Agency
Hiller Media Group’s Austin Hiller on Growing Slowly and Giving Creators Room to Create
Hiller Media Group (HMG) has paid creators nearly $6 million, roughly six times the $1 million it had reached in October 2025. Co-founder and CEO Austin Hiller credits the foundation the firm built slowly and deliberately before it scaled. The Austin-based talent management agency built its systems before its roster, expects every employee to know every creator it represents, and pushes brands to give those creators room to create.
The emphasis on knowing creators traces to the talent managers who courted Amelia Massey Hiller, Austin’s wife and co-founder, who has been posting content since around age 13. The talent managers who courted her, Austin says, treated creators as commodities, fixated on whether they made sense on paper and missing the human and strategic support.
The couple was then running a traditional Influencer Marketing agency, launched officially in 2022 to source creators for PR agencies and brands, until creators on repeat campaigns asked them to manage their other deals. Working on every side of Influencer Marketing primed HMG for that move, Austin says, and the firm now uses its systems to help creators turn a creative outlet into a career. Talent management now accounts for more than 90% of the firm’s time, according to Austin.
“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,” he says.
That responsibility shapes how the firm divides the work. It handles negotiation, pitching, and finance so creators can focus on the content they enjoy making, while 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. Keeping that level of service intact through growth is where, in his view, a lot of agencies go wrong.
HMG Built Its Systems Before Its Roster
“The trap that a lot of agencies tend to fall into is that they grow too quickly, and they are not providing the hands-on care,” Austin says. Missing systems and shallow training of new hires are common causes. Hiller Media Group grew slowly and moved to scale only once the foundation was ready. Systems and automations now handle the repeatable work, from deal tracking to flagging campaign risks, so the team can spend its time on creators.
The same patience governs signing. Austin looks for creators who are having fun, and who are consistent and coachable. The team asks questions up front to ensure mutual alignment from the start. “Do we feel like, for the creator, that the value that we’re providing will far surpass our agency fee?” he asks. That fee is a standard 20% for every creator on the roster.
“It’s cool to see that this rapid scaling isn’t due to us just going all in on talent recruiting and hiring a bunch of talent managers,” Austin says. He credits the growth to the combination of HMG’s staff, the systems that support them, and the creators on the 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,” growth that saw HMG celebrate $5 million paid to creators in August 2026. Those earnings depend on pitching each creator for the deals that fit, which is where the team’s structure comes in.
Every Employee Knows Every Creator on the Roster
Each creator who joins gets an assigned talent manager and a campaign manager. The 12-person team now 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.
Austin contrasts that setup with agencies where talent managers and their rosters are siloed. “We make it a point of emphasis that every single person on our whole entire team knows every single creator on our roster,” he says. A Los Angeles event, for instance, can be pitched to a New York creator who might be traveling there.
That knowledge sits in back-end repositories that log each creator’s dream brands, past partners, content styles that have worked, and current workload, so no one gets overcommitted. Creators arriving from other agencies, in Austin’s experience, often describe getting generic advice and not feeling seen.
Austin has seen employees comment on one creator’s post, many with no role on that account. “They’re not working with them directly, but they know them, they’re advocating for them,” he notes. For the firm, that breadth has a commercial purpose, since every person who knows a creator is another chance to place them. It also carries an operational load once a deal is signed.
Smooth Campaigns Bring Brands Back for the Roster
Once a deal closes, the firm’s campaign management systems come into play. Proprietary trackers record each creator’s exclusivities and travel timelines, and automations flag potential problems. “Part of what makes you a great talent manager is knowing when a campaign is at risk to any degree,” he says.
In practice, that means warning a client when a product shipment slips a couple of days, before the creator asks for an extension, and telling creators when a post date is fixed to an in-store launch. Austin pairs the tracking with a clear separation of duties between talent managers, campaign managers and the broader team, so ownership of each handoff is clear.
The goal is a partnership neither side has to rework. “They may be entitled to three rounds of revisions, but everybody wants to have a one-and-done situation for a brand partnership,” Austin says. He and Amelia have worked as creators and on the brand and agency sides, which tells them what makes a partnership difficult and what makes the process run smoothly.
The firm advocates for its creators, and Austin says the goal is for every party to leave a partnership feeling valued and respected. “We know as well as anyone, being on all sides of this industry, this is all about relationship building,” he explains. For many partnerships, the zone of possible agreement is wide. He has seen one creator book the same scope in the same week for $5,000 and for $100,000.
HMG Pushes Brands to Set Guardrails, Then Step Back
Austin attributes that spread to many factors, but ultimately to alignment and enthusiasm, and the alignment in particular is also why the firm turns campaigns down. It passes when its creators are not fundamentally aligned with the brand. “If you’re doing an influencer campaign, you are hiring a creator. So in my opinion, let them create,” Austin argues.
Austin and his team push back on briefs that ask for organic content, then supply talking points to read verbatim and a set location. Key messaging and content angles help, Austin says, but brands that tell a creator to do whatever they want pose the opposite problem. “Oftentimes, they don’t mean that,” he adds, so his team pushes for the non-negotiables up front that suit all parties.
“If you are undermining the way that you are showing up online with partnerships that are not true to you, then that just erodes your online persona,” Austin says. With brands, his team often holds a follow-up call to get past the brief, aligning on creative direction for both the creator and the brand.
The “Gina for Texas” political campaign first contacted Amelia as a creator, unaware she co-founded a talent agency. The request grew into a targeted campaign across more HMG creators, then a party the firm proposed where Gina Hinojosa spoke with Texas creators; everyone had the chance to engage in conversation, and creators made organic content around the event.
Austin puts the resulting organic impressions at well over a million. “In order to do that effectively, you have to know the creators, and you have to know what the brand team is going for,” he explains. Austin also credits the talented creatives HMG is connected with in Austin. The campaign joined both halves of the model, creator knowledge and a client’s actual goals.
Austin Wants a Higher Bar for Talent Management
Austin wants to keep that model intact. Over the next 12 months, he plans to preserve the firm’s boutique feel and scale only as fast as its team and systems allow, with new offerings due in the coming months. On the brand side, he sees partnerships swinging back toward the tone of early-2000s Doritos commercials, with creators bringing in videographers to add cinematography to standard deals. “The brands that are going off script and are having fun with it are the ones who are crushing,” he says.
Both predictions rest on the firm’s premise that creators do their best work when the people around them know them and give them room. Many talent managers fall short of that standard, Austin argues, describing managers who are slow to respond, not pitching, and not invested in creators’ strategy. In many of his conversations, creators’ trust in managers has already been eroded.
“Creators are just being underserved,” Austin says. “We need to do better as the industry as a whole.”
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