Running a creator campaign across multiple markets used to mean hiring several multilingual staffers, weeks of manual outreach, and hoping the process didn’t collapse between time zones. At most agencies, it still does.
That operational hurdle is the founding logic behind Multiple, the AI-powered creator campaign platform that social creator agency NewGen launched in May. Developed after enterprise clients requested global campaigns at a scale the agency couldn’t deliver manually, Multiple consolidates creator sourcing, outreach, contract generation, compliance verification, and performance reporting into a single managed system. According to NewGen, campaigns can go live up to ten times faster than manual workflows.
Mike Craddock, NewGen’s co-founder and CEO, started the agency in 2015 after spending four years building a YouTube gaming channel that accumulated 55 million views. Today, NewGen operates across London, Manchester, New York, and Paris with 95 employees and brand clients including PepsiCo, Samsung, P&G, and Activision Blizzard. In 2024, the agency secured a multi-million-pound investment from BGF. Multiple is the first major technology product to emerge from that capital deployment.
“The future of agencies is going to be very tech-focused, especially with how quickly AI is moving,” Mike says. “We want to be at the forefront of that.”
When the Manual Process Hits a Wall
The immediate trigger for Multiple came from a client request that exposed the ceiling of manual operations. A brand asked NewGen to activate creators across 20 markets at roughly 50 per market. At that volume, the traditional agency process would have required a dedicated person per market, including multilingual speakers for each geography.
“If someone says to us, ‘Hey, we want 20 markets, 50 influencers per market,’ it’s a very manual process,” Mike says. “The only way agencies were previously able to do that scale was just very expensive, because you just needed more manpower.”
Photo: Mike Craddock
What brands actually lose in that friction is speed, which in the Creator Economy translates directly to relevance. “You’re losing time, which means you’re losing relevance,” he says. “In the social and creator world, sometimes you don’t have weeks. You have hours.”
The back-and-forth negotiation phase is the largest single time drain. Four email exchanges across a hundred creators produce four hundred messages, spread across time zones where creator availability rarely aligns with agency office hours. A creator responding at 6 p.m. who doesn’t hear back until 9 a.m. loses nearly a full business day per exchange, compounded across hundreds of simultaneous outreach threads.
Three Ways to Run a Campaign
Multiple operates as a managed service rather than standalone software. Clients access live dashboards tracking views, click-through rates, and CPMs in real time, but NewGen runs the platform on their behalf.
The system offers three operational modes. In the hybrid model, account teams lead strategy while the platform handles creator discovery and workflow coordination. In the fully automated mode, AI manages outreach, rate benchmarking, negotiation within preset parameters, and contract dispatch, with human staff intervening only when a rate request exceeds a threshold or when a creator’s communication carries negative sentiment. The third is a conventional human-led approach for clients who want direct relationship management.
“Some of our brands aren’t keen on AI and want to really build a relationship with the creators and ensure everything’s really authentic,” Mike says. “We want to make sure we have three different offerings.”
According to Mike, gifting and affiliate campaigns at nano-creator scale are drawing the most demand for full automation. A hotel brand activating a thousand creators can route the process from discovery through Shopify-integrated product fulfillment without manual coordination at volume. The platform also includes built-in FTC (Federal Trade Commission) and ASA (Advertising Standards Authority) compliance checks, generating contracts that account for local disclosure requirements across markets.
“There are still way too many agencies and brands that fall shy of this,” Mike says. “It’s only going to become more clamped down upon as the industry matures.”
The Feature That Caught Brands Off Guard
Mike expected speed and scale to lead product demonstrations. The feature drawing the most sustained interest turned out to be the platform’s AI creator vetting.
When a brand brief is loaded, Multiple transcribes verbal content from creator videos, not just metadata or captions, scoring each creator on brand affinity, tone of voice, and relevance. The system can surface creators who mentioned a relevant product or related topic in content made months or years earlier.
“We are literally not just taking what’s in the description or in the comments,” Mike says. “We’re taking what is being verbally said and transcribing all of that. So if someone has spoken about a product verbally in a video 20 videos ago, we can analyze that.”
Each creator receives a composite score out of 100 across multiple criteria. Those scoring below 75 are typically flagged or excluded. The scoring framework was built partly in response to a client whose selected creator later generated PR problems for the brand, incorporating up to 4,000 content keywords and up to 15 to 20 years of social content history per creator.
“I feel like we are showing them something new that they haven’t yet seen,” Mike says.
What the Agency Now Actually Sells
Automating the operational layer has a direct implication for how NewGen positions its human work. If creator discovery, outreach, and reporting are handled by the system, the agency’s account teams have to justify their value on different terms.
“People who are just building influencer lists and saying these are the right creators, like that, will not really have a role in 12 to 18 months,” Mike says. “I think we are going that way with how quickly AI is building.”
For NewGen, that prediction is also a pitch strategy. “We should be a strategic partner for our brands and clients,” Mike says. “What is the strategy? What’s our ambassador program? Where do we show up? What’s relevant in culture today? Rather than just building a list and contracting five creators.”
He describes moving toward performance-based contracts as the logical endpoint, with agencies guaranteeing creative and commercial outputs rather than billing on execution time. The model requires a different account team profile and a different value conversation with clients.
Where Brand Creator Strategy Still Falls Short
Despite tools like Multiple and years of industry conversation about creator strategy, Mike argues that the most common brand behavior remains undisciplined.
“People are treating it just as a media buy … and a one-off media buy,” he says. “YouTube integrations of 60 seconds, which have been done for 10 to 12 years, and the audience can see straight through it.”
He acknowledges one-off campaigns have a place, for launch moments or seasonal pushes, but argues the execution is typically poor. “I still see so much one-off lazy Instagram stories or YouTube integrations that have no relevance whatsoever,” he says. The direction, in his view, is toward ambassador relationships and culturally timed activations, though the industry is moving there slowly.
