Inside the big business of the creator economy, with the agents making it happen

We’ve got another special episode of Decoder today, recorded at the Cannes Lions advertising festival in the South of France. I’m talking with Ali Berman and Raina Penchansky, who run the Creators division at United Talent Agency. UTA is an enormous talent agency. Half the people you’ve ever heard speak or perform or who show up anywhere have UTA agents representing them. For full disclosure, that includes me! UTA handled the sale of the forthcoming Decoder book. Which means I paid them money, making this a reverse conflict of interest. Now you know. Anyhow, that has nothing to do with Ali and Raina, whose Creators division represents some of the biggest creators and influencers in the world — stars as diverse as Charli D’Amelio and Markiplier, Kai Cenat and Emma Chamberlain. Alex Cooper and Alix Earle. Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Head here. Not a subscriber? You can sign up here. So I really wanted to know how Raina and Ali identify up-and-coming talent, how they work with that talent to build durable business, and what the machinations of being a top creator actually look like — after all, all of these folks are running multimillion-dollar businesses with several different revenue lines. You’ll hear Ali and Raina talk directly about what it takes to build those businesses, what kinds of deals they strike, and how it’s all very different than the traditional Hollywood model, where your agent just takes a cut. Here, UTA is helping creators literally launch products — and it’s fascinating that the stars of today are going from making media to making products of their own. Not all of them can do it, so I wanted to know how Raina and Ali help their clients make the jump and what makes them successful at it. Of course, we also talked about AI, and platforms, both of which seem like destabilizing forces for the entire creator ecosystem. I think you’ll find Ali and Raina to be refreshingly chill about it all — even though they represent some VTubers of their own. There’s a lot going on here; I think you’re going to like it. Okay: Ali Berman and Raina Penchansky. Here we go. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.  Raina Penchansky, Ali Berman. You are the co-heads of the Creators division at United Talent Agency. Welcome to Decoder. Ali Berman: Thank you. Raina Penchansky: Thanks for having us. I am really excited to talk to both of you. I need to disclose right away: I’m a UTA client. This is a reverse conflict of interest. I think I pay UTA money, but that’s fine. So it’s a good conflict. I’m hoping it causes a journalism scandal and this gets shared widely. I’m very curious about how the Creators division works. You guys have been in the game forever. One of our ideas here on Decoder is that the structure of organizations tells you a lot, and Creators has been reorganized. You guys are the new heads. It started in 2024.  We’re here at Cannes. It’s creators everywhere here. They are the future of advertising. There’s so much money floating around this festival and in advertising. Tell me how UTA works with creators, how this division is structured, your backgrounds, how we got here. AB: I’m going into my 16th year at UTA. I’ve only ever worked at a talent agency, for better or for worse. I started my career at another agency, then after a few years, moved over to UTA in a very Jerry McGuire meets Entourage-esque moment and worked on the more traditional literary side of the business. But I was in love with the internet and what the internet was at the time, which was very blog-centric. Self-discovery was really up to you. You didn’t have algorithms feeding you. It was obviously a very different era. At the time, UTA had a burgeoningdigital department that was really a catchall for anything that was nontraditional film or TV. I went into that division as an entrepreneur, and really gravitated towards artists who were forming their own communities and going direct to consumer. I really believed that there was going to be a day where you could monetize those communities, and so helped shape what at the time was the digital talent division. Right around that time, our third co-head, who’s not here today, Oren Rosenbaum — he’s at Cannes, but not physically in this room, he’s doing another interview downstairs — he was doing the same thing but on the audio side of the business. UTA was the first agency in Hollywood to think about artists in a way other than what you traditionally thought of them. We’re actually celebrating our 20th year as what we now refer to as the Creators division.  Oren was building similar to what I was building, but on the audio-focused side. We acquired two companies, one on the gaming and esports side. And then I’ll kick it over to Raina and then we’ll pick it back up to where we are today. RP: I was one of the cofounders of Digital Brand Architects (DBA) 16 years ago, before Instagram had even launched. I came from a traditional marketing background. What I was drawn to in terms of seeing the bloggers that Ali referenced, the bloggers at the time were people who were building these communities directly with their audience. I’d come from fashion and marketing and I was used to the top-down relationship with the consumer, and it was so exciting to see at the time all these street style women who were building this relationship with their audience and who were essentially the next generation of editors and the next generation of media properties and they just didn’t know it yet.  Iin my time at the brand that I had been with, I was working with a lot of these women in fashion and they would come to me organically and say like, “Oh, such and such brand wants me to post. What should I charge?” Or, “So-and-so wants me to be in a lookbook or a fashion show.” I became like a fairy godmother of sorts, just answering questions in the vein of, “How do you build?” It was totally organic at the time and I was inspired by these women and thought like, “Oh, there’s something here.” I think like most entrepreneur stories, I wasn’t connecting the dots as to what the business was. I was inspired by the storytelling component of it and what they represented in terms of where there was like, “Oh, wait, there’s something here.” That’s 16 years ago. UTA acquired DBA in 2019, and now it sits within the realm of UTA Creators. I have the role of CEO of DBA and then co-head with Ali and Oren. They’re church and state in terms of management and agency, but we have a back of house that services both. We have a brand partnerships team and a products development team and this massive data and analytics. And we sit at the epicenter really of everything that’s taking place in the overused word of “creator economy.” To your point, every single conversation is around creators, that’s fine, but then what does the next chapter ever look like? What Ali and Oren and I come to the table with is that we’ve been in this long enough to know it so well, but are also able to anticipate and be excited about the next chapter of it. And that’s our love language for the three of us. AB: What continues to inspire us is setting the bar, which is what we did 20 years ago, and we’ve been building this for 20 years. Where are we going to place the next bar? That’s what we’re constantly talking about and thinking about. When you look around at this festival, the opportunities are absolutely limitless. For the first time I think in the history of this ecosystem, if there’s a tagline for 2026 especially, I say it often, but it’s, “we’ve arrived.” This direct-to-consumer creator, storyteller, artist world is everywhere. And it’s inescapable. It’s inescapable for brands. It’s inescapable as an artist. So it’s really exciting. RP: I keep looking around and I keep thinking of the version of Cannes Lions from 10, 15, maybe even five years ago. And then I’m looking at it today and all these people are capturing content. It just must feel so different for the people who have been doing this for a long time to see, but it also has a different vibrancy to it. It feels really energized. You can tell that there’s just a little bit of a shift. I think that’s really interesting. I’m struck very much by how much everyone seems to have only just discovered the creator economy — AB: I know. Tell us about it. Or just pretending that it’s brand-new. I can sense that from both of you.  