Hiller Media Group Has Paid Creators Nearly $6 Million

Hiller Media Group (HMG) has paid creators nearly $6 million, roughly six times the $1 million it had reached by October 2025. The Austin-based talent management agency crossed $5 million paid to creators in August 2026. Co-founder and CEO Austin Hiller credits a foundation built slowly and deliberately before the firm scaled.

The agency's origin explains its posture. Hiller's wife and co-founder, Amelia Massey Hiller, has posted content since around age 13, and the talent managers who courted her treated creators as commodities. The couple ran a traditional influencer marketing agency, launched officially in 2022, until creators on repeat campaigns asked them to manage their other deals. Talent management now accounts for more than 90% of the firm's time.

"Managing the careers of creators is a huge blessing and a privilege, and it's something that we do not take lightly at Hiller Media Group," Hiller said.

What does the growth mean for practitioners?

HMG's model divides labor sharply. The firm handles negotiation, pitching and finance so creators can focus on content. Amelia, whom Austin calls the firm's "creative heartbeat," leads strategy and positioning. Austin, a former Senior Consultant at Kenway Consulting, runs systems, automations and infrastructure. The agency charges a standard 20% fee for every creator on its roster.

By Austin's count, the firm has taken just over 30 creators from very early stages to full-time, and taken others from full-time to numbers they had "never dreamed of." He rejects the idea that rapid scaling came from aggressive recruiting. "This rapid scaling isn't due to us just going all in on talent recruiting and hiring a bunch of talent managers," he said.

How does the 12-person team operate?

Each creator gets an assigned talent manager and a campaign manager. The 12-person team also includes a VP of Partnerships leading outbound sales, a talent platforms team handling campaign applications, a leadership team supporting strategy ideation, and a finance operations specialist.

"We make it a point of emphasis that every single person on our whole entire team knows every single creator on our roster," Austin said. Back-end repositories log each creator's dream brands, past partners, content styles that have worked, and current workload, so no one gets overcommitted. The breadth carries commercial weight: every person who knows a creator is another chance to place them.

On campaign execution, proprietary trackers record exclusivities and travel timelines, and automations flag risks before they escalate. Hiller's benchmark is efficiency: clients may be entitled to three rounds of revisions, but "everybody wants to have a one-and-done situation for a brand partnership."

Why does the firm turn campaigns down?

Pricing varies widely in the market. Austin has seen one creator book the same scope in the same week for $5,000 and for $100,000. He attributes the spread to alignment and enthusiasm, which is why HMG passes when creators are not fundamentally aligned with a brand.

"If you're doing an influencer campaign, you are hiring a creator. So in my opinion, let them create," he argued. His team pushes back on briefs that request organic content but supply verbatim talking points, and it often holds follow-up calls with brands to align on creative direction.

The "Gina for Texas" political campaign illustrates the approach. It began as a single request to Amelia, grew into a targeted campaign across more HMG creators, and ended with a party where Gina Hinojosa spoke with Texas creators, who made organic content around the event. Austin puts the resulting organic impressions at well over a million.

What comes next?

Over the next 12 months, Hiller plans to preserve the firm's boutique feel and scale only as fast as its team and systems allow, with new offerings due in coming months. He expects brand partnerships to swing toward the tone of early-2000s Doritos commercials, with creators bringing videographers into standard deals.

His wider charge is blunt. "Creators are just being underserved," Austin said. "We need to do better as the industry as a whole."