What happens when the influencer industry starts to scale based on technology that was not built by people who have lived the day-to-day reality of the industry?
For Philip Brown, that question has run through his Influencer Marketing career since he started in 2013, and is a recurring theme that often surfaces when writing his weekly newsletter, The Influencer Marketing Academy. In 2019, Philip started documenting the patterns, debates, and structural gaps that keep resurfacing across the Creator Economy. In January 2026, he and co-founder Mark Dandy launched Creator Economy Architects to help brands address those issues more directly.
The connection between the two is central to Philip’s current work. The Influencer Marketing Academy gave him a place to formalize his point of view after more than a decade across agency, SaaS, and in-house brand roles. Creator Economy Architects turns that point of view into consulting, infrastructure design, and an agentic influencer workflow product that automates what the admin built based on their own experiences within the industry.
“The Influencer Marketing Academy is very much my raw, unfiltered take on articles that discuss Influencer Marketing,” Philip says. “Creator Economy Architects exists because of the newsletter, with the mission to support brands when it comes to their long-term Influencer Marketing programs.”
Philip’s thesis is that many businesses have increased investment into the creator marketing function without first building the foundation that is required to make Influencer Marketing departments and programs sustainable. Creator Economy Architects is designed to help teams move from fragmented, campaign-by-campaign activity into structured programs with clearer strategy, workflows, reporting, and technology choices.
“Most influencer programmes aren’t actually influencer programmes,” he says. “They’re not structured to operate in that way. They’re ad-hoc campaigns that reset on a monthly basis, where you spin the wheel based on numbers and hope for something that sticks, only to try the next month again.”
From Observing the Industry to Building Within It
Philip did not enter Influencer Marketing through a formal career path. While studying marketing in the Netherlands, he looked for a London-based company where he could complete his dissertation. The company that responded is called Come Round, and it works on what he describes as an early version of gifting to everyday influencers.
“When I was in college, there wasn’t a module on Influencer Marketing,” he says. “Bloggers and Vloggers existed, but the industry was much more in its infancy back then.”
He has worked in the industry since 2013, starting on the agency side at Come Round before moving into Influencer SaaS at Traackr and in-house brand roles at Formula E, 2K, and air up. Each environment showed him a different perspective of the same industry.
On the agency side, he says, the work often centers on output because the agency is primarily engaged to deliver results. On the SaaS side, it’s a much more support-oriented role. Facilitating workflows, tackling topics such as measurement, and overall providing more of a consultant angle on the work being done in-house.
“Inside a brand, Influencer Marketing becomes much more of a blend, more strategic because you have to now manage, fight for, and defend Influencer Marketing budgets, while managing internal stakeholder expectations – everyone has an opinion on Influencer Marketing now – while still maintaining the day-to-day planning, execution, and output, often with limited headcount to do so,” Philip says.
“When you work for a brand, you have to look at Influencer Marketing through a variety of different lenses,” he adds. “And you have to be agile, as budgets and expectations often can and will change quickly.”
The Academy became a way to process those perspectives in public. Philip reads industry coverage each week, selects stories, and analyzes what they reveal about the wider market.
“I read a lot of articles every week, pick a few, do a deep dive, and provide a critical angle on what’s being discussed, why it’s being discussed, and what is really being discussed,” he says. “A lot of the time, an article will say one thing, but the underlying current can be quite different.”
Doing this on a weekly basis for such a long time has shown him that the industry often returns to the same topics as new people and players enter the market.
“I’ve been doing weekly deep-dives for quite a while now, and I often run into articles discussing topics that seemingly find themselves back in the spotlight on repeat, without acknowledging that they’ve been covered already,” Philip says. “There doesn’t seem to be an industrial knowledge bank, and most reporting outlets don’t seem to be keeping historical tabs, either.”
In 2019, he says, the newsletter led him to a broader conclusion: The majority of solutions in the Influencer Marketing space are not actually created by practitioners, for the sake of practitioners.
“We have seen a huge influx of new players in the Influencer Marketing industry over the past few years, run by people that quite often don’t have any on-the-ground experience themselves, or think that content creators are programmatic ad buys,” he says. “I see those people trying to solve ‘problems’ in an industry that is not native to them.”
The Infrastructure Gap
Creator Economy Architects was built around the view that Influencer Marketing has matured unevenly. Brands are spending more money, creator demand is rising, and AI tools are entering the workflow, but many teams still lack the internal structures to support sustainable programs.
Philip and Mark position the company around infrastructure, but Philip defines that term more broadly than software.
“Infrastructure is not just technology that allows companies to scale effectively,” he says. “When we talk about infrastructure, we often think of it as something that we buy from an external vendor to help scale efforts.”
For him, infrastructure also includes strategy, team design, workflows, approval processes, reporting, and alignment around what Influencer Marketing is supposed to do for the business. Before a brand increases spend or adds tech, he argues, it needs to know whether the internal foundation can support that scale.
“What does the internal infrastructure look like to support meaningful scale?” he says. “Do we have the right team set up? Are we as a business even aligned on how our Influencer Marketing program impacts the business?”
Creator Economy Architects’ services reflect that diagnosis. The business offers infrastructure consulting and automated agentic workflow products. In practice, Philip says those areas often connect because underperformance in Influencer Marketing is rarely only an executional issue.
“When Influencer Marketing programmes aren’t delivering what was expected, the industry has a tendency to point at the executional layer,” he says. “Perhaps we didn’t select the right creators? Perhaps we didn’t vet them well enough? Maybe our brief wasn’t strong enough?”
His view is that those questions may be valid, but they often sit downstream from deeper issues.
“In reality, the problem more often than not sits much deeper, at a strategic and foundational level,” he says.
That is why the company typically starts with an audit. The goal is to identify where performance is being lost, whether through creator mix, attribution, budget allocation, workflow inefficiency, or unclear strategic direction. Sometimes, Philip says, the answer is not to scale faster, but to narrow the program around what already works.
“We believe all of that can be avoided by putting strategy, infrastructure, and execution under one framework,” he says. “We typically tend to start from scratch, with a full audit, and then provide recommendations. A lot of the time, that means identifying what’s working, instead of scaling what doesn’t.”
Context Before Scale
One recurring problem Philip sees is that many tools and workflows prioritize more creator activity without enough attention to context.
In creator identification, he says, brands often receive lists built from similar data sources: keywords, audience data, engagement rates, or historic performance. Those signals can be useful, but Philip argues they are not enough unless viewed through the lens of a specific brand and what it is trying to achieve.
“When you pick a creator, are you picking them because they have a high average view count, a high engagement rate, or past traffic and sales?” he says. “That data is rarely viewed through the lens of brand-relevant context.”
The risk is that brands confuse output with fit.
“Are we interested in their numbers, or are we interested in how they got to those numbers?” he says. “Did they get there because they’re selling a product every other post, or because they have a genuine relationship with their followers?”
For brand marketers, that distinction matters as creator programs become more closely tied to business outcomes. Philip is not arguing against data or tools. His concern is that teams often adopt infrastructure designed to scale activity before they have decided which activity should be scaled.
His test for a mature program is simple: ask people across different departments and levels of seniority to explain what Influencer Marketing looks like at the company.
“If you can find a brand where ten people from various departments and seniority across the same business can answer the question: ‘What does our influencer programme stand for, and how does it impact our business?’ In the same way, you’ve discovered a company that has the foundations for a meaningful Influencer Marketing programme,” he says.
Building Sodalis
Creator Economy Architects is also developing a product called Sodalis, which Philip describes as an agentic Influencer Marketing workflow model. The goal is to reduce the administrative workload on Influencer Marketing managers and lower reliance on having to use multiple third-party tools.
“Sodalis” is Latin for “trusted friend,” and Philip says the product is being designed to support individual Influencer Marketing programs rather than force teams into a generic workflow.
