Unilever Now Works With 300,000 Creators — But the Next Stars Are Experts

Unilever now works with close to 300,000 creators, up from around 10,000 just two years ago — yet the voices cutting through this saturation are not the biggest followings but the deepest expertise, according to a new essay on the shifting creator economy.

The piece, published by Fast Company, argues that a decade of feeds tuned to "whoever is best at being watched" has produced a correction: audiences hungry for people who actually know things. The author, a podcast host, cites the evidence from their own show this year. A clip of Irish Nigerian author Emma Dabiri explaining how the language of race was invented passed a million views on its own. Another of the most shared conversations featured Clare Rewcastle Brown, the British journalist who broke the 1MDB scandal from a spare room with a blog and a shortwave radio — and watched Malaysia's prime minister end up in prison.

What do the numbers say?

The macro data supports the shift. Trust in news fell to 37% this year, the lowest the Reuters Institute has recorded since it began measuring in 2015. Meanwhile, The Rest Is History — two middle-aged historians talking for an hour at a time — now pulls around 30 million downloads and streams a month, and seven in 10 of its listeners are under 40.

The creator economy itself keeps scaling. Unilever's chief executive talks about building an "army of creators." Coca-Cola took 10,000 of them to the Paris Olympics. Well over 200 million people now describe themselves as creators, a figure that makes Andy Warhol's 15 minutes of fame look quaint — the feed made everyone a creator for 15 seconds, which the author notes "sounds wonderfully democratic until you try to tell any of them apart."

AI accelerates the problem. Add AI presenters "who never age, never sleep, and never fluff a line," and the human face talking to camera — once the antidote to corporate advertising — starts to blur into its own kind of slop. What cuts through, the author argues, is "a story told by somebody who was actually there, which is the one thing a machine can't claim."

Why does this change brand spending?

The essay frames the result as an "expert economy," where experts become the new rock stars. When anyone can generate a convincing explanation in seconds, the people who actually know become the most valuable voices. Truth, the author writes, is starting to behave "like a premium tier the way you pay Spotify to make the ads go away."

Two implications stand out for practitioners. First, the editor is back: as people tire of "algorithmic overlords," they are returning to a human editor of choice whose judgment they have trusted over years. Brands have spent fortunes renting audiences from influencers; very few have backed the judgment itself.

Second, the winning format is the duo. One half has spent 40 years on a single subject and is well past the age when the industry usually stops calling. The other is a 25-year-old producer who knows how to cut one clip so it moves round the world at the speed of a meme. Together, these creative duos make age irrelevant, because the person who knows the most no longer has to be the person who understands the format.

How should marketers pick an expert?

The author offers four tests for backing an expert voice:

• Look for the obsession that came before the audience. Rewcastle Brown was writing about Borneo's disappearing rainforest long before anyone was listening.
• Ask for the whole hour. Judge candidates on their longest conversation, not their best clip.
• Footnotes are king. Sources, caveats, and the willingness to say "I don't know" are now among the strongest trust triggers in media.
• Book people who argue with your brief. An expert who agrees with everything has "stopped being an expert and become an influencer again."

The closing calculus is stark: reach can be bought by the yard, but belief is earned by the decade — and the people who have already put the decades in are mostly unbooked. Whether the expert economy explodes from here depends on whether brands act on that gap before the market reprices it.