t to build a media business for everyone. Every goal for each one of our clients is very bespoke.

But as the algorithms change and as platforms continue to change, what we’ve always said is, “You have to be platform-agnostic and you have to be multi-platform. You cannot put all of your eggs in one basket.” We’ve seen an increased opportunity with that philosophy because of how many platforms are out there and that’s what’s widening the talent funnel.

think a lot about how if you were to draw what the creator celebrity ecosystem looks like today, the funnel has never been wider. It’s the widest funnel we’ve ever seen, because you’ve got everything from long-form to short-form to editorial to, you name it. But the spout has never been more narrow. What we’re trying to do is help our clients get through that spout. And in order to do that, you have to be across everything, because if one thing changes, you’re still carrying the weight of the direct connectivity to who you’re speaking to.

RP: You rely on the platform, but you also build your own direct-to-your-audience relationship. Whether that’s Substack, newsletters, it’s diversification. I don’t want to always be beholden to the algorithm, but we love these platforms and they’re incredible partners. And then there’s also, “how am I building separate from that” as well.

AB: A really big and increasingly bigger component of that is the real-life experiences that a lot of our clients are building, whether it’s something that directly involves them or it’s something that they’re powering. Whether they’re on stage and people are buying tickets and coming to see them, or if it’s a store, that it’s their brand that’s a physical brick-and-mortar and people who subscribe to their content are coming to experience that in real life. I’m really excited to see how that continues to evolve and take different shape with all that’s available.

You’ve mentioned your clients several times. I want to talk about your clients and some of the things you build for them, but to get there, I want to ask you the other question I always ask everybody on Decoder, which is about decisions. How do you guys make decisions? This seems like an ever-evolving space. You can’t obviously have a predictable framework, but what’s your process for making all the decisions you have to make?

AB: Well, I’ll quote Raina from a meeting earlier —

AB: We love to say “no.” And the stat that you stated earlier, when we’re saying no to 90 percent of things, it makes it that much easier to really focus in on the 10 percent and figure out what makes the most sense. Representing a client is a human-to-human relationship, and you have to really understand the artist as a human being to be able to understand what makes sense and what doesn’t make sense. On a personal level, what I love so much about the job is being able to connect with individuals on such a deep human level and say, “This is what you want to do and this is how we’re going to get there.”

If you’re just listening to this in a car or on audio, Ali lit up when I asked the decisions question. Why did that make you so excited? I’ve asked that question to hundreds of people. You lit up.

RP: It’s funny, I saw that and I had the same reaction.

RP: I think for both of us, decision-making is magic and logic. And I think that’s what’s really great about our space and not to put words in your mouth, but the “lighting up,” because I did the same thing. I was like, “Oh, that’s a funny question.” There’s logic in what we all do. There’s analytics, there’s data, there’s follower counts, all the things, but the magic is the most fun part of it.

When you see a creator and you see a piece of content , we’re inspired by it. We love it. That’s what’s motivating. And I think the decision-making in our world comes down to the content and when you see someone, and Ali referenced stars, there’s just something, whether they’re endearing and there’s a thing and that’s the magic and there’s a spark in our day-to-day lives as it relates to clients. Knowing how to toe the line between the magic and the logic, I think is the best part.

AB: Yeah.I often get asked, “Do you feel threatened by AI in terms of replacing your jobs and helping artists navigate their careers?” Frst and foremost, no, we’re not threatened by AI. To Raina’s point, our clients wear so many hats and so we think it’s just created an incredible opportunity to help outsource a lot of resourcing.

But no, because it’s where art meets science and again, it’s that human-to-human connection that really helps you figure out how you can help somebody accomplish their goals in life, which is such an incredible opportunity we have.

Don’t worry, we’re going to come back to AI and what kind of threat it is. Raina, I wanted to ask you, you’re also in this Wall Street Journal piece, there’s a quote that says you have an almost psychic ability to discern when brand deals are good or bad.

Someone else said that, about you. I don’t think you disagreed with it, to be perfectly clear. That’s a decision-making process. Do you just stare at the ocean and decide if a brand deal’s good?

RP: I have a Magic 8 ball.

How does it just come to you? For many of our listeners who want to go into this career, knowing what brand deals to take and which ones to not is the first hardest question. So how does your almost psychic ability work? How do you make these calls?