“Our goal is to heavily reduce the admin-focused, output-driven nature of the Influencer Marketing manager role by adding an agentic coordinator to your team,” he says, “so your team can focus on the things that matter. Strategy, creative ideation, and most importantly, building human-to-human relationships.”
That emphasis reflects Philip’s broader view of AI. He sees clear use cases, especially in reducing repetitive work around emails, contracts, briefs, and follow-ups. But he is cautious about AI products that treat more content output as the main goal.
“If we’re being honest, most of an Influencer Marketing manager’s job is admin,” he says. “It’s sourcing, vetting, emails, contracts, briefs, approvals, live dates, etc. It’s chasing people. It’s a lot of heavy lifting.”
The challenge, he says, is making automation meaningful rather than simply adding another product to an already crowded stack.
“Companies might spend more money on a tool instead of focusing on getting the internals right,” he says. “Do we have the right headcount for this? Before we spend 20% to 30% more, can we actually support it? Or are we going to burn out the people who work here?”
A Practitioner-Led Model
Philip argues that Creator Economy Architects is different because it is built by practitioners who have worked through the problems they are trying to solve. Mark brings agency experience across high-volume, high-budget brand work, while Philip brings the in-house and SaaS perspective.
“We aren’t punters from outside of the industry trying to make a quick buck, or solve a problem we’ve read about in an industry report,” Philip says. “We’re looking to solve problems and bottlenecks that we ourselves have faced as practitioners.”
The Academy remains part of that work because it continues to function as Philip’s thinking system. It helps him track the industry’s repeated debates, test assumptions, and identify where brands may be moving too quickly without the right foundations.
In the long term, his goal is not simply to help brands do more Influencer Marketing. It is to help them build programs that can last.
“In an ideal world? The majority of brands will have an in-house Influencer Marketing department that is healthy, stable, and able to meaningfully engage with their community and relevant audiences through a sustainable Influencer Marketing programme,” Philip says, “while still treating content creators as human beings, and not programmatic ad-buys.”
Dragomir is a Serbian freelance blog writer and translator. He is passionate about covering insightful stories and exploring topics such as influencer marketing, the creator economy, technology, business, and cyber fraud.
What happens when the influencer industry starts to scale based on technology that was not built by people who have lived the day-to-day reality of the industry?
For Philip Brown, that question has run through his Influencer Marketing career since he started in 2013, and is a recurring theme that often surfaces when writing his weekly newsletter, The Influencer Marketing Academy. In 2019, Philip started documenting the patterns, debates, and structural gaps that keep resurfacing across the Creator Economy. In January 2026, he and co-founder Mark Dandy launched Creator Economy Architects to help brands address those issues more directly.
The connection between the two is central to Philip’s current work. The Influencer Marketing Academy gave him a place to formalize his point of view after more than a decade across agency, SaaS, and in-house brand roles. Creator Economy Architects turns that point of view into consulting, infrastructure design, and an agentic influencer workflow product that automates what the admin built based on their own experiences within the industry.
“The Influencer Marketing Academy is very much my raw, unfiltered take on articles that discuss Influencer Marketing,” Philip says. “Creator Economy Architects exists because of the newsletter, with the mission to support brands when it comes to their long-term Influencer Marketing programs.”
Philip’s thesis is that many businesses have increased investment into the creator marketing function without first building the foundation that is required to make Influencer Marketing departments and programs sustainable. Creator Economy Architects is designed to help teams move from fragmented, campaign-by-campaign activity into structured programs with clearer strategy, workflows, reporting, and technology choices.
“Most influencer programmes aren’t actually influencer programmes,” he says. “They’re not structured to operate in that way. They’re ad-hoc campaigns that reset on a monthly basis, where you spin the wheel based on numbers and hope for something that sticks, only to try the next month again.”
From Observing the Industry to Building Within It
Philip did not enter Influencer Marketing through a formal career path. While studying marketing in the Netherlands, he looked for a London-based company where he could complete his dissertation. The company that responded is called Come Round, and it works on what he describes as an early version of gifting to everyday influencers.
