Follower count used to be enough. Book a creator with millions of followers, ship the brief, and collect the content. That model has a shorter shelf life than most brands want to admit. Jake Rosen, CEO of Jake Rosen Entertainment (JRE), has spent the past several years building a different thesis: that the creator who has already been living your brand’s story will always outperform the creator who is simply willing to tell it. 

“Brands are being a lot more strategic about who they are working with and why,” Jake says. “It’s not just, ‘Here’s Sarah, she has five million followers.’ It’s, ‘Here’s Sarah, here are the three times she mentioned your product organically, and here is her idea for the video.’”

A recent campaign for Weight Watchers, now operating as WW, made the case in numbers. The campaign has generated close to 20 million views and counting, with WW now reviewing year-long partnership extensions for multiple creators on the roster.

Founded in 2018, JRE is a NYC-based digital talent agency that manages a roster with a combined following exceeding 900 million and has orchestrated more than 20,000 brand collaborations, including clients such as Disney, McDonald’s, Netflix, CVS, and Hulu.

Jake’s background is in television production and running social media channels for major brands, covering stints at ABC News, Meredith Corporation’s PeopleTV, and Bunim Murray Productions, before he pivoted to the Creator Economy. That editorial instinct, of knowing which stories resonate and which do not, shapes how JRE approaches brand partnerships today.

Organic Fit Is Now a Casting Requirement

WW’s January push is its highest-stakes window of the year. New Year’s resolution season drives peak consumer activity around weight loss, health goals, and wellness apps. When the brand approached JRE in November and December ahead of the new year, it brought two distinct initiatives: promoting its app and raising awareness of its partnership with the GLP-1 weight-loss medication brand Wegovy.

Rather than send WW a shortlist of familiar names, Jake sent an internal email to JRE’s entire roster explaining precisely what the brand was looking for. He asked creators to respond with three to five sentences explaining why they were a genuine fit. The submissions that came back covered creators already on personal fitness journeys, others who had been considering GLP-1 medications, and some who had lost significant weight and could show it.

“There’s always going to be a creator who just says, ‘Sure, I’ll do it.’ My response to them is, ‘how?'” Jake says. “If you want to stand out in a pitch when you are competing against other names, you need to be as detailed as possible. We try to arm our talent with the most material to make sure they’re putting their best foot forward.”

The result was a curated submission package that gave WW not just names but pre-qualified context for each one. Ten to fifteen creators were approved in the last week of December, with a directive to go live in the first week of January.

The Brief That Left Room for the Creator

WW provided briefs for both campaign tracks, but not all briefs are created equal. The GLP-1 activation came with strict legal requirements governing how medication-adjacent claims could be presented, leaving creators with less room to improvise. The app campaign ran differently.

For the app brief, JRE treated the document as a reference point rather than a script. A middle-aged creator who plays pickleball built her video around her active lifestyle and wove in the app naturally. Healthy cooking creators on the roster took a different angle, preparing recipes they would have posted anyway but translating ingredient values into WW’s point system.

“It wasn’t like we completely reinvented the wheel,” Jake explains. “They’re doing the same recipes they normally do, but adding a little bit of a twist. It doesn’t feel completely sponsored. It feels like one of their normal videos, and when creators are able to make their ‘normal’ videos, they see the best results.”

Platform allocation followed the budget rather than a predetermined plan. Some creators commanded higher rates and were activated on a single platform. Others, at lower price points, ran across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube simultaneously. Jake pushed for creative flexibility on platform selection, though he acknowledges the tradeoff.

“If I’m saying this will perform better on a certain platform, I’d better eat my words and make sure that it performs better,” he says. “There’s more pressure. But it allows for more creative freedom and makes sure we’re putting our best foot forward.”

The 100-Pound Post That Everything Else Chased

Across both campaign tracks, the content that outperformed was not the most polished. It was the most personal.

One of the top-performing pieces came from creator @nakaanddom on TikTok, who documented a 100-pound weight loss journey and credited WW as part of that process. Her followers had watched her postpartum transformation unfold in real time, which meant the sponsored post landed not as advertising, but as a continuation of a story they were already invested in.

“The ones that actually showed some sort of transformation performed the best,” Jake notes. “Being able to see the fitness journey of where they were six months ago and where they are today, that’s a visual thing. You can see the results.”

The post received more than 80,000 likes and 3,600 saves on TikTok. WW continued running it as paid media months after the campaign officially closed. It has remained live in the brand’s ad rotation.

The pattern extends to the cooking-focused content. Creators who would have made healthy recipe videos regardless of the sponsorship simply added WW’s point annotations. The integration was minimal enough that the posts read as organic content, which is precisely why they kept accumulating views.

Speed as a Competitive Advantage

The WW campaign did not begin as an end-of-year budget windfall. JRE had worked with WW previously, through a third-party agency, before the brand brought its influencer strategy back in-house. When the in-house team reached out directly, Jake asked the right question at the right time: “What are you specifically looking for right now?”

The answer arrived with an unusual constraint: a one-week turnaround between approvals and go-live dates, through the Christmas holiday period. Many agencies would have flagged the timeline as unrealistic.

“Getting this live in a week, during Christmas time, getting people to shoot content during Christmas, that was the real measure of success in this specific one,” Jake says. “The mix of great responses as well as being an agency of trust, where they know we can deliver on a fast turnaround, led to incremental dollars we thought were gone for the year.”

That execution reliability translated into ongoing spend. WW extended boosting on the top-performing assets, with at least some of those TikTok posts still generating impressions months later. The brand is also reviewing longer-term contracts with multiple creators to document their continued weight-loss journeys over the next year.

What Brands Keep Getting Wrong

Jake is direct about where brand-side strategy breaks down. The most common failure mode is not a bad brief. It is a brand that either does not know its own creative voice or does and then abandons it mid-production.

“I don’t want to name a brand, but I did a deal the other day where they came back after the shoot and said they completely changed their mind on creative,” he says. “We shot a piece of content, they gave two rounds of notes, and then all of a sudden they changed everything they wanted.”

The second failure mode is micromanagement that defeats the purpose of hiring a creator in the first place. Jake describes recent feedback requesting frame-level edits: adjusting a clip from 22 to 21 seconds, a different still frame, and specific timing changes.

“If you’re completely micromanaged, you’re taking away the main reason you hired them,” he says. “You hired them because you enjoy the content they create, and when you micromanage every aspect of it, it no longer feels authentic to them.”

Jake argues that speed compounds both problems. Brands with extensive approval chains miss cultural windows that close in days. He points to the viral Dr Pepper jingle creator, Romeo Bingham, as a case study in responsive brand strategy, and Vita Coco’s move to bring the same creator to the Super Bowl as evidence of what an on-point brand can accomplish.

“Brands that are willing to move fast and do what’s going on in pop culture are the ones seeing the most success,” Jake says. “Brands that take three months to approve anything, by the time they come back, that trend was two months ago.”

From Campaign to Long-Term Infrastructure

The WW campaign signals a broader shift in how JRE is positioning itself. Jake is pushing the agency toward more direct brand relationships, bypassing third-party agencies in favor of working with marketing teams that come to JRE not just for a creator name but for the strategic architecture around the campaign.

The next phase of that build includes supporting creators on their own product launches and business ventures, not just brand deals. One creator reached out to Jake during the interview period about launching a product line. His response was to start making connections.

“The biggest thing here at JRE this year is to support talent in any of their goals and be a team that can do that in all capacities,” Jake says. “We want more brand-direct relationships versus going through third-party agencies. That’s something we’re looking to grow.”