In the basement of a complex just steps away from the Knicks’ home in Madison Square Garden, a different kind of competition is underway.
Rather than running on a hardwood floor, four creators take turns standing on stage in front of a room full of marketing and advertising executives, all in hopes of grabbing their attention and winning a pitch contest and its grand prize: a $25,000 brand deal with software giant Adobe.
That was on the line when it came to one of New York Advertising Week’s showiest events of the year, a creator-led contest in collaboration with Adobe and Digital Voices. Over the course of seven days, a shortlisted group of 20 creators were given the opportunity to pitch Adobe a campaign promoting the company’s AI model, Firefly. The 30-minute presentation saw finalists Isiuwa Igodan (4,700 Instagram followers), Shelby Tate Blaauw (10,800 TikTok followers), Ryan Sichelstiel (64,900 TikTok followers) and Michael Nesmith (4,000 LinkedIn followers) propose everything from a digital scrapbook for all to an audience-fueled reimagining of a more accessible world.
Ultimately, Igodan’s idea to expand Bestie Banter, a card game that has players guess popular phrases based on prompts, into the digital world through AI-generated images shared on social media, won the event.
But the contest served as something more than a multi-grand prize for one person or even a chance for the chosen 20 to collaborate with a respected brand. It also worked as an early bridge between the advertising community and an ecosystem that’s expected to be worth $480 billion by 2027.
The bridge is badly needed as a divide has emerged between creators who feel stifled by the long list of demands and creative constraints that come from brands, and brand leaders who still aren’t entirely sure how to deploy creators in their campaigns. While creators are happy to finally be seated at a table that includes some of the most influential names in advertising, many are frustrated that it’s taken so long.
Events like Advertising Week signal that both sides are trying to better connect. It marked the first time that the creator economy played a significant role at the annual marketing conference.
“I always feel glad to be in these spaces and doing things like this with brands where I get to present myself as a non-binary person and talk about my community — my trans and non-binary audience — because a lot of us don’t have access to these rooms,” Iris Olympia, a creator and musician with over 275,000 Instagram followers, told TheWrap. “Even if I’m not necessarily here winning … I’m still having our identities presented right in front of the brands themselves, saying, ‘Hey, we’re here. Remember, we’re here.’ That feels really good.”
The contest, along with the rest of Advertising Week’s focus on creators, also helped expose advertisers more directly to creators they may not typically contact. Though the creator economy is a fairly mature one, many brands are still focused on reaching out to the biggest names in the industry — the Alex Coopers and Sean Evans of the world — rather than lesser known creators who may have substantial followings and even higher engagement rates with their audience. Focusing on bigger creators also means that brands could be ignoring niche communities that perfectly reflect their target audience.
But as well received as the contest was by both creators and Advertising Week attendees, it was ultimately just one event.
“The Adobe pitch competition is a step in the right direction to give back to creators, but that is ultimately only going to affect one to three people. So how do you do that on a larger scale?” Gigi Robinson, a creator with over 150,000 TikTok followers and the founder of Hosts of Influence, told TheWrap. Robinson, who often helps creators with their personal branding, served as an on-site coach for creators throughout the competition.
How Adobe’s Creator Contest unfolded
Over the past two years, Ruth Mortimer, global president of Advertising Week, noticed more creators were attending Advertising Week. But it wasn’t until this year at Cannes Lions that she realized a real shift was taking place within the creator economy. More often than not, creators were attending these advertising-focused events not as talent but as representatives of their own media businesses.
She also noticed a change in how advertisers themselves were approaching creators. Before creators were seen as a bottom of the funnel addition, meaning that after a company or brand had decided on a campaign, they set aside some money for creators to promote the campaign they already decided upon.
But more companies have been introducing creators toward the beginning of their campaigns and even asking them to weigh in on brand strategy. A good example of this is Crocs’ “Kid With Crocs” campaign, a viral real-world campaign wholly designed by creator Anthony Po (1.9 million YouTube subscribers) that revolved around Po making Crocs for statues around New York.
“I met a bunch of creators that told me, ‘We just don’t have the experience of being in these environments and doing these deals,’” Mortimer said. “There’s been a lot of improvement in the last couple of years about standardizing rates, but the actual business side is still quite untouched.”
Will AI Slop Kill the Creator Economy?
Heading into this year’s New York event, the Advertising Week team decided to make creators a major priority. That meant adding a creator-focused course of panels, unveiling a Meta-sponsored Creator Lounge and, of course, launching the creator pitch competition. Creators were shortlisted via a panel composed of Robinson as well as leaders from Adobe and Digital Voices. They were chosen not based on their follower count but by their responses to Adobe’s brief about designing a campaign to promote Firefly. All 20 people on the shortlist were given a week to work on their pitch as well as feedback from Adobe in a private session.
“We wanted it to be an all-in experience for creators,” Mortimer said.
Olympia, who settled on two short films about gender euphoria and gender dysphoria with a behind-the-scenes Firefly-focused feature for their pitch, was appreciative of the feedback .
“They brought up some of my own concerns about the fit of this partnership with my very activist-oriented audience, people who might be apprehensive about AI programs,” Olympia said. “I really loved that.”
The friction between creators and advertisers
Olympia’s positive and collaborative experience isn’t the norm when it comes to how creators interact with brands.
“Brands say, ‘We want to work with creators. We want to give them their voice.’ But then they have all these legal guidelines and tweaks,” Robinson explained. She noted that those boundaries will “always” exist to some degree, and certainly have in the decades-long partnership between filmmakers/actors and brands to create traditional commercials. These restrictions can be limiting to a group that has flourished online by being authentic. “Those guidelines could be pushed back on more to create more authentic, longer lasting partnerships,” Robinson added.
For many creators, there’s also a lack of education about how to work with brands. Often a creator becomes popular after a viral video or moment. That can lead to a cycle of that creator trying to recreate that success with varying results thanks to the whims of the algorithm.
Because many creators are so focused on chasing virality, it’s difficult to think of the bigger picture, which means complicated questions like personal branding, how they want to collaborate with brands and how to create sustainable ways of connecting with their audience fall to the wayside. It’s also easy for them to creatively burn out “too quickly” once the opportunities come in, Robinson said. Having an agent or a manager can help with some of these concerns, but these professionals are often focused on working with creators as talent rather than shaping their businesses.
“Sometimes creators can be a little bit single-track-minded in terms of ‘What am I actually getting out of this?’” Evan Marshall, one of the competitor and chief outreach officer of the socially focused fashion line Black Menswear (over 729,000 Instagram followers), told TheWrap. He pointed to Advertising Week itself as an example, an event that’s more business-to-business focused rather than business-to-consumer focused.
“You could have 2 or 3 million followers, but [advertisers] might want to work with you even though they haven’t heard of you. That is a very different audience base versus Fashion Week,” Marshall said. “It takes the right creator to understand this is a business opportunity versus someone just wanting to be on the panel.”
It also seems as though this trend of connecting creators and advertisers may continue past Advertising Week. Adobe Max, which will happen later this month in Los Angeles, is designed to cater to creators, artists and business professionals. SXSW 2026 in March will feature a keynote from Patreon co-founder Jack Conte as well as a session from former YouTube and Instagram employee Jon Youshaei. And leaders in the creator field have expressed interest to TheWrap in returning to the advertising hub Cannes Lions for 2026.
“As Taylor Swift talks about, it’s showbiz at the end of the day,” Robinson said. “That’s what being a creator is. You’re a freelancer, you’re an actor, producer, writer, editor and you also have to be a salesperson. And if you can’t confidently sell yourself, whether that’s in an email pitch or on a stage, then you’re just relying on things to come to you.”
