Are Creators the future of Advertising? Mark Ritson thinks not.
Mark Ritson, founder of the Mini MBA is pushing back against the current “creators are the future of advertising” narrative. His argument is not that creator marketing is useless. It’s that marketers are overcorrecting, they are taking something that can be highly effective in circumstances and turning it into a universal marketing strategy.
The CEO of Unilever announced an ambition to put 50% of digital spend into social and dramatically increase the number of creators the company works with. Mark Ritson’s concern is that this effectively applies one creator-led principle across hundreds of very different brands. (eg. Dove, Hellman’s, Vaseline)
Ultimately the marketing problem is reach versus engagement.
Creators can be excellent at generating credibility, engagement, demonstration and advocacy among people already interested in a category or creator. Think beauty/skincare tutorials, product demonstrations, recommendations, reviews, etc.
But Mark Ritson argues that brand growth primarily comes from market penetration, reaching lots of light buyers and non-buyers. Creator audiences tend to be comparatively concentrated, which makes creators less naturally suited to delivering mass reach efficiently.
That's where traditional mass media and broad-reach digital media can still be extremely valuable.
There's also an interesting economic/operational problem underneath this. Scaling creator marketing isn't simply equivalent to increasing a Meta or YouTube budget. Brands suddenly need creator sourcing, contracts, approvals, rights management, content production, measurement and attribution across potentially hundreds or thousands of creators. Recent reporting suggests many brands still don't have the infrastructure or measurement systems necessary to do this effectively.
What this means for us:
We need to educate our clients and help them distinguish between where creators genuinely outperform conventional media and where paid distribution is still required to create scale.
This isn’t an anti-creator position. It's an argument for better media planning around creators.