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.

Several stories this week made me think about what brands actually mean when they say they need more creators.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Target, American Eagle and other brands are recruiting everyday people with very small audiences into formal creator programs. Club Target accepts creators with as few as 500 followers and has already grown to 15K members.

TikTok is building creators into its NBA and WNBA partnership, and Fortune reported that brands are involving creators earlier in everything from product feedback to campaign development.

Gap added another version of this when it opened its creator and affiliate program to eligible employees across its corporate offices, stores and distribution centers.

There’s also new performance data that makes the follower question more interesting.

OpenSponsorship 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, while creators in the 50K to 250K follower range had the highest cost per engagement and cost per view. Mega creators, meanwhile, had the lowest median cost per view.

It's their own platform data, weighted toward sports, wellness, food and lifestyle, so read it as a strong signal about their roster.

Their explanation for that middle tier highlights a problem I see often. The creator has a real audience, a tidy grid and a plausible media kit, so the buy looks responsible in a deck but they aren’t always the right fit. 

They found something else that matters more than the tier math. Creators booked inside the subject they already post about outperformed creators booked outside their lane in every cut of the data. Niche fit beat follower count every time they looked.

The question underneath all of this is about the job each creator should have, and most 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 a specific thing that person is responsible for changing.

Taken together, these stories show how much the job of the creator is changing.

Brands still pay creators for access to an audience, but increasingly, that’s only one reason to work with them. Someone might be there to make content, sell, or bring the brand into a community it wants to reach. And even the OpenSponsorship data shows why “bigger” or “smaller” isn’t a useful strategy on its own. The most efficient tier changes depending on what you are measuring.

I saw a version of this recently while looking at an affiliate program and creator funnel for a DTC brand. The team was stuck between three options: more nano creators, more micro creators, or a tighter creative brief. All three were reasonable options, and none of them was the problem. The program had never separated who was there to make content people actually wanted to watch, who was there to close a sale, and what was supposed to happen between those two things. Adding creators would have produced more content and the same funnel.

That’s why the 500-follower number caught my attention. The interesting question isn’t whether 500 followers suddenly makes someone influential. It’s what 500 followers can be enough to do.

Target’s previous creator program was commission-based. In May, the company introduced two programs for people who participate with the brand in different ways.

Club Target is for everyday creators and Target shoppers. It runs on the Duel platform, uses challenges and tiers, pays in gift cards and perks, and commission starts once someone reaches Tier 7. Target Ambassadors is a separate invite-style program inside LTK for established creators, tied much more directly to sales.
Modern Retail on why Target changed its creator program

Club Target also gives us a look at how a brand can manage thousands of participants without treating every piece of creator content the same way. The program still requires disclosures and challenge-specific tags, and it reviews challenge submissions. Based on its public instructions, posts can go live before Target reviews whether the creator completed the challenge correctly.

Same brand, same category, two different jobs with two different economies attached. Somebody decided what each group was for before deciding what to pay them, and that's rarer than it should be.

Of course I work at the intersection of social and claims so I can’t help but think about how this might apply to different niches. Target has room to work that way. A pharma brand, a supplement company, a device team, or anyone carrying substantiation requirements doesn’t always. 

My thought is that posts making a claim about the product needs review but everything else, the shopping trip, the routine, the reaction, the reason someone likes the thing, can run on clear rules with monitoring after the fact. Most programs I see either review all of it or review none of it, and both of those cost more than they should. 

Probably not 15,000 creators.

Target has national awareness, stores across the country, an enormous product assortment, affiliate infrastructure and customers who already make Target content.

The useful part is how Target is separating people based on what they can contribute.

A customer who loves making videos, an affiliate who consistently sells, a creator whose content performs in paid media, and someone with access to a community you can't reach are all valuable, for four different reasons. 

That should change what you ask them to do, what you give them in return, how much support they need, and how you measure their contribution.

Before a brand asks how to find more creators, I think there's a better question:

Who is already willing to participate in this brand, what could each person actually contribute, and what should the brand give them in return?

A few things I’ve been thinking about while actually doing my job this week.

Some feedback is really late information.
I started shaping a creative brief before I had all of the source material. By the time an important reference arrived, I had already made decisions about the story and direction based on what was available. The new material changed some of those decisions, so the brief had to change too.On a timeline, that revision gets logged as feedback, when it was reworked because of an input that showed up late. Creative that isn't working needs a better idea. Creative that changed because the reference arrived in week three needs a better intake step at the start of the project. Two different problems, and calling both of them feedback hides the one you can actually fix.

A brief has to decide enough without deciding the creative.
On the same assignment, I kept coming back to how much direction creative actually needed from me. The brief should settle the audience, the problem, the required messages, the boundaries and what the idea needs to accomplish. It can point to a useful story flow or existing assets. It shouldn’t solve the execution before the creative team gets it.

Concept approval and content approval are not the same thing.
On another project, I’ve been thinking about how to get alignment on a messaging territory without making it sound like every future sentence inside that territory has already been approved. Especially in review-heavy categories, teams need to be clear about what they’re approving now and what still needs to be evaluated once the actual content exists.

P&G helped invent the soap opera. Now it’s making a 22-episode taco drama for Albertsons.
Rico’s Tacos is a short-form scripted series built around different kinds of shopping trips Albertsons sees in its customer data. Retailers usually use shopper data to decide who should see the marketing. Here, the way people actually shop helped shape what got made. I want to come back to this once there’s enough performance data to tell us whether people watched and whether it changed what they bought.

Fake experts create a trust problem that real brands still have to pay for.
A New York Times investigation found hundreds of AI-generated videos featuring fake doctors, healers and wellness influencers promoting supplements online.

The misleading claims are the immediate problem. I'm also interested in what happens to legitimate brands when real experts and real evidence appear in the same feeds as people who never existed. The brand has to prove the person is real before the audience even gets to whether the person should be trusted.

I'm going deeper on this in the next WIP, including what changes when brands have to prove the source, keep checking whether the evidence is current, and explain how the content was made.

Most of what I noticed this week comes back to the same question. What is this person, format or feature actually here to do?

A creator can be there for reach, engagement, credibility, sales, or access to a community the brand can't reach on its own. Follower count still matters and so does every one of those. The mistake is letting one of them stand in for the casting decision.

The fake doctors are the same question from the other direction. When anyone can manufacture a source that looks credible, proving who's talking moves from a compliance step at the end into the casting decision at the start.

If you work on a creator, affiliate or ambassador program, where is the role still unclear?

What are you asking people to do that you’re not sure you’re measuring, rewarding or supporting correctly?

I turned the questions behind this issue into a one-page check for teams trying to figure out whether they need different creators or whether the real problem is somewhere else in the program.

The worksheet helps you look at:

Download: Before You Add More Creators

If your creator or affiliate program is already active but you still can’t tell whether the problem is casting, content, the offer, the funnel or measurement, I also offer a Creator & Affiliate Program Diagnostic.

Learn about the diagnostic