RP: I could give you the list of things I’m not good at, but I have high EQ. So I think that’s the piece of the psychic ability. We all have a gut sense of things and your first instinct is normally the right instinct, and I think people have a tendency to second-guess. This just might be the entrepreneur in me, but I do things quickly. I’m thoughtful about it, but it’s also a matter of like, “Huh, that doesn’t feel right.” You know when something is a good idea and then you know when you’re taking a beat. If you’re taking a beat because you’re hesitant, that’s normally not the right place.

Creators are in tune to their audiences, and they’re creators by their nature because they’re meant to be doing this. If you’re meant to be in front of the camera, you’re going to have the best sense of what you’re supposed to be doing. You build these teams and you all have these conversations and you talk about these long-term strategies and plans, but ultimately, the creator’s putting themselves in front of the camera and putting them at the forefront of this content. If you’re trying to figure out what the right brand deal is, you’ve got to go with your gut.

AB: It’s so easy to default to just being so highly transactional in this space and just saying yes to everything that comes your way, but what shapes you is the discernment and the point of view that you as an artist and your team around you have around what you should and shouldn’t be doing. Our goal is always for our clients to do what’s obvious in terms of what their audiences want to see from them, but to continue to position them to do what’s not obvious so we can help them innovate and help them create different edges to who they are.

RP: The most fun is when it’s an outside-the-box idea. And then it’s like, “Oh, is this totally left of center and this is going to feel like a little strange? We should do this.”

Is that all incoming? Do you go out to come up with creative ideas and go out to clients?

RP: Oh yeah, absolutely. All the time.

How does this work? What’s that process like?

RP: Everybody in a room brainstorming. We used to say, “What do you want to do in five years?” But five years feel so far off. So it’s like, “What do we want to do in the next-”

When we’re all replaced by AI.

RP: Yeah. “What are we trying to accomplish in the next 18, 24 months?” We break it down to a lot of different things. What are the IP ideas? What are the huge offline things we want to do? And then what are the steps that lead us to that and what are the things that we do along the way? What’s amazing in terms of like, what’s a dream thing that you’ve always wanted to do? But then what’s a really practical thing that we need to do to build to get there?

AB: Absolutely. Yeah, I was just going to say that. You ask the question of, what are your goals? Let’s build the strategy and then let’s start down the path.

Tell me about that cadence. I think most people see creators like, they just open the apps and they see the videos and they’re excited and they’re entertained. You’re describing it like a business process, a series of meetings and goals and charts and KPIs. What’s the process? Do you meet with creators on a cadence?

AB: Oh, absolutely. We’re in weekly or biweekly or monthly touch bases with the majority of our clients. The second that we start working together, we build that overall strategy. And then just like you work at a company, you have a normal nine-to-five, but you’re meeting as a team to update everybody on where this project is or where these numbers are, and we’re doing the same.

I’m really curious about that because I think people who want to go into this career don’t understand that they might be running a pretty complicated business on the backend.

And I’m curious, you were early to some big names to talk about. We’ve been talking about creators as a monolith, I think, for this conversation, but these are all different creators. I think you have Charli D’Amelio who has a very different business than Alix Earle than Jake Shane than Emma Chamberlain. These all seem like people are situated differently.

One, how do you decide, “Okay, these are the people we should go after and try to sign”?

Because you’re pretty early. Historically, I think you in particular have seen the talent early, Ali, and made sure to go get them. And then you’ve got to convince them, “Okay, now you have to have a bunch of business meetings with me because that’s the thing that’s going to help you grow and that’s not the time you’re spending making the content for the audience.” So how do you identify the people early and then how do you get them on the path to building the business?

AB: Collectively on the management side of the creators business and the agency side, we believe that the earlier we partner with the talent, the better it is for them so that they can continue doing what they’re doing, which is creating content and building community. Leave the rest to us. Trust us as part of what’s left in the process. And fail fast at things. Try things, fail fast, but like I said earlier, continue working to that overall goal.

I feel like vanishingly few people are ever going to experience the full force of an Ali Berman pitch. I mean, most people want to get it. Maybe that’s a goal, but you’re only going to selectively pick a few people. So what’s it like? What do you actually say? “Just trust me.” Describe the pitch when you reach out to a creator that you’ve seen that has the star quality. What’s the story you tell them?

AB: With all due respect, I cannot give out that recipe. I’m sure you can describe the outcomes. What does this cookie look like?