Photo: NewGen team
Two Ends of the Market
Looking three years ahead, Mike expects creator marketing to diverge along clear structural lines. Performance-oriented brands and SMEs will use AI-powered platforms as pure media-buying infrastructure, running campaigns at volume with minimal human involvement. Culture-oriented brands will pursue highly selective creator programs with deep human oversight and strategic coordination. “Influence marketing is going to have two very opposite polar ends of how it works in a couple of years,” he says.
NewGen’s internal AI team is developing additional tools across social, streaming, and gaming creator verticals, with announcements expected within the next few months.
For Mike, the industry’s most stubborn unsolved problem lies outside the scope of any platform. Despite years of professionalization, brands still routinely impose 60-, 90-, or 120-day payment terms on creators and agencies, creating cash flow strain and reputational damage throughout the supply chain.
“I actually still think the biggest problem the industry faces is payment terms,” he says. “The biggest thing the industry could do better is to have standardized payment terms in the Creator Economy.”
Cecilia Carloni, Interview Manager at Influence Weekly and writer for NetInfluencer. Coming from beautiful Argentina, Ceci has spent years chatting with big names in the influencer world, making friends and learning insider info along the way. When she’s not deep in interviews or writing, she's enjoying life with her two daughters. Ceci’s stories give a peek behind the curtain of influencer life, sharing the real and interesting tales from her many conversations with movers and shakers in the space.
Running a creator campaign across multiple markets used to mean hiring several multilingual staffers, weeks of manual outreach, and hoping the process didn’t collapse between time zones. At most agencies, it still does.
That operational hurdle is the founding logic behind Multiple, the AI-powered creator campaign platform that social creator agency NewGen launched in May. Developed after enterprise clients requested global campaigns at a scale the agency couldn’t deliver manually, Multiple consolidates creator sourcing, outreach, contract generation, compliance verification, and performance reporting into a single managed system. According to NewGen, campaigns can go live up to ten times faster than manual workflows.
Mike Craddock, NewGen’s co-founder and CEO, started the agency in 2015 after spending four years building a YouTube gaming channel that accumulated 55 million views. Today, NewGen operates across London, Manchester, New York, and Paris with 95 employees and brand clients including PepsiCo, Samsung, P&G, and Activision Blizzard. In 2024, the agency secured a multi-million-pound investment from BGF. Multiple is the first major technology product to emerge from that capital deployment.
“The future of agencies is going to be very tech-focused, especially with how quickly AI is moving,” Mike says. “We want to be at the forefront of that.”
When the Manual Process Hits a Wall
The immediate trigger for Multiple came from a client request that exposed the ceiling of manual operations. A brand asked NewGen to activate creators across 20 markets at roughly 50 per market. At that volume, the traditional agency process would have required a dedicated person per market, including multilingual speakers for each geography.
“If someone says to us, ‘Hey, we want 20 markets, 50 influencers per market,’ it’s a very manual process,” Mike says. “The only way agencies were previously able to do that scale was just very expensive, because you just needed more manpower.”
Photo: Mike Craddock
What brands actually lose in that friction is speed, which in the Creator Economy translates directly to relevance. “You’re losing time, which means you’re losing relevance,” he says. “In the social and creator world, sometimes you don’t have weeks. You have hours.”
The back-and-forth negotiation phase is the largest single time drain. Four email exchanges across a hundred creators produce four hundred messages, spread across time zones where creator availability rarely aligns with agency office hours. A creator responding at 6 p.m. who doesn’t hear back until 9 a.m. loses nearly a full business day per exchange, compounded across hundreds of simultaneous outreach threads.
Three Ways to Run a Campaign
Multiple operates as a managed service rather than standalone software. Clients access live dashboards tracking views, click-through rates, and CPMs in real time, but NewGen runs the platform on their behalf.
The system offers three operational modes. In the hybrid model, account teams lead strategy while the platform handles creator discovery and workflow coordination. In the fully automated mode, AI manages outreach, rate benchmarking, negotiation within preset parameters, and contract dispatch, with human staff intervening only when a rate request exceeds a threshold or when a creator’s communication carries negative sentiment. The third is a conventional human-led approach for clients who want direct relationship management.
“Some of our brands aren’t keen on AI and want to really build a relationship with the creators and ensure everything’s really authentic,” Mike says. “We want to make sure we have three different offerings.”
According to Mike, gifting and affiliate campaigns at nano-creator scale are drawing the most demand for full automation. A hotel brand activating a thousand creators can route the process from discovery through Shopify-integrated product fulfillment without manual coordination at volume. The platform also includes built-in FTC (Federal Trade Commission) and ASA (Advertising Standards Authority) compliance checks, generating contracts that account for local disclosure requirements across markets.
“There are still way too many agencies and brands that fall shy of this,” Mike says. “It’s only going to become more clamped down upon as the industry matures.”
The Feature That Caught Brands Off Guard
Mike expected speed and scale to lead product demonstrations. The feature drawing the most sustained interest turned out to be the platform’s AI creator vetting.
When a brand brief is loaded, Multiple transcribes verbal content from creator videos, not just metadata or captions, scoring each creator on brand affinity, tone of voice, and relevance. The system can surface creators who mentioned a relevant product or related topic in content made months or years earlier.
“We are literally not just taking what’s in the description or in the comments,” Mike says. “We’re taking what is being verbally said and transcribing all of that. So if someone has spoken about a product verbally in a video 20 videos ago, we can analyze that.”
Each creator receives a composite score out of 100 across multiple criteria. Those scoring below 75 are typically flagged or excluded. The scoring framework was built partