Ava Lee, the creator behind Glow With Ava, put her own beauty snack brand on Target shelves nationwide on Sunday. That same week, Bloomberg reported that Alex Cooper's Unwell Beverage Co. is ending production across its line, with Target, the brand's main retail partner, planning to sell through its remaining inventory.

Bloomberg's reporting doesn't say why the Alex Cooper beverage line is closing, and a category that already includes Logan Paul’s PRIME caffeinated energy drink and Emma Chamberlain's Chamberlain Coffee is decidedly a hard one to break into. Perhaps a Kantar study from earlier this summer that looked at 15,000 sponsored creator posts and showed that high engagement and genuine brand effectiveness often don’t align provides an answer.

Below: what Kantar’s The Creator Game Plan can measure for brands, and a trade show opening tomorrow that connects outdoor creators with outdoor brands.

— Jeff

Jeff Hallstead is a Chief Content Officer who builds branded entertainment programs for the kinds of brands he writes about here.

Mimitime launched in Target stores and on target.com nationwide on Sunday, August 16, eight days after launching on its own site. It's a Korean-style konjac jelly snack with marine collagen, co-founded by Ava Lee, creator of Glow With Ava, and Priscilla Tsai, founder of Cocokind. Cindy Lloyd is chief executive, and Lee is chief brand officer.

Lee wrote on her own Substack about why she brought in a partner this time, after building byAVA alone. Tsai "had already lived through building and scaling Cocokind," she wrote, and she named manufacturing relationships and retail conversations as "the operational stuff that no amount of research replaces." Reaching a Korean manufacturing partner and a national beauty endcap took two years, and so Lee understood the value of partnering with someone who had gone that route before.

Creator Alex Cooper’s Unwell Beverage Co. launched in 2025 in partnership with Nestlé, and the product sat on the table between Alex and her guests in every video episode of "Call Her Daddy" (with its 2.2 million subscribers on YouTube and 3.8 million followers on Instagram; Alex herself has 7.8 million followers on Instagram) and shipped a Target-exclusive flavor in May. Bloomberg reported on August 13 that production is ending, days after Unwell, Cooper's media company, took outside investment at a $500 million pre-money valuation from WTSL. Having an audience was never the binding constraint in Cooper’s beverage business; converting that audience to try the brand was.

Kantar analyzed more than 15,000 pieces of sponsored creator content on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube for "The Creator Game Plan," comparing live likes and comments per view against brand-impact scores from its LINK AI tool. The two agreed roughly a third of the time. Among the posts that scored highest on engagement, fewer than one in five showed strong brand-building potential and about one in eight showed short-term sales potential. Kantar also puts creator content seven percentile points below digital advertising benchmarks on Branding, which it attributes to the same editorial style that makes the format work at all.

Agentio, the creator advertising platform, analyzed $130 million in spend across 65,000 Meta Partnership Ads from 137 brands. Ads carrying the creator's handle earned 19% more clicks, converted 10% better, and cost 5% less per acquisition than licensed footage run from the brand's own account. In Meta's search placements, the conversion gap ran to 143%. The report also clocks the average winning creator ad as fatiguing after 36 days, and since Agentio sells software that manages that creator-replacement cycle, it lets brands test continuously.

Linqia's CPG Influencer Staffing Report took a 2026 LinkedIn snapshot of U.S. roles explicitly tied to influencer and creator work at companies representing more than 700 brands and over $20 billion in combined advertising spend. It counted 152 such roles, an average of about 13 per company, with Manager the largest tier at 34% and Director at 13%. VP and "Head of" each account for 1%. Half the companies have hired an in-house creator, and none have hired a second, which is what a pilot looks like on an org chart.

Outdoor Retailer's Wild Reach initiative debuts August 19 through 21 at the Minneapolis Convention Center, the show's new home, embedding more than 150 outdoor creators with a combined 11.7 million followers among the exhibitors. Popfly is the technology partner and handles recruitment, brand matchmaking, and QR-based tracking, so exhibitors can see which booth conversations produced content. Creators work the floor through a Passport Program built around hands-on product discovery, and the show describes the output as unscripted. Education Day is August 19, and the exhibit hall is open August 20 and 21; creators apply through the Wild Reach form on the Outdoor Retailer site, and brands arrange participation through the show's exhibitor team.

