Janessa Christine watched as her creators struggled with relentless streaming schedules and business management demands while brand partnerships remained unnecessarily complicated. After years as an account manager for gaming talent and a streamer herself, she recognized a key problem: talent agencies were often functioning as barriers rather than bridges between creators and brands.

When COVID-19 hit and her company went under, Janessa faced a decision point. While being recruited by competing talent agencies, she realized she had an opportunity to build something different: a management approach that would facilitate rather than complicate brand-creator relationships.

“I don’t want to get in the way. I don’t want to be a bully, but I want to help them connect and understand each other,” says Janessa, articulating the core philosophy that drives her talent management company, Fenix Down, in the gaming space.

Founded in 2020 in San Diego, Fenix Down represents over 50 content creators, primarily Twitch streamers, who need support managing their business affairs. Janessa co-founded the company after creators themselves approached her, saying, “We don’t want to work for anyone else, or we don’t want to work with anyone else.” The company emerged to serve gaming creators who were putting in 60+ hour streaming weeks while struggling to handle business operations, contracts, and brand relationships on their own.

The Value Framework: Facilitation Through Structure

Fenix Down’s value proposition begins with its team-based structure, which reimagines how talent management operates. Rather than assigning individual agents to specific creators, Janessa developed a collaborative system where responsibilities are distributed functionally.

“With talent agents, you usually have one agent managing, like 10 talent,” Janessa explains. “And some of them get less attention, or maybe some have a better agent than another agent. We adopted a team-based approach. So every person on our team works with all of our talent, but in a more limited scope.”

This structural change ensures that creators receive consistent service, regardless of which team member is unavailable due to time off. Their needs are addressed by specialists in each aspect of management rather than generalists trying to handle everything. And, most importantly, this structure enables the work-life balance that Janessa identifies as a core value.

“It allows us to have a lot more work-life balance, too. So we’re able to take time off and relax. And our creators too; they don’t get hurt when somebody’s out of the office because their person’s gone for two weeks.”

Meanwhile, brands benefit from working with a more organized, consistent team that understands both sides of the partnership equation.

Gaming Experience as Competitive Advantage

The facilitative approach of Fenix Down is enhanced by its understanding of gaming culture, which Janessa identifies as surprisingly rare among marketing professionals working with gaming brands.

“Everybody who works at the company plays video games,” she says. “You would be surprised. A lot of the marketing side of video games, including the actual publishers and companies, often have marketing teams comprised of marketing experts. They’re not actually playing video games.”

According to Janessa, this shared cultural understanding adds value for both creators and brands. For creators, it means working with managers who genuinely understand their content, audience, and lifestyle. For brands, it means having a partner who can genuinely translate between marketing objectives and gaming culture.

Her own gaming background provides particular insight: “I had online friends before that was normal. I was playing ‘Halo 2.’ I recall an instance when I was a teenager, on Thanksgiving, and I had to tell my family, ‘Oh well, I’m having Thanksgiving with my gaming friends online.’ And they just thought that was so weird.”

This lived experience informs how Fenix Down handles the entire partnership process, from filtering opportunities and negotiating deals to briefing creators, reporting analytics, and handling payments.

The Endemic/Non-Endemic Divide

One of the core services Fenix Down provides is helping non-gaming brands (non-endemic brands) understand the unique nature of live streaming content, a form that inherently resists the polished messaging of traditional advertising.

“Non-endemic brands sometimes come in and they want something really polished, that’s as if it were pre-recorded content,” Janessa explains. “We have to coach them and walk them through what genuineness looks like in a live stream, and that the genuineness is going to pay off better than the polished message.”

This educational role ensures brands avoid wasting marketing budgets on approaches that won’t resonate with gaming audiences, while creators maintain their genuineness and audience trust. 

Janessa offers a reframing that helps brands understand the medium: “There are a ton of brands that treat live streamers as a billboard when it’s more like a booth at a fair. They’re welcoming them into the space, teaching them about the product, they’re answering questions. We’ve had some streams where even the brand representatives come on stream and play games. It’s a lot more like an in-person event than a billboard.”

Creator-Centered Campaign Development

Fenix Down’s facilitative approach extends to campaign development, where Janessa advocates for involving creators earlier in the strategy process.

“I wish I got to be involved more in creative strategy, and I wish the creators were able to as well, because I think we have a lot of ideas,” she says. “But most of the time when something’s coming to me, the outreach, they’ve already outlined the brief, they’ve already outlined the creators that they want and what they want them to do.”

Janessa cites Electronic Arts’ approach with “Battlefield 6” as exemplary of what’s possible when creators are genuinely involved in development: “They were meeting with creators for the past three years to consult with them on how to make this game playable in a way that people are going to love it. And then they got their feedback, and then they actually implemented their feedback.”

While acknowledging that such thorough consultation requires resources, Janessa points out that even independent developers with smaller budgets can engage in meaningful collaboration with creators who often provide discounts for projects they believe in.

This creator-centered approach shapes how Fenix Down measures success: “If the creator is not having anxiety about the brand partnership and they’re able just to go on and shine and do what they do best, then we did our job.”

Toward a Two-Way Creator Economy

Looking toward the future, Janessa envisions developing from facilitation to true two-way communication, where creators’ initiatives receive the same consideration as brand campaigns.

She explains, “One thing that I’ve noticed is that a lot of times we’re on the receiving end. Brands have creative ideas, and they come to us, and we can execute them and find them the right talent, but it doesn’t work as well the other way around. If I have a creator who’s coming up with this big event that they’re investing a lot of money into and they need a sponsor to help bring their vision to life, me pitching that side, it kind of just falls to the wayside.”

Janessa believes this imbalance stems from structural issues rather than a lack of interest: “I think they just don’t have the systems and processes to be able to field that type of inquiry.” Developing these systems represents her vision for Fenix Down’s future impact on the creator economy.

This vision extends to how partnerships are valued, with Janessa challenging the industry’s overreliance on viewership metrics, noting the problematic incentives this creates: “Paying people off of views encourages purchasing fake views.” Instead, she advocates for valuing genuine engagement and strategic fit, which aligns with current trends in influencer marketing more broadly.

She illustrates this with a campaign for the Dairy Farmers of Manitoba, where they represented a creator who goes by the username, “Ultrasaurus,” who was Canadian, played farming simulator games, and had a degree in agriculture: “She was literally perfect. And we really had to talk to them, and we’re just like, ‘Because of all of this, she needs this rate. I know you don’t think that her views match up, but she is your star person.'”

As Fenix Down grows, expanding sales and social media teams, Janessa is reserved when it comes to scaling. “Fenix Down is boutique by design. We have a lot of unique touches, so I want to be careful about growing too fast,” she explains. “There’s a reason why we haven’t taken major investment, because I don’t want to lose the heart and soul of the company if we scale too fast.”

The company name itself reflects Janessa’s philosophy. “We represent an imagery of a phoenix rising from the ashes,” she explains, referencing both her team’s emergence from a previous company and the gaming item from the “Final Fantasy” series that revives fallen characters. “‘Phoenix Down’ is an item that revives you if you die. It’s a play on that as well.”

For the broader creator economy, Fenix Down aims to generate value by removing friction within talent management rather than adding it. As Janessa concludes, “We’re trying to come into this space with good intentions. We’re here to facilitate successful partnerships for both brands and creators.”