From Transactional to Transformational: Reimagining Creator Partnerships for the Long Game

Part 1 of the Pop Culture Collaborative's special digital creator series

Welcome back, or welcome for the first time! Digital Waves—the Pop Culture Collaborative’s Substack on all things digital culture and narrative strategy—is back for a special limited series on digital creators and narrative strategy.

TL;DR: Everyone’s gaga for digital creators these days. But here’s the question: How do we meet digital creators’ sustainability needs while also advancing pluralist narrative power? We’ve got some ideas and answers.

Over this four-part series, we:

1. Lay out why there is an urgent need to reorient how to work with and invest in digital creators;

2. Name 10 sustainability barriers creators face—and how that undermines pluralist narrative power;

3. Unpack a range of creator partnership models mapped to their unique narrative and creator advantages; and

4. Identify emerging creator narrative infrastructure models matched to the narrative power and creator opportunities they unlock.

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HOW WE PARTNER WITH DIGITAL CREATORS MATTERS

“Whether they’re talking about politics or entertainment or sports, creators have found a way to engage an audience through their ability to create an authentic perspective that is different from others or breaks through the feed.”
– Ryan Bitzer, Digital Media Management

Here’s the reality: Digital creators, more than legacy media, now shape how tens of millions of people make meaning, form beliefs, access news, and build community—every single day.

The creator economy is nearing half a trillion dollars globally. In November 2024, Pew reported that 37% of adults under 30 get their news from digital creators, and these young adults trust information from social media about as much as they trust national news outlets. And young people don’t just consume creator content. They build identity, culture, and community around it.

Creators—TikTokers, Substack writers, Instagram influencers, podcasters, YouTube livestreamers—are doing essential cultural and narrative work.

Their roles are varied: critics, commentators, role models, advisors, teachers, organizers, artists, journalists, trend spotters, fans, influencers, comedians, storytellers, pranksters, and more.

Their content is prolific: live streaming, episodic content, short-form video, long-form video, podcasts, newsletters, photos, audio, and other formats.

They’re engaged in every aspect of our society: politics, science, technology, the environment, education, and entertainment, including gaming, film, television, sports, books, fashion, arts, and music.

They’re shaping our lives: relationships, health, food, beauty, aesthetics, finance, hobbies, pop passions, caregiving, parenting, civic engagement, self-care, travel, and more.

Yet most creators—especially BIPOC, women, disabled, queer, and trans creators—are operating inside hazardous digital platforms and systems with little time, protection, or infrastructure, resulting in instability, burnout, harassment, and financial precarity.

Meanwhile, we know that toxic narrative movements have invested in and built out a powerful digital creator ecosystem. Turning Point USA, which incubates anti-pluralist digital creators, generated $85 million in revenue in 2024 and reportedly grew their endowment to $64.3 million, up from $7.2 million in 2020. Venture studios like Red Seat Ventures are backing digital creators with long-term financial and brand-building investments that build power over years, not just election cycles.

But pluralist digital creators, individually and in partnership with social justice movements, are punching above their weight, creating profound cultural and political change. For example:

• A FIGHT FOR FREEDOM OF SPEECH: JIMMY KIMMEL
  On September 17, 2025, Jimmy Kimmel was forced off the air with an “indefinite suspension” by Disney/ABC with pressure from the FCC. In response, Nelini Stamp, cultural strategist at the Center for Working Families Fund, launched the “We Have Friends Everywhere” creator and fandom organizing strategy. Through previous activations, Nelini had built relationships with Disney fans—digital creators and podcasters—who were then organized around this rapid First Amendment campaign. Creators advanced variations of the #BoycottDisney hashtag across Disney properties, encouraged audiences to cancel Disney+ and Hulu (Disney-owned) subscriptions, and paused production of their own Disney content. Within five days, Disney stocks reportedly tumbled over 2.39% with a market value drop of almost $5 billion and it was reported that Disney+ lost 1.7 million subscribers.
  