“When I was in college, there wasn’t a module on Influencer Marketing,” he says. “Bloggers and Vloggers existed, but the industry was much more in its infancy back then.”
He has worked in the industry since 2013, starting on the agency side at Come Round before moving into Influencer SaaS at Traackr and in-house brand roles at Formula E, 2K, and air up. Each environment showed him a different perspective of the same industry.
On the agency side, he says, the work often centers on output because the agency is primarily engaged to deliver results. On the SaaS side, it’s a much more support-oriented role. Facilitating workflows, tackling topics such as measurement, and overall providing more of a consultant angle on the work being done in-house.
“Inside a brand, Influencer Marketing becomes much more of a blend, more strategic because you have to now manage, fight for, and defend Influencer Marketing budgets, while managing internal stakeholder expectations – everyone has an opinion on Influencer Marketing now – while still maintaining the day-to-day planning, execution, and output, often with limited headcount to do so,” Philip says.
“When you work for a brand, you have to look at Influencer Marketing through a variety of different lenses,” he adds. “And you have to be agile, as budgets and expectations often can and will change quickly.”
The Academy became a way to process those perspectives in public. Philip reads industry coverage each week, selects stories, and analyzes what they reveal about the wider market.
“I read a lot of articles every week, pick a few, do a deep dive, and provide a critical angle on what’s being discussed, why it’s being discussed, and what is really being discussed,” he says. “A lot of the time, an article will say one thing, but the underlying current can be quite different.”
Doing this on a weekly basis for such a long time has shown him that the industry often returns to the same topics as new people and players enter the market.
“I’ve been doing weekly deep-dives for quite a while now, and I often run into articles discussing topics that seemingly find themselves back in the spotlight on repeat, without acknowledging that they’ve been covered already,” Philip says. “There doesn’t seem to be an industrial knowledge bank, and most reporting outlets don’t seem to be keeping historical tabs, either.”
In 2019, he says, the newsletter led him to a broader conclusion: The majority of solutions in the Influencer Marketing space are not actually created by practitioners, for the sake of practitioners.
“We have seen a huge influx of new players in the Influencer Marketing industry over the past few years, run by people that quite often don’t have any on-the-ground experience themselves, or think that content creators are programmatic ad buys,” he says. “I see those people trying to solve ‘problems’ in an industry that is not native to them.”
The Infrastructure Gap
Creator Economy Architects was built around the view that Influencer Marketing has matured unevenly. Brands are spending more money, creator demand is rising, and AI tools are entering the workflow, but many teams still lack the internal structures to support sustainable programs.
Philip and Mark position the company around infrastructure, but Philip defines that term more broadly than software.
“Infrastructure is not just technology that allows companies to scale effectively,” he says. “When we talk about infrastructure, we often think of it as something that we buy from an external vendor to help scale efforts.”
For him, infrastructure also includes strategy, team design, workflows, approval processes, reporting, and alignment around what Influencer Marketing is supposed to do for the business. Before a brand increases spend or adds tech, he argues, it needs to know whether the internal foundation can support that scale.
“What does the internal infrastructure look like to support meaningful scale?” he says. “Do we have the right team set up? Are we as a business even aligned on how our Influencer Marketing program impacts the business?”
Creator Economy Architects’ services reflect that diagnosis. The business offers infrastructure consulting and automated agentic workflow products. In practice, Philip says those areas often connect because underperformance in Influencer Marketing is rarely only an executional issue.
“When Influencer Marketing programmes aren’t delivering what was expected, the industry has a tendency to point at the executional layer,” he says. “Perhaps we didn’t select the right creators? Perhaps we didn’t vet them well enough? Maybe our brief wasn’t strong enough?”
His view is that those questions may be valid, but they often sit downstream from deeper issues.
“In reality, the problem more often than not sits much deeper, at a strategic and foundational level,” he says.
That is why the company typically starts with an audit. The goal is to identify where performance is being lost, whether through creator mix, attribution, budget allocation, workflow inefficiency, or unclear strategic direction. Sometimes, Philip says, the answer is not to scale faster, but to narrow the program around what already works.
