Gregory Curtis Jr.: Brands Should Run Creator Marketing Like Media Buys

Gregory Curtis Jr. has made the case that brands should treat creator marketing as a media buy, not as an experiment bolted onto the side of a campaign. It's a short argument with long consequences for how marketing teams budget, measure, and negotiate.

The core claim, as laid out in his interview with Net Influencer, is a reframing: creator content isn't influencer flattery or a brand-awareness garnish — it's inventory. And if it's inventory, it should be bought, priced, and evaluated the way display, paid social, or CTV (connected TV advertising sold programmatically) inventory is.

What does this change for practitioners?

If you buy the framing, three things shift.

• Budget lines move. Creator spend stops competing with "experiential" or "PR" dollars and starts competing with performance media dollars — where it has to justify itself on delivery, not vibes.
• Measurement hardens. A media buy implies impressions, reach, frequency, and cost-per-outcome reporting. Gut-feel campaign recaps don't survive that standard.
• Negotiations change. You don't gift product and hope. You negotiate placements, deliverables, and terms the way you would with any publisher or network.

Curtis's argument lands at a moment when creator marketing budgets keep growing but measurement practices lag behind the spend. Treating creators as a media channel is his answer to closing that gap.

Official position vs. industry reception

To be clear about sourcing: this is Curtis's stated position in the Net Influencer interview, not a platform policy change or an industry-wide standard. There's no trade body mandate here, no measurement framework everyone has signed.

The reception question is whether media buyers actually restructure around the idea. That depends on standardization — creators offering consistent, comparable inventory the way publishers do — and on brands being willing to hold creator spend to the same cost-per-result math they apply elsewhere.

For now, it's a thesis practitioners can test against their own numbers: if your creator spend can't survive a media-buy-grade evaluation, Curtis would say the problem isn't the channel — it's how you're buying it.

Expect the "creator as media" framing to keep pressure on pricing transparency and measurement tools across the influencer marketing sector in the coming quarters.