Creator Spend Breaks at $10 Million Without Systems, Viral Nation Co-CEO Says

Enterprise creator marketing programs break down once social spend "crosses the threshold of $10 million and above," according to Joe Gagliese, co-founder and co-CEO of Toronto-based creator marketing company Viral Nation. Speaking in an interview with Dinis Guarda, Gagliese said Fortune-level CMOs and CEOs routinely order aggressive creator investment without the operational machinery to support it.

"CMOs and CEOs of Fortune companies are saying things like scale our social, put 50% of our budget into creator," Gagliese said. "But the part that they're missing is the best social operating companies in the world focus on the how it's done and not necessarily the why or the what."

In his telling, "everything that that system entails breaks" when a brand pushing past $10 million lacks the team, technology and approval processes that spend requires. That's a direct warning for practitioners: budget growth without internal infrastructure produces execution failure, not reach.

What does this change for enterprise marketers?

Gagliese framed brand-safety vetting as a precondition for larger creator budgets rather than a compliance afterthought. A brand partnership gone wrong can cost a company "20% of their market cap," he said. That risk calculation drove Viral Nation to build its own brand-safety technology, which filters an estimated 50 million creators worldwide down to a vetted network of 1 million it deems ready for enterprise use.

He also described how creator selection changes character as a program scales. "Brands really used to care which creators they worked with because they were working with 20 of them," Gagliese said. "When a Fortune 500 goes to working with 4,000 of them, it becomes less relative who it is and more relative what it's doing to move the P&L of that business."

For managers of large rosters, that means the evaluation shifts from individual creator identity to portfolio-level performance data.

Which categories are spending fastest?

Pharmaceutical companies and AI companies currently rank among the fastest-growing spenders in creator marketing, Gagliese said, because creator content has proven effective at reaching their audiences.

On LinkedIn, he said the platform has historically made it harder to transact with creators than YouTube or TikTok. That could change: LinkedIn is planning new creator discovery tools, which Gagliese said could open B2B spending on the platform — a signal worth watching for B2B social teams currently constrained by limited creator supply.

Briefs built from performance history

Briefing is also evolving. Gagliese said briefs are increasingly built from a creator's individual performance record rather than applied uniformly across a roster. He shared one concrete example: a client found a creator's results improved fivefold when the creator's pet appeared in a post, and the brief was then adjusted to include the pet going forward.

Viral Nation is also running creator campaigns in October and November built specifically to influence how AI systems surface a brand — not to reach human audiences. "Big creator programs solely meant for AI search, nothing else," Gagliese said. That's an early, concrete instance of creator spend being redirected toward generative-engine visibility (how AI search tools like chatbots and AI answer engines present brands) rather than traditional audience reach.

Reviews carry direct commercial weight too, Gagliese said, particularly in automotive. Negative reviews from "those top 20 creators" following a new vehicle release can leave a brand "with parking lots full of vehicles."

The through-line from Gagliese's comments is operational: as enterprise creator budgets push past the $10 million mark and AI search becomes a campaign target, the differentiator will be vetting infrastructure and data-driven briefing — not headline budget size.