Kantar's number says a creator saying a brand’s name out loud carries more lift than anything else it measured and shows up in barely half of sponsored posts. Agentio's research says the same footage works harder under the creator's handle than under the brand partner's.

Spending more on creator content than your current reporting can account for? That's the work I do with brand teams. Book a 30-minute call.

Who's buying, hiring, and greenlighting branded content this week, from job-post signals to confirmed deals.

This week's radar: 22 creator and content roles posted. 8 sit in-house at brands, 8 at agencies and vendors serving brands, 6 at platforms. 1 is director level or above. 11 disclosed an annual salary band in U.S. dollars, median $119,500.

Why it matters: V1sion was built around helping creators start their own ventures, which is the capability DBA is buying and the same capability the Mimitime launch runs on. The open question is what happens to fee structures, because a manager paid to build a creator's business has less reason to say yes to a one-off brand deal.

Why it matters: Murcko comes from theSkimm, Fullscreen, Condé Nast, and Gannett, a publisher's revenue résumé. Fixated bought Ellify, Elevate, and Studio71's North American business in eight months for $50 million from Eldridge, so the hire reads as a move to sell that roster the way a media network sells inventory. Watch whether direct media sales overtake brand partnerships in the mix.

Why it matters: Havas Red launched CRed earlier this year as a global creator practice aimed at longer-term partnerships, and this promotion puts the person running its largest client's social account in charge of that practice nationally. Holdcos keep building their creator units inside the PR side of the house, which leaves the function one room away from where media budgets get decided.

Why it matters: This is the only director-level role on the radar this week, and its job is selling creator work into brands. A commission structure attached to a director title suggests the agency expects the pipeline to come from outbound prospecting, which is a reasonable read on how many brands still aren't sure what to ask for.

Why it matters: A creator moving from paid posts to co-ownership changes what a brand is negotiating for, because Lee's reason to talk about this product now runs for years instead of one campaign window. The open question is distribution economics. A national beauty endcap is expensive shelf space, and the first reorder tells you whether the audience followed her into the aisle.

Why it matters: The brief pairs premium brand and media partnerships with experience design, reflecting a company that expects its content to be made in rooms it owns. Spirits brands got here early because the category can't advertise everywhere, and that constraint tends to produce better content thinking than an open budget does.

Why it matters: The role owns affiliate creator outreach, is explicitly asked to move those relationships toward longer-term community building, and gets a say in assortment, pricing, and promotion. A creator function with influence over what gets made and what it costs is the version that survives a budget review, because it can point at a margin line.

Why it matters: The top of that band is more than double what any brand-side role on this week's radar pays, for a job about matching merchants and assortment to creator content. TikTok is buying operators who can make the supply side work at category level, and the brands selling through that channel are staffing the same problem at manager pay.

Why it matters: Amazon is hiring someone to push shows including "New Heights," "The Oprah Podcast" and "Armchair Expert" out onto platforms it doesn't own, which is an admission that owning the destination isn't enough to fill it. Any brand running a podcast or a series should read the same sentence about its own channel.

Why it matters: A free ad-supported service with more than 100 million monthly users is building a launch process around creators the way a network builds it around a series premiere. That gives a brand a route into creator-led programming with television-style sponsorship mechanics attached, which is easier to buy than a bespoke deal.

Why it matters: This turns exhibition space into a production location with attribution attached, which is a new line item for anyone who already budgets a category trade show. Watch what exhibitors report afterward. Content volume makes it a booth upgrade; scan-to-outcome data makes it a media buy, and those are two different conversations with a CFO.

Why it matters: An upfront is what a category builds when buyers need to compare inventory on the same terms, and the IAB running one moves creator media a step closer to how television is bought. CreatorFronts is invite-only for qualified brand marketers, media buyers, and agency staff, so the practical step is requesting an invitation through the IAB events site.

CMO statements, earnings mentions, and funding signals.

I work with a small number of brands at a time as a fractional Chief Content Officer, building branded entertainment strategy and the infrastructure to run it. If your team is scaling content past one-off campaigns, book a 30-minute call. You'll leave with bullet points on how you can better use your audience data to grow.

Jeff Hallstead, brand strategy consultant and fractional CCO. Based in Los Angeles. jeffhallstead.com