AB: Ultimately, I want to be in business with people who I personally connect with. That’s the joy and the reward of this job and this career for me. And I want to be in business with people who want to work really hard, who want to work harder than I want to work, but ultimately, I’m going to work just as hard if not harder.

And people who have a real singular voice. That’s really, really important to me. It’s that singular voice that’s going to help you outstand a platform, outstand an algorithm change, outstand whatever it is. And quite frankly, that’s always been the ethos of UTA, which is, let’s go identify and represent the most unique artists in the world.

That was an all-time decline to answer and then a seamless pivot into pitching UTA. So I can tell that it’s good. I’m going to figure it out. Raina, will you tell me? What does your outreach look like to new creators?

AB: You don’t have to share my…

RP: You don’t want to give out the recipe either.

AB: I can’t possibly sell a niche.

Of all the things I asked about, I did not expect to hit the brick wall here. I’m very curious. UTA is a big company. You guys have big clients. Young creators that I know are very skeptical that someone is going to come in and run them over. There’s just some part of that first step of “you’re going to take how much, you’re going to do what, how do I hold you accountable?” And I’m really curious how you get over that wall.

RP: What I will say is for both UTA and DBA, our work speaks for ourselves.We have a lot of clients who are also just talking about “this is my experience, and it’s been amazing,” and so we’re very fortunate for that.

I don’t know. Again, for me, I love content. And it’s funny, there’s something that you asked earlier when you were talking about how often we meet with clients. I am in my client’s DMs when they post content that I love.

RP: “This is amazing. I love this. This should be a series. We should do something with this. Let’s do this.” That’s the other nuance of what you were talking about in terms of the business. That’s the difference. An idea can come from something that someone posts and then we’re off to the races.

The space is moving quickly, but we’re moving at the speed of content and making decisions and building off of a piece of content. Something that didn’t exist yesterday, that just happened today at Cannes, could be the next IP in the show. That’s the other really fun thing about our space.

AB: I love that. We’re moving at the speed of content.

RP: I don’t think I’ve ever said that before.

I can’t participate in this, you guys. I can’t be here for you guys workshopping a tagline.

AB: It’s so good. It’s so good.

RP: I swear I’ve never said that before.

RP: But I was thinking when you were talking about cadence and frequency. And I was laughing at myself thinking, “oh my God, my client … I’m literally in my client’s DMs being like, ‘I don’t know about that.’”

I’m a real straight shooter when I sit with clients. And I will say, “That thing you did, that didn’t land and here’s why. And what I think would land is X, Y, and Z.” But I think it’s because what they sense from us, and Oren, when they’re in the room with us is that we are consumers of content and their content, and we’re not like, “Hey, here are the boxes you check and here’s the things you should do.” We’re coming at it from the point of view of, “This is how we build together because I genuinely believe in what you’re doing and this is how I see it.”

AB: I mean, the table stakes are, adding whatever percentage it is, just that. That’s the bare minimum. We just want to add value. And if we’re adding 10 percent of value, we’re not doing our jobs. We need to be adding 10-plus.

The reason you’re saying 10 percent is I’m pretty sure that’s the rate. That’s the commission on deals like the standard.

I’m curious how that works in the creator world. I understood how it worked in old Hollywood world. Tom Cruise gets a big check, the agent takes 10 percent of it. Everyone’s rich and happy, we’re all buying boats. Creator world is a bunch of brand deals. You’ve negotiated, I think, equity deals for Alix Earle and Poppi. How does the rate work when the shape of the deals is so varied and a lot of these things turn into businesses over time?

RP: It’s really deal-dependent, obviously, especially as you’re talking about these larger things that we’re building. And more, they’re fluid conversations with clients. We’re not in the room unless we add value, and we add a tremendous amount of value. And so that value conversation comes with a number and we just talk through what makes the most sense. The standard in terms of the brand deals is a 10 percent agency commission and then there’s always conversations. Honestly, sometimes it’s more. Sometimes it’s less. It just depends on what the structure of the deal looks like and what our role is in it.

