For brands testing creator marketing, the choice can feel binary: build an internal team to manage the work or hand the program to an agency. For smaller creators, the problem runs in the opposite direction. Brand inquiries arrive without the infrastructure of a talent manager behind them. Ghost is building a business around the space between those two models.

The idea began with R.J. Napolitano’s girlfriend, a creator with roughly 50,000 followers who had built a community around a rare health condition. As brand deal inquiries began coming in, she had no talent manager to help evaluate opportunities, negotiate terms, or manage the resulting workflow. R.J., whose background spans Goldman Sachs, startup operations, and growth, saw a broader problem: smaller creators had demand coming in, but little framework for handling it.

Ghost, co-founded by R.J. (CEO) in Los Angeles in 2024, now operates on both sides of that market. For creators, it offers software that connects to Gmail, learns their profile, and helps draft responses to inbound brand inquiries while leaving negotiations in the creator’s hands. For brands, Ghost sources creators, manages outreach and contracting, and produces creator-made content for paid channels. Brands pay a monthly subscription based on campaign scope, with no long-term commitment.

“We’re building out a modern-day CAA [Creative Artists Agency] for 2026,” R.J. says.

Between Agencies and In-House Teams, Ghost Offers a Month-to-Month Alternative

Ghost’s commercial pitch starts from a three-way market map. Brands running creator campaigns at scale either build an internal team, a route that requires sustained headcount investment, or pay an agency, which typically involves longer commitments and higher fees. For companies still evaluating whether creator marketing warrants that level of spend, R.J. says, neither option fits.

“You don’t have to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars into building your own in-house team, but can still get the benefits of having people run the campaigns for you,” he says.

The onboarding process is designed to move quickly. Within the first 24 hours, Ghost runs an intake session with the brand to understand its business, prior marketing experiments, and growth economics. From there, the team proposes campaign approaches based on what it is observing across its client base and begins sourcing creators. By the second week, experiments are live, and performance data is accumulating.

“We’re trying to feel like a very fast internal team member that’s helping you run everything with your growth marketing,” R.J. says.

For brands that arrive with a defined plan, Ghost executes it. For those still finding a strategy, it advises. The month-to-month model, R.J. argues, keeps the relationship tied to what is actually working rather than locked to what was agreed at the outset.

The Badia Case Study Shows What Happens When Creator and Product Actually Match

Ghost’s most-cited proof of concept is its work with Badia Spices, a client for whom it manages the full influencer program. Before Ghost, Badia had been running static images and user-tagged content as digital ads. No content had been commissioned directly from more sophisticated cooking creators on the brand’s behalf.

Ghost helped Badia identify its priority products and matched the brand with cooking creators positioned to integrate those products naturally into their content. The creators produced video assets Badia then deployed across its paid channels. According to Ghost, the campaign generated 38 times more clicks per dollar compared with the brand’s previous ads.

“That was a bread-and-butter kind of case study for us,” R.J. says. “We were able to see what really made a difference in their performance.”

The Badia result reflects a sourcing standard R.J. applies across clients. Ghost evaluates creators not solely on reach or engagement rate but on whether the product represents a genuine fit for their content and audience. “We would never want to find or suggest a creator that the product didn’t actually serve a use case for them and feel natural,” he says. When that match is genuine, he argues, creator-made content performs in ways that static brand assets do not.

Ghost Uses AI to Speed Up Execution, Not to Replace Its Team’s Judgment

Ghost markets itself as an AI-assisted platform, but R.J. draws a line around where the automation stops. The tasks Ghost automates are those he describes as purely repetitive: sending the first email in an outreach sequence, scheduling, and initial logging. Anything requiring interpretation stays with a human.

“We use it to automate the repetitive tasks, but not to use it for anything judgment-wise,” R.J. says. Deciding whether a creator is the right fit for a specific brand, which content formats to test, and how to read campaign performance once data arrives are all calls Ghost’s team makes.

A recurring misconception among brands approaching Ghost, R.J. says, is that the platform produces video content using AI. Creators produce the content, while Ghost manages the surrounding workflow. The company is exploring AI-generated video as a potential future offering but has not deployed it with clients.

On the broader question of what effective growth marketing looks like, R.J. points to brands like HubSpot and Clay as instructive cases. Their success with creator-led channels, in his view, came from discipline rather than novelty. “I don’t think anything in growth marketing usually is rocket science,” he says. “You can get creative, but it’s really execution.”

Ghost Gives Creators a Framework, Not a Script

Ghost provides rough outlines and format suggestions for creators working on brand campaigns, but stops short of scripting what they say.

“The creators are amazing because they’re the ones who have all of the unique ideas and can put their own spin on all of the content,” R.J. says. Ghost helps brands identify which product attributes they want communicated and suggests formats that have performed well for similar clients, but leaves interpretation to the creator. “It’s always a rough outline and structure, and then the creator can add their own unique twist on it,” he says.

That latitude, R.J. argues, is where the commercial value lives. Brands that over-specify content tend to reduce the qualities that make creator marketing effective in the first place. The goal is for creators to present a brand in their own voice, which requires that voice to remain theirs.

For brands wanting to test multiple messaging approaches, Ghost suggests hook variations and value-proposition angles without dictating delivery. The creator decides what resonates with their audience. That judgment, R.J. says, is not something Ghost’s platform or its AI layer replaces.

The Platform Ghost Wants to Be in Five Years

R.J.’s longer-term ambition for Ghost is to become the default infrastructure layer for growth marketing, not just creator-driven, available to companies with and without deep pockets.

“Our hope is that any team of any size, regardless of what your budget is, can get access to a really well-thought-out and well-executed growth marketing strategy,” he says. That means early-stage startups running their first experiments as well as established brands operating at scale. The month-to-month model is designed to make the service accessible without the upfront commitment required to build an internal team or enter a longer agency relationship.

His closing point circles back to the condition Ghost assumes is already in place before its infrastructure adds value. “Magic really happens when you have a product that is really helping people, and then you’re able to bring it to market with creators that are really a fit and really love what you do,” R.J. says. The platform Ghost is building exists to manage everything that happens in between.

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