“We believe all of that can be avoided by putting strategy, infrastructure, and execution under one framework,” he says. “We typically tend to start from scratch, with a full audit, and then provide recommendations. A lot of the time, that means identifying what’s working, instead of scaling what doesn’t.”
Context Before Scale
One recurring problem Philip sees is that many tools and workflows prioritize more creator activity without enough attention to context.
In creator identification, he says, brands often receive lists built from similar data sources: keywords, audience data, engagement rates, or historic performance. Those signals can be useful, but Philip argues they are not enough unless viewed through the lens of a specific brand and what it is trying to achieve.
“When you pick a creator, are you picking them because they have a high average view count, a high engagement rate, or past traffic and sales?” he says. “That data is rarely viewed through the lens of brand-relevant context.”
The risk is that brands confuse output with fit.
“Are we interested in their numbers, or are we interested in how they got to those numbers?” he says. “Did they get there because they’re selling a product every other post, or because they have a genuine relationship with their followers?”
For brand marketers, that distinction matters as creator programs become more closely tied to business outcomes. Philip is not arguing against data or tools. His concern is that teams often adopt infrastructure designed to scale activity before they have decided which activity should be scaled.
His test for a mature program is simple: ask people across different departments and levels of seniority to explain what Influencer Marketing looks like at the company.
“If you can find a brand where ten people from various departments and seniority across the same business can answer the question: ‘What does our influencer programme stand for, and how does it impact our business?’ In the same way, you’ve discovered a company that has the foundations for a meaningful Influencer Marketing programme,” he says.
Building Sodalis
Creator Economy Architects is also developing a product called Sodalis, which Philip describes as an agentic Influencer Marketing workflow model. The goal is to reduce the administrative workload on Influencer Marketing managers and lower reliance on having to use multiple third-party tools.
“Sodalis” is Latin for “trusted friend,” and Philip says the product is being designed to support individual Influencer Marketing programs rather than force teams into a generic workflow.
“Our goal is to heavily reduce the admin-focused, output-driven nature of the Influencer Marketing manager role by adding an agentic coordinator to your team,” he says, “so your team can focus on the things that matter. Strategy, creative ideation, and most importantly, building human-to-human relationships.”
That emphasis reflects Philip’s broader view of AI. He sees clear use cases, especially in reducing repetitive work around emails, contracts, briefs, and follow-ups. But he is cautious about AI products that treat more content output as the main goal.
“If we’re being honest, most of an Influencer Marketing manager’s job is admin,” he says. “It’s sourcing, vetting, emails, contracts, briefs, approvals, live dates, etc. It’s chasing people. It’s a lot of heavy lifting.”
The challenge, he says, is making automation meaningful rather than simply adding another product to an already crowded stack.
“Companies might spend more money on a tool instead of focusing on getting the internals right,” he says. “Do we have the right headcount for this? Before we spend 20% to 30% more, can we actually support it? Or are we going to burn out the people who work here?”
A Practitioner-Led Model
Philip argues that Creator Economy Architects is different because it is built by practitioners who have worked through the problems they are trying to solve. Mark brings agency experience across high-volume, high-budget brand work, while Philip brings the in-house and SaaS perspective.
“We aren’t punters from outside of the industry trying to make a quick buck, or solve a problem we’ve read about in an industry report,” Philip says. “We’re looking to solve problems and bottlenecks that we ourselves have faced as practitioners.”
The Academy remains part of that work because it continues to function as Philip’s thinking system. It helps him track the industry’s repeated debates, test assumptions, and identify where brands may be moving too quickly without the right foundations.
In the long term, his goal is not simply to help brands do more Influencer Marketing. It is to help them build programs that can last.
“In an ideal world? The majority of brands will have an in-house Influencer Marketing department that is healthy, stable, and able to meaningfully engage with their community and relevant audiences through a sustainable Influencer Marketing programme,” Philip says, “while still treating content creators as human beings, and not programmatic ad-buys.”
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