I’m curious about those deal structures, because that seems like it’s also the Wild West. So many of your creators, creators across the ecosystem, are now just starting their own businesses to sell their own products. And for as much as we might not be threatened by AI or as much as we don’t think the algorithms change, I’m often struck by how lucrative it is for creators to go from digital businesses to physical businesses, which basically is not how things should work. You should go to a way-higher-margin digital product, but all the creators have to leave digital world and they have to market … I think it’s crazy that the Paul brothers sell bottled water, which is historically not a great thing to be wanting to ship around the world, but that is a vastly more lucrative business than their digital business.

So there’s a part here where we’re going to stand up a white-label makeup line or whatever the thing is that we’re going to do. How do you play in that? Because it feels like those deal structures and those commission rates would be very different than the standard brand deal commission.

RP: We’ve been doing those deals for quite some time and have put together some, if not all, of the most successful examples of those. Those are really complicated deal structures, and they take a tremendous amount of time and energy and detail, and we participate in them. We sit on the cap table along with clients because again, we’re in the room putting it all together and then not staying and being a part of it. I think the difference with those kinds of deals is that it’s not—

AB: It’s not just an introduction.

RP: It’s not just an introduction. It’s not just a licensing deal. We are involved in packaging, distribution, marketing, all of the things that really are fundamental to launching these brands, and we’re sitting at the table right alongside these teams and helping and facilitating.

AB: And to be honest with you, it’s not a straightforward answer because there are infinite ways that these deals come together. Whereas on the more traditional, just highly transactional side of business, it’s a fee for a service. And these are incredibly, as Raina said, complicated but can come together in so many different ways in terms of capital coming from here or capital coming from there or from the talent directly. It really depends on how the deal shapes and how it all comes together. And then, like Raina said, we get in a room, and we have a conversation and we figure it out.

But it is not just an introduction, and it’s really about staying in there. Because every day we’re sitting across the four corners that is our client’s business, and so we’re constantly trying to figure out, to speak in metaphorical terms, how do we build the biggest book? How do we add as many pages to this book as possible? And we’re not just trying to hand it in with a one-page document.

The reason I’m pushing on this is this is new. It feels new for talent to be needing to launch physical product businesses to have something that will create enterprise value that they can maybe sell at the end of the road in a way that selling a TikTok channel might not be as easy to transact on. And I see the push from all of the biggest creators to launch that next business. I don’t think UTA has historically been in the business of “we’re going to help you launch products. We’re going to sit in your design meetings or your packaging meetings.” I don’t think the other agencies have either.

I think [Creative Artists Agency] is your competitor, they just launched a fund to buy creator businesses in this way. It seems like that’s one of their opportunities. You seem less interested in actually transacting and owning the things, right? You’re trying to help the creators build their own businesses. There’s something shifting where we understand that the businesses should have long-term value and maybe exit in some way.

RP: One thing that I think is important to note, if you’re a creator or someone who wants to be in the space of going from digital to physical product, the money’s not the issue. Money, candidly, is easy to come by. It’s about being in business with people who understand how to launch successful businesses.

And for all of the incredible examples of the successes, in any sort of launching of products, we can all think of thousands that weren’t successful. The devil’s in the details in terms of who are your partners, who are you building with, who has the infrastructure, who understands these spaces, who’s been in them for a long time, who’s done these sorts of deals, who knows the entire landscape?

The capital isn’t the issue. It’s the infrastructure, it’s the knowledge, it’s the institutional knowledge, it’s the rest of it that’s really what’s important, and that’s what we are very happily bringing to the table.

It is true that sitting here in the South of France at one of the most moneyed events I’ve ever been at, the capital does not feel like …

RP: It’s really not. The capital is not the challenge.

There’s just a lot of money floating around here that has no idea what to do.

RP: Yes, yes. But you’ve got to really understand and know how to bring a product to market and how to connect those dots to have this be successful.

AB: And again, it goes back to, you have to really understand your client, and you have to speak that language.

So there’s a concept that I’ve been really fascinated by lately. I don’t know if you’ve heard it or seen it. It’s a TikTok influencer. She’s a social media thinker. Her name is Carmen Vicente, and she coined this term called the influencer cliff. Which is when the creator goes to try to directly sell their own product and the audience rebels because that’s a misalignment, right? They accept the sponsorship deals, the brand integrations, because that supports what they’re there for. And when you flip the switch to being more directly commercial, that misaligns you with the audience, then we all end up issuing apologies. And she says most people, a lot of people, fall off the cliff and some people get to exit.

