A European brand director usually hires creators only at the end of a campaign. The creative is finished, the media plan approved, and only then comes the choice of the profile that will carry the product to the audience. Advertising Week, a leading trade conference of the advertising industry, is building the opposite model in New York. At its edition from 5 to 8 October 2026, it wants to connect 500 marketing chiefs with more than 2,500 creators and kick off $100 million of new business between them.
Jessica Williams, Chief Marketing Officer of OnePay, which is joining the initiative, shared those figures and the target amount in her LinkedIn post.
A creator has been given his own title at the conference
Advertising Week named creator Dhar Mann its first Chief Creator Officer. The wording on the official event page reads “In 2026, Dhar Mann joins Advertising Week as our inaugural Chief Creator Officer”. Mann is among the most followed creators on social media. According to his profile, he has 170 million followers across platforms, and his scripted videos are built around moral dilemmas.
The conference takes place in New York's Penn District and lists more than 1,300 speakers and over 500 programme blocks. Mann will curate the creator programme and open the conference with a keynote. His task is to connect creators and brands through “headline programming and live creative collaborations to pitches, meetings and unexpected moments designed to turn conversations into opportunities”.
Moving the creator to the top of the funnel
The core of the initiative is a change in the creator's position in the marketing process. Ruth Mortimer, global president of Advertising Week, explained the logic of the format, according to Digiday. “Lots of creators don't actually often work directly with brands; quite often, they will be part of a campaign, but once you've chosen your creative direction, eventually you'll end up choosing a creator to promote your product. What creators were saying to us was, 'we want to be at the top of the funnel, helping companies co-collaborate and co-create the campaigns.'”
The difference between the two positions is commercial. A paid distribution channel receives a brief and a reward for reach. A co-author of the campaign enters the brief earlier, contributes to the idea and negotiates a different share. The programme in New York is built around the second model.
Who sits at the table for the brands
The list of names Williams published shows whom the initiative is targeting. Besides Mann, it names Mark Kirkham of Pepsi, Ravi Kandikonda of Zillow, Daniel Cherry III of Vans, Tim Ellis of the NFL and Adam Vasall of Big Brothers Big Sisters of America. These are people from brand leadership who decide marketing budgets.
Williams justified her participation by the value creators bring to the relationship with a brand. “Creators have built something brands can’t manufacture: real trust with their communities,” she wrote. Her thesis is that this trust, combined with the right brand and budget, creates partnerships that are both culturally relevant and commercially strong. That is precisely why the marketing chief of a major financial platform is joining a programme whose measure of success is the volume of deals closed, rather than the number of views.
Platforms are also building marketplaces for creators
Advertising Week is not alone in building infrastructure for deals between brands and creators. On 19 May 2026 the platform X launched Creator Connect, which uses AI to pair brands with creators according to campaign goals, audience interests and current trends, and manages the whole process from outreach to distribution, with approval at each step. Meta sponsors the creator hub at the conference itself.
What they share is that a one-off purchase of reach becomes a lasting market layer. A brand and a creator meet repeatedly there, through a standardised process, much like an advertiser and a media agency. The conference adds a physical venue and a four-day window, while the platforms' tools provide ongoing matching.
Stricter advertising labelling rules apply in Europe
Deeper integration of creators into campaigns meets a stricter regime in Europe than in the United States. The Unfair Commercial Practices Directive prohibits hidden advertising and requires creators to state clearly that content comes from a paid partnership with a brand. The Digital Services Act shifts part of the responsibility for such content directly onto creators, and places higher transparency demands on platforms.
France goes furthest. Its 2023 law on influencers requires commercial content to be marked with a banner across the whole photo or video, rather than with a caption or hashtag alone, and sets sanctions of up to €300,000 and six months in prison for breaches. The more a creator's authored content blends into a brand's brief, the sharper the question of where creative work ends and advertising, which must be disclosed, begins.
A Chief Creator Officer title at an industry conference, and a marketplace built around that amount, move creators from an entry in the media plan to the counterparty in a commercial negotiation. For a brand that still buys creators only at the end of a campaign, this changes where the collaboration begins.
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