Help me just unpack a little bit of agency world for one second. You described the church and state split between agency and management. I think most of the audience thinks agency and they still think of Ari Gold from Entourage. That’s obviously not the kind of business you’re running. And I want to talk about that because it seems like you’re building businesses for folks in a way that isn’t just signing deals with Hollywood studios. Explain the difference between management and agent. RP: I can speak to it from the creator space, which is different than the traditional space. Creators have so many hats and they’re doing so many things. There’s a nuance to it, whether it’s capturing content, whether it’s content strategy, whether it’s … not being PR, but certainly talking about perception and talking about overarching things around your brand, thinking of roadmaps to all the various things that exist. A lot of these creators are doing things that live offline of their content that’s on platforms and they’re building experiences and they’re building events. And so the relationship between manager and agent and the creator space is incredibly nuanced, because the agents are also nuanced and multifaceted. It’s not like you’re walking on set and you have a thing and you do a thing and you book this. There’s so much that goes into it and so much of that is very intangible and organic. The manager has a lot to do with that in the day-to-day of managing the nuance of what it takes to capture content, build the thing, build whatever offline, the book, all the things that are going along with that. And then the agent is obviously involved in the more business side of it, but it’s a delicate balance. And I think you obviously, Ali, can speak more to the agent side of it as well. AB: The other thing that I’ve been reflecting on a lot is, obviously, and I keep saying it in this interview, but we built this division 20 years ago, but there’s no better time to be a creator, influencer, whatever you want to call it, and be represented at an agency because of how multifaceted careers have become. At a time in the creator economy, it was really just driven by brands. And we were working with clients who we’d say, “Oh, their business is …” And I don’t mean to use the word “just” because I don’t mean to minimize it. Those businesses are incredibly healthy and vibrant and important, but their business is just going to be brand deals, endorsement deals. Now I would argue that if we go and we look at our roster, the majority of our clients are doing way more than just brand deals. When you’re being represented in an agency and especially when you’ve got a creator division inside an agency, they’re really quarterbacking their careers inside all the different dimensions and facets that there are to entertainment. And we’re so fortunate to be seated at a place like UTA where we’ve got experts and market leaders in literally every area. I’m just going to put forth an idea of structure here and you guys can react to it. It just sounds, as you’re describing it, a traditional media company from 10 years ago would have a bunch of infrastructure, right? They would have accountants and finance people and a licensing division and they would have talent and they would pay the talent, whatever number. Maybe UTA would negotiate that talent rate, but that would be the end of UTA. And then the business, whatever big old Hollywood studio would have rooms full of accountants making the business go.  This is my imagination of what old Hollywood was like, but that was basically Sony’s business. “We’re going to make a show, we’re going to pay everybody and then we’re going to license that show to whatever networks around the world.” It sounds like UTA and what you guys are doing is we’ve decentralized the talent. They don’t all work for studios in the same way. And you’re providing that infrastructure layer so that creators don’t have to think about, “Okay, how does my business actually work?” You have a playbook or you have an approach for each of those creators.  Is that a good way to think about it? Because I’m constantly thinking about where the centralization and decentralization come. And the big media businesses, in my opinion, don’t seem like they have a future. They can’t support all that overhead. AB: That’s a tricky one because our clients are the modern-day media businesses. But they don’t have rooms full of accountants. I hope that you’re not telling them to hire rooms full of accountants. AB: No, no, but they’ve got extensions of their teams that are helping them think through what is their P&L. We do have some clients who have in-house accounting because it’s necessitated. We’re certainly decentralizing it, but I think the centralization happens within their own orbit, within their own organization.  Big media companies are struggling in a lot of ways. And a lot of the reason they’re struggling is their distribution has got way away from them. If you own a broadcast network, that is very lucrative, but there is a time limit on how much money that thing is going to make and how many people are going to watch it.  I don’t think a lot of people are turning on their TVs to watch over-the-air broadcasts anymore. That number’s going down. They are all opening Instagram every single day, probably while they’re watching TV. And the cost structures of making that content are changing. And so I think that means the structures of the companies that make that content have to change with them. RP: One hundred percent. Yes. And it just seems like you two are figuring out a role to play inside of those structures. RP: Yes. And we’re figuring out how to optimize for the new version of what those media companies are. To Ali’s point, they’re their own media companies. So what does that entail? Is there going to be physical product? Are we going to do events? What is the TV component of it? We are working within the world of, “How are we taking all of this and turning you into the next media company?” But yes, to your point, it’s completely become decentralized, but we sit at this epicenter of connecting those new dots in the decentralized world. This is why I’m asking the structure question. So many times on Decoder, my joke is, “Tell me your structure, tell me your org chart, that’s like, 80 percent of your problems” and it’s like the 20 percent where the magic is. And here it just se