You have a lot of clients who’ve managed it well. What do you think the difference is? Why do you think … You’re nodding your head. I think you generally agree with this concept that it’s really hard.

Why do you think some creators fall off the cliff and they can’t sell directly to their audience and some people are able to achieve escape velocity?

RP: I think there’s a fundamental philosophical relationship between this talent and their audience, because the reason they have this relationship in the first place is because the content has been free. And so the first time that they’re asking their audience to transact, that’s going to go one way or the other.

It goes without saying, but there has to be a content-market fit. It has to be something that is only going to continue to add to this free content that the audience has been getting and is going to continue to get. But there’s a technical shift in what that relationship is between the artist and their audience, and it’s not going to work for everyone.

What are the signs that it’ll work and what are the signs that it won’t work?

AB: If you can fit it into your content and not have to make a big effort to do so, that checks the biggest box, by far.

RP: I’ll give an example. We have a client, Patrick Starrr. He has a beauty line that he came out with five years ago, ONE/SIZE Beauty, one of the biggest beauty brands at Sephora. A product of his, his setting spray, which is one of the products he’s known for, sells every eight seconds at Sephora. We had this conversation. It was like, of course, Patrick Starrr who was like this insane YouTuber in the beauty space is going to have a makeup line. We found him this amazing partner, and we had all these conversations. And it was like, okay, where should we start, what product would we start with?

And he said, “When I was younger, I worked at a MAC store. And I was a boy who wore makeup, and I walked in, and I had all this makeup on, and I walked into MAC to work and they said, ‘You’re wearing too much makeup. You need to take it off.’” And he said, “My first product is going to be makeup remover wipes. That’s what I’m launching with. That’s my story. That’s who I am. It fundamentally represents who I am. I’m not launching with foundation. I’m not launching with eye, this is what I’m launching with,” which was a starkly different thing than how you would normally launch beauty. You’re launching a beauty brand with makeup remover? That feels counterintuitive. That was 100 percent the right decision, and it was his decision; the partner supported it, but it was a counterintuitive thing. But his audience knows him, and that is exactly what he should have done.

When you’re launching something and you are so profoundly passionate about that thing and you know exactly what that point of view is and how it intersects with your audience and with selling to the audience, then you’re going to find success. When it’s like, “Oh, I want to do a brand,” then it’s a little more challenging and that’s when the cliff happens.

What do you say no to? I mean, it sounds like you’re hearing a lot of ideas, 90 percent nos. What are the things you’ve said no to?

AB: We say no to, again, 90 percent of it.

People show up and they’re like, “I want to do a line of car fresheners,” and you just say no?

RP: Absolutely. Car fresheners actually sounds…

AB: Anyone out there want to do it?

It’s like, what a crowded market. I’m going to be in every gas station in America.

AB: Hold on a minute, actually.

RP: What I find that we say a lot when ideas come in is like, okay, let’s break that down. That market, okay, supplements are challenging for X, Y, and Z reasons. How’s ours going to be different? Where are we going to sit? Or alcohol is challenging for X, Y, and Z reasons.

Listen, everything’s hard. I think we all know that. We certainly make things a lot easier, but these are challenging rooms and challenging spaces, and the market is crowded and you have to really come at it from the right place. We definitely say no a lot, but it’s also a matter of partnering and just laying out things and talking about them from the really organic sense of, “what are the challenges here, what could be the potential pitfalls, and how are we going to do it differently?” I think it’s more about, “how are we going to come at this differently?”

One of the things that really strikes me in this conversation, and every creator conversation I’ve had recently, is how much the role of being a creator is also the role of being a marketer. And I’ve heard a lot of the bigger creators now just openly describe themselves as marketers. Their money comes from working with brands or they’re building businesses and marketing their own businesses and they understand that some part of what they’re doing is selling.

I think this is different from traditional entertainers, certainly different than traditional journalists. It just feels like a big shift. Everything is advertising or everything is driven by marketing in some way. My colleagues at New York Magazine just ran a story called “The Feed is Fake”, and it’s like everything is bought and paid for. And there’s some response from the audience that’s like, I don’t like this. I don’t like living in a world that’s this commercial all the time. I feel like all the creators are trying to balance this as much as they can.

You have a much wider view. You’re building big businesses with these folks. How do you feel about this notion that everyone is becoming a marketer in the end?

AB: This is a moment in time where there’s a little bit of pushback, but I would say that our prediction is that, yes, everybody’s a marketer, but we’re moving towards a world where everybody’s a consumer. And those two things match up perfectly. You look at Gen Alpha and it’s all they know. All they know is to consume, purchase, consume content, purchase products, whatever is being fed at them.

AB: I mean, I’m not here to be the arbiter —

RP: I think that’s a different podcast.

AB: Yeah. I was just going to say —

No, that’s this podcast. So, I’m —

AB: I’m not here to be an arbiter of —

I’m going to drag you into your feelings whether you like it or not, Ali.

AB: I’m not here to be the arbiter of what’s ethical in our consumer —

Sure, but I’ll just give you a counterexample to that. I insistently make journalism, which means I don’t make as much money as I should. And our joke about The Verge’s subscription product, that stopped being a joke and it actually became the thing to start marketing, is: What you’re buying from marketers are ethics policy, but you can’t buy me. I won’t do a brand deal. I won’t even read the ads on the podcast, which drives everybody crazy. We are just leaving money on the table every single day. And our youngest consumers had no idea that was a thing, right? They didn’t grow up in that world.

RP: Yeah. Gen Alpha’s like, “Where are the ads?”

They’re like, “Where are the ads?” And we’re like, “No, we don’t do it.” I literally have to say out loud, “These are the things we have.” It’s like, “And now a message from our sponsors.” We just don’t do it. We don’t integrate the ad content, and we say this is what differentiates our information from everything else. And that’s fine. It’s just the market … And maybe we’ll die. Maybe I should have been reading the ads every single day.

But you just mentioned Gen Alpha in that way and it’s like, I don’t know if anyone is telling them that there are other ways to be. And so the notion that it’s all consume, and market, and purchase, at some point, people just grow up and their habits change and their tastes change.

AB: Maybe we’ll sign the next anti-marketer.

There’s something about everyone being marketing that it just feels like maybe in the deepest way there will be a rebellion to that, right? In every counterculture, there’s some rebellion against that kind of commercialization.

RP: The pendulum always swings, right? We’re seeing it now in terms of nostalgia having this big moment and everyone being nostalgic and everyone was obsessed with Love Story and this nostalgic content and the throwback to the ‘90s, whatever.

I have an 11-year-old daughter, she’s Gen Alpha. She has only grown up knowing that this is what it is. She doesn’t have the point of reference that I have where I’m remembering looking through the pages of Vogue and having that emotional relationship with the ads or the content. These generations aren’t comparing it to anything. They’re not necessarily thinking that there’s a bad or a good version of this. This is just what they know. There’s obviously pros and cons to everything. But at the end of the day, if you think of it, we’re all sort of our own marketers, right?

RP: That’s in our day-to-day job, in our role, whether you’re advocating for yourself or fora salary raise or whatever that is, we are all sort of marketers. Some of us are marketers with a platform. And some of us are marketers in our everyday.

AB: When I first got into the digital ecosystem, it was at a time where you were driving your own algorithm. So to Raina’s point, it’s like I can remember growing up and I was driving the algorithm in terms of going through this big Vogue magazine or InStyle magazine figuring out what I liked, but now the world knows the consumer. I don’t know if that’s going to change. I think that’s the world we live in now. I really do.

It’s a spectrum, right? Some people will want to be more forward about self-discovery and don’t want to be fed as much. But I also think that it’s just the world we live in.

RP: The other side of the coin is that we’re living in a more egalitarian society.There are people on the internet who didn’t have a place before. You’re being exposed to different people, you’re being exposed to different things, and you’re seeing different kinds of content, whatever that is. It’s broadening the spectrum of who can become … There used to be a mechanism for who got to be famous and who got to have a voice. A lot of people can have a voice and that’s a good thing.

We’ve come now inexorably to AI and maybe my own dim views of the platforms that I don’t think you share. If I had to describe the mistake that traditional media companies have made over the past 10 years, it’s that we will get enough scale to bring YouTube to the table and cut us a bigger check than everyone else, right?

Jonah Peretti was just on Decoder and maybe the original sin of millennial digital media was Jonah Peretti believed he could go so viral that Facebook would pay him money. And Mark Zuckerberg looked at him and said, “No, I can replace you with an army of teenagers who will work for free.” And he killed most of these companies. They’re all gone. You still have that problem, right? You have stars who have risen above it, but at any point, you still have that problem.

