Creators have the answers now. Agencies need a new job

In February a civil servant in the South Korean city of Chungju handed in his notice. Four days later the city's YouTube channel had lost about 190,000 subscribers, close to one in five. 

Kim Seon-tae, better known as Chungju-man, had built that channel to 975,000 subscribers more or less on his own. When he left, a fair slice of the audience left with him. 

Two weeks later he opened a channel under his own name. It passed a million subscribers in three days. 

Chungju had everything a marketer wants from a creator studio. One person, a point of view, and an audience that turned up for him every week.  

A person posting as themselves will get more attention than a brand account ever will. Genice Ooi, a social specialist at PropertyGuru in Singapore, told the Creator Weekly podcast last week brands shouldn’t try to outwit creators. "How do we fight with the content creators, 'cause they are the reason why people are on social media," she said. 

What to do about it? Some are hiring creators and building creator studios in-house. Many are buying staff a ring light, passing them a template and guidelines. Behold, employee-generated content. Others are turning to creator-led agencies. 

First ask, are you selling or talking to your audience? Conversion or awareness? If you get that wrong you end up with the wrong studio. 

The studios that work are shops, and that includes B2B 

In mainland China, brands broadcasting on the short-video, live-streaming, and social-commerce super-app Douyin from their own stores made slightly more than 30% of sales in 2024. Influencers with more than a million followers, the stars of the livestream boom, brought in about 9%. During last year's 618 shopping festival, half of all livestream sales came from store broadcasts. Store broadcasting is the mainstream in China and is becoming increasingly common elsewhere in Asia. 

A studio is a sales floor. Think racks of products and a host on salary, open every day. L'Oréal opened 22 of these spaces in Vietnam last year and runs them up to 18 hours a day. Momentum Works estimated content commerce made up 37% of Southeast Asian platform e-commerce GMV in the first half of 2026, up from 20% in 2024. Hong Kong's largest 24-hour online shopping mall and e-commerce platform, HKTVmall, runs its live channel from 8.30am to midnight, and Asian beauty and cosmetics retail group Sa Sa says livestreaming made up 15.8% of its Hong Kong and Macau online sales in the six months to September 2025.  

It’s not just B2C, and not entirely new. Over in B2B land they shifted to selling earthmovers this way during the pandemic. In November 2020, Sany ran a 72-hour livestream and sold 17,919 machines, worth about 23.5 billion yuan, roughly two months of group sales. Those were Covid days but it showed it could be done. Another industrial products manufacturer, Zoomlion put its chief technical experts on camera every afternoon that year and sold 620 excavators in one 90-minute broadcast.  

This is genuine employee-generated content. People who know the product such as engineers and trade staff in front of the camera. 

If you’re a brand talking to your audience your studio looks more like a newsroom or a production house and it centres on a skill that most marketers lack. 

Creator-led studios are different  

Creator-led studios are the success stories of the creator economy. These are the creators who built up audiences and followings such as Kim Seon-tae. An increasing number are thriving studios. A few are building agency businesses off the back of their success as a pathway to further growth by winning business off traditional agencies.  

As a result many are being bought. Publicis agreed last year to buy Hepmil, the Singapore group that grew out of the meme page SGAG into a network serving more than 450 brands. Accenture agreed in June to buy Whalar, which has run more than US$600 million of creator campaigns. JianHao Tan built Titan Digital Media into a production house and talent network of more than 70 staff and is now making games. Agencies used to be the smartest people in the room but now have to leave a seat at the top table for creators. 

What the buyers are paying for is knowing what an audience will watch and how to keep engaging them on specific platforms.  

The job is commissioning 

In television, publishing and journalism the skill marketers lack is called commissioning. The person who sees what the audience wants, decides what gets made, works out the business case and finds the people to make it. They know which part of the content creation process is theirs and which belong to the maker.  

PropertyGuru's recent micro drama The Moving Out Show is what commissioning looks like when a brand does it well. The idea started in the appendix of a strategy deck and ended up being pitched as an experiment. The brand went to a production house and a TikTok creator known for winding people up. When the team split over the ending group vice-president for marketing and growth Alex de Leon told them they could make the call. PG’s head of social, Rita Goh said they let the storytellers tell the story. "We let the creatives be creative." 

The brand did make some decisions. The flat was made shabbier and the rent was cut to make it realistic. It’s important that the brand still sets the constraints. Then the creators get the freedom to do their thing within. 

No studio was built. The nine-part series reached a million views in 48 hours and 3.3 million by the finale, with 343,000 comments, shares and replies, against a target of 10,000 views an episode. PropertyGuru's name appeared nowhere until the last episode. "We haven't earned the right to be able to engage with Gen Z," de Leon said. "A lot of brands get it wrong. They say, 'We've got a Gen Z strategy, we're gonna do a TikTok thing,' and you just come full force. But you have no credibility in that space." 

"Should every brand do a micro drama? Like, no, definitely not." de Leon said. Goh was clear the intent was not to be drawn into anything but social media marketing. "We are not becoming a media company," she said. 

As the City of Chungju found out you can’t necessarily keep the star but you do keep the format and credit for getting the idea right in the first place. Kim Seon-tae’s successor was able to build the city’s channel back up to 800,000 subscribers. PropertyGuru showed you can share the glory with the creators. Gen Z interest in rentals on the portal spiked afterwards.  

The agency of the future is a commissioning editor 

So where does this leave traditional agencies? It’s a tricky spot when creator content out-engages most brand content.  

What's left is the commissioning editor job. It’s not unlike what traditional agencies have always done. Spot the gap, find the insight that cuts through, make the case, and now find the right creator to make it. I’d argue with one difference. Agencies are famous for being the ones with the answers. Now creators have the answers to what audiences love.   

Marketers can learn it too but their jobs are bigger than just commissioning which is why I think it’s the problem agencies can best solve. It’s a rare marketer who can keep the branding out of shot. 

This article was written by Simon Kearney, CEO of Click2View.