This week: why 500 followers can be enough, what brands are actually hiring creators to do, and a few things I’ve been thinking about while doing creative marketing strategy this week.

Creator marketing has become a little bit like Pokémon.

Brands are collecting nano creators, micro creators, celebrity creators, employees who are creators, customers who might become creators, in addition to anybody with 500 followers and a Target receipt.

I’m exaggerating slightly… but this week I kept running into different versions of the same story: brands are finding more people to call creators, giving them more ways to participate, and involving them in more parts of the marketing process.

Which makes one question increasingly hard to avoid:

What are all these people actually here to do?

Because “we need more creators” is one of those sentences that can survive an alarming number of meetings without anybody asking what the additional humans are supposed to accomplish.

And some new performance data makes that question even more interesting.

Target, American Eagle and other brands are recruiting everyday people with very small audiences into formal creator programs. Club Target accepts people with as few as 500 followers and has already grown to 15,000 members.

TikTok is building creators into its NBA and WNBA partnership. Brands are involving creators earlier in product feedback and campaign development. Gap opened its creator and affiliate program to eligible employees across its corporate offices, stores and distribution centers.

Basically, “who gets to be a creator?” is slowly turning into… maybe everyone.

Then OpenSponsorship came along with some data designed specifically to make the follower-count conversation more annoying.

The company analyzed 1,527 paid creator deliverables from January 2025 through June 2026. Nano and micro creators had the lowest median cost per engagement in its dataset. Creators in the 50K to 250K follower range had the highest cost per engagement and the highest cost per view. While mega creators had the lowest median cost per view. 

Now, this is OpenSponsorship’s own platform data, and its roster leans heavily toward sports, wellness, food and lifestyle which is important to keep in mind. I read it as a strong signal about what happened across their platform, not the Ten Commandments of influencer marketing.

But their explanation for that middle tier made immediate sense to me.

The creator with 50K to 250K followers is extremely easy to defend in a meeting. They have a real audience, their grid looks good, and their media kit has impressive numbers on it. Nobody is going to stare across the conference table and ask why you recommended someone with 213K followers.

It looks responsible even if it isn’t.

The most interesting part to me was that creators booked inside the subject they already post about outperformed creators booked outside their lane in every cut of the data.

Imagine that.

It’s not about about whether brands need bigger creators or smaller ones. It’s about the job each creator is supposed to have.

And a surprising number of programs never make that decision explicitly.

I’ve been saying some version of this for years, and I finally gave it a name: Every Partner Needs a Job™.

Meaning: every person in the program should be responsible for changing something specific.

Brands still hire creators because they have audiences, but increasingly that’s only one reason to work with them.