  

• ELECTION VIBES: ZOHRAN MAMDANI
  During the 2025 New York City mayoral race, Zohran Mamdani’s campaign actively partnered with digital creators to reach audiences outside traditional media. His team hosted creator briefings and influencer events—one gathering more than 70 creators whose coverage reached over 77 million social media users—and encouraged supporters to generate their own campaign content online. What set this approach apart was not just reach, but how creators translated the campaign into a cultural vibe. Rather than simply repeating policy positions, creators interpreted Mamdani’s platform through humor, trends, and relatable language. Mamdani himself leaned into this strategy by engaging directly with creators, reinforcing a sense that the campaign was something creators and their audiences could co-create. As one analysis noted: “Mamdani’s team treated the internet not like a megaphone, but a neighborhood bar. TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter: each became a spot where voters actually hung out.” The campaign’s creator-driven storytelling helped transform policy messages into viral content that mobilized younger audiences.
  
  

• CULTURAL MEANING MAKING: FROM BEYONCÉ TO BAD BUNNY
  When pop culture icons go on tour, release a new album, or do a major performance, the digital water cooler conversations, hot takes, and analysis intensify. These “big sky” moments, as we call them, are profound opportunities for creators to shape how audiences make meaning of the culture that captures their attention and invites them to go deeper. For Beyoncé’s 2025 Cowboy Carter tour, the Pop Culture Collaborative resourced 20 creators—ranging from Beyhive fans to true history experts—to engage and cross-pollinate their audiences around narratives about reclaiming their history and identity through music, fashion, dance, and expressions of collective joy. This content engine strategy engaged over 1.1 million viewers over a three-month span during the tour. Similarly, in anticipation of Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show performance, the Collaborative’s field partners and partner creators from across the Latiné diaspora came together around the narrative “Seguimos Aquí” (translated to “We Remain Here”) to help audiences show solidarity with immigrant communities that are under attack and reimagine who belongs in the Americas. Bad Bunny featured the idea of “Seguimos Aquí” throughout his 2025 residency in Puerto Rico, and the phrase saw a surge of engagement in the days leading up to and immediately after the iconic Super Bowl performance. In the week following the Super Bowl, “Seguimos Aquí” was mentioned over 44.4K times, with engagement of over 3.71M and reach of 6.26B.
  

So what’s at stake?

We are relying on creators to serve the functions of legacy media from journalism to Hollywood as well as to act as community organizers. But if we don’t reimagine how we move from partnerships that are transactional—treating creators as contracted messengers—to mutually beneficial partnerships and investments in creators, we will undermine our ability to build transformational and durable digital pluralist narrative power.

So in 2025, drawing from learnings culled from the Collaborative’s multi-year investment in digital creators and digital creator infrastructure as well as a landscape scan and interviews conducted by Dot Connector Studio, we set out to explore one big question: how do we both meet digital creators’ critical needs while also amassing pluralist narrative power?

We documented and analyzed the innovative strategies being tested by organizers, funders, producers, and digital strategists to reimagine creator content partnership and infrastructure models that are mutually beneficial and capable of building nimble, sustainable pluralist narrative power.

Using those insights, the next three issues will:

1. Lay out 10 sustainability barriers creators face—and how that undermines pluralist narrative power;

2. Unpack creator partnership models mapped to their unique narrative and creator advantages; and

3. Identify emerging creator narrative infrastructure models matched to the narrative power and creator opportunities they unlock.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Digital creators are leading core elements of cultural, narrative, and community-building work. Meeting the real needs of digital creators isn’t just about making campaigns more effective. It’s about strategically investing in digital creators as partners in our work to build thriving, resilient pluralist narrative power.

In our next post, we turn to the creators themselves—and the 10 barriers that throttle their impact and destabilize their sustainability.

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Funders interested in learning more about pop culture narrative strategy: reach out to s.flaster@popcollab.org to discuss this series or learn about Imagination Requested, the Pop Culture Collaborative’s narrative strategy masterclass.

Pop Culture Collaborative is North America’s leading narrative change funder, harnessing the exponential influence, scale, and speed of pop culture to build narrative power and momentum for a just and pluralist future.

Dot Connector is an imagination, foresight, and restoration firm that cultivates futures learning with philanthropy, arts, culture, and social impact leaders.