The Creator Economy Is Shifting Toward a Programmatic Model

The creator economy has started building its own programmatic infrastructure. The clearest example is creator commerce platform LTK, which this week rolled out a new AI-driven service that lets marketers build campaigns, identify creators, and get recommendations for next steps. LTK joins a growing list of companies racing to automate influencer marketing; over the past two years, holding companies and other firms have also snapped up numerous influencer-marketing companies chiefly for their technology.

Natalie Silverstein, chief innovation officer at Collectively, describes the process as 'a blend of art and science,' adding that 'it's the art part that makes it work.' Advocates for the programmatic model make their case on efficiency grounds: AI-driven dashboards let brands manage many creators at once through a single system rather than negotiating individually — a necessity in some cases, such as managing Unilever's 'army' of more than 300,000 creators. According to LTK co-founder Amber Venz Box, the company's offering is built on proprietary commerce intelligence drawn from 15 years of data, including more than 100 billion commerce signals.

But the programmatic model isn't without its downsides — problems like ad fraud, hidden costs, and a lack of placement transparency could well repeat themselves here too. Gabe Gordon, CEO of Reach Agency, warns that leaning too hard on automation risks flooding the market with low-quality, so-called 'AI slop' content: 'Creators aren't interchangeable ad inventory, and the industry risks automating away the very thing brands are actually paying for — human trust and creative thinking,' he says.

The programmatic ad market was built on standardization, but no such single standard exists in the creator economy. Silverstein of Collectively says the programmatic approach works well for affiliate or sponsorship content aimed at artificially scaling word-of-mouth, but standardizing campaigns that require a tailored approach across different niches and platforms is far harder. Gordon notes that a creator partnership can take many forms — from a sponsored post to an original entertainment series, from a product collaboration to a live event or a long-term ambassador role — and none of that reduces neatly to a single unit of measurement.