You have a bunch of stars in your roster who have risen above it. You have a lot of scale. You have good relationships with the platforms it seems like, but you still have no ability to bring Neal Mohan, the CEO of YouTube, to the table and get better rates for your talent, right? You have to monetize them in other ways.

And at some point, Neal, and Adam Mosseri who runs Instagram, they’re going to start putting AI content into these feeds, perfectly tailored to the consumer. They’ve already said they want to do this and they’re going to start taking minutes of attention away from all of the creators and something else will happen. I’m saying this in stark terms because they say it all the time. They’re not shy about it. Adam Mosseri just put out a blog post where he’s like, “Maybe every Instagram app will be different for every person and I’m worried about what that will do to society, but we’re going to do it anyway.” And I immediately wrote Adam and said, “You’ve got to come on the show.” And Adam, if you’re listening in, come on the show and talk about that with me.

But that’s the future that platforms see, that they’re going to even more infinitely tailor the content to people, that they’ll make AI avatars of creators on YouTube and somewhere they will reap the rewards of the AI avatars of the creators on YouTube. That’s not 10 years from now, that’s tomorrow. That’s coming really fast. How are you thinking about hedging amongst those threats?

AB: Neal Mohan said yesterday that YouTube’s position is that there’s too much AI slop out there and he wants to make sure that YouTube is a place for real human-made or human-touched AI content.

AB: I do believe him. I think YouTube is one of the best places to tell a story. And I firmly believe that there has to be a human touch on the product.

RP: Obviously we’re all talking about AI and it’s been interesting because in all the meetings that I’ve been in with creators and brands talking about it this week, everyone goes to the same thing, which is like, “Yeah, AI is a great tool, but there’s only so many cats bouncing on…” At a certain point, you look past the AI-generated content and you’re like, “I see that it’s AI. It’s fine. It’s whatever.” The consumer, does not seem to be gravitating towards this idea.

Yeah, they hate it. The polling data is clear. They’re booing at graduation.

RP: The content’s not contenting. And so will it exist? Of course. But listen, we just saw this massive thing go down in New York with the Knicks, right, and this insane desire for this human connection. The conversation was taking place on these platforms and then it was taking place offline.

And I think that we’re only going to see more of the relationship between the platforms, and the content, and creators building these communities and building these audiences and then figuring out these IRL experiences. It’s not a coincidence that there was this groundswell around these sort of moments and finding this community and finding your people. And I think that’s a little bit of the other side of the coin to the AI content.

AB: The opportunity for platforms now is for them to continue to protect the creator or the artist in the midst of everything that’s happening with AI and be able to balance the ecosystem, make sure that the human can still survive and they have a real opportunity to do that. I mean, you look at what these platforms have done in terms of producing stars and where we were 10 years ago to where we are today, and now they need to preserve that.

If I look around Cannes and conversations I’ve had here: Two days ago, I interviewed the CEO of Digitas, a huge ad agency. She’s great. And she’s a tech CEO. She thinks about data, and scale, and platforms and that is one side of the advertising industry. How much data can we collect to put the right product at the right time on the right shelf at Walmart? And that is how she thinks.

Then there’s the creator side, which is like the human side. It’s like the cuddly face of Cannes, but actually everyone here is transacting on data. There’s a lot of money floating around data here in, frankly, terrifying ways. It feels like the platforms are continuing to use the presence of the creator, the presence of the stars to sort of… “Don’t look at our real business. Don’t look at where the real scale is,” which is Meta will perfectly target creative to you and maybe even generate it with AI because that is the growing part of their ad business.

Mark Zuckerberg has said it out loud. “You just give us money. We will AI generate the ads perfectly for individual consumers and we’ll just deliver you business results.” The whole ad ecosystem here knows this is coming for them. They think this is an existential threat.

It seems like both of you are just much more confident that that human face of this business, the creator economy, will outlast the naked ambition of the tech executives that run these platforms, even though they keep saying they’re going to put more AI in the feeds. And it’s not like the AI content is getting worse, right? It’s something else.

RP: Right. But what we see is that relevance drives conversion. The more relevant content is, the more relevant the brand working with the creator, like the more relevant the partnership, the more success that comes from it. And I just don’t know that you’re going to see that level of relevancy from AI generating this continuation of, in your words, the AI slop content.

Well, I don’t think it’s slop. For example, every creator I know, right, the pressure to make more stuff just exists. Some of the youngest TikTokers I know, they just are like, “I have to make four posts a day every single day. That’s the way I’m going to win.” That’s a lot of pressure to create. Every one of those videos is valuable for a day or a week and then they’re gone, right? You don’t have catalog value. Of course they’re going to start using AI to make some of that content. They’re going to relieve the pressure in the most natural way.

RP: Right. But that’s using it as a tool to enhance their…

But I just think it’s a small jump from there to, “let YouTube make the next video for me.” And now we’re not really having the AI slop conversation, right? The platform is helping the creator in some maybe very meaningful way and then it’s a small jump from there to “we made a VTuber. There’s a totally virtual creator.” And I actually think UTA reps some VTubers, right? So there’s just a spectrum from slop to synthetic creator that looks like it’s compressing more rapidly than maybe anybody thought about.

RP: Yeah. I mean, listen, not no, but again, audiences are built from the human component of it.

RP: And community is built and community ultimately is the most important thing that these creators have. And you can’t build community solely from AI content.

AB: I keep phrasing it in this way, but I think that’s the opportunity, because I firmly believe that these worlds will cohabituate. And whether it’s OpenAI or it’s Anthropic, they have incredible executives in place. We have incredible relationships with those platforms just like we do YouTube and the video and social media platforms.

Do you worry about your creators likenesses being taken or voices being taken? We see this happen all over the place.

AB: Sure. We worry about it, but —

Do you have a mechanism to stop it?

AB: I don’t want to… Let’s edit this stuff.

We don’t do that. Sorry. Journalism. I’m just curious. And you can say no, you don’t want to answer, but.

AB: Okay. No, I don’t want to answer.

Okay. I’m just saying one of the things I think UTA provides at scale is you have relationships with the platforms and the platforms are full of synthetic content creators’ faces being used, creators being redressed. I see that all the time now. Do you have the ability to go to the platforms and say, “We need to stop this”? There’s not a great legal mechanism yet in any of our countries to say, “That’s my likeness, please take it down.” I’m wondering if you have come up with those solutions with the platforms or are letting it happen.

RP: I don’t think that there are any solutions to any of the nuance of that. We work on behalf of our clients to make sure that their name and likeness aren’t being used to the extent that we can. To your point, whether that’s in the confines of legal or whether it’s through legal channels or what have you, we’re out to protect our clients to the extent that obviously we want to.

Yeah. I’m curious, that just feels like the bleeding edge of having to protect your clients, right? It’s very easy to reuse the content. It’s very easy to steal people’s likeness. It’s very easy to steal people’s voices and it just feels like there’s some part of the creator economy that’s going to run into that in just massive scale.

I mean, there’s a reason there’s deepfakes litigation. There’s a reason there’s deepfakes legislation floating around. Everyone understands that it’s a problem. I’m just wondering if you’re hearing that from your creators and if you’re taking that to the platforms.

AB: I think the platforms have also been incredibly responsible in protecting the talent too. You look at the tools that YouTube has come out with and, like I said earlier, this is where the platforms have a continued opportunity to prioritize and protect the human beings that power the storytelling.

You both have given me a lot of time. I just want to wrap up, like a very quick lightning round question. We exist in a time of huge platforms. What do you see as nascent? Is there a next platform on the rise that you’ve got your eye on? Where does the next group of creators come from?

AB: I think there’s going to be a real resurgence in live content. I think we saw an incredible boom around that pre-COVID and into early COVID. And then as people started to get back out into the world, the business just started to change, and that business was so concentrated in gaming or more streaming culture. I think we’ll start to see other categories, and niches, and verticals that really start to thrive in that medium.

Yeah. What about you, Raina?

RP: I mean, listen, Gen Alpha.

Marketing, consuming all day long.

We’re going to come back around. What’s next for UTA? What should we be looking at from both of you?

RP: That’s such a hard question to answer because there’s just so many conversations going on.

AB: There’s so much. And by the time we answer it, we will have iterated on it. We’re constantly evaluating all of the different opportunities and directions we can go, and then something

happens with content or and —

AB: And you’re moving at the speed of context.

AB: We’re moving at the speed of content.

RP: You were here. You heard it live.

I’m going to take my royalty back for that one. This was really great. Thank you guys so much for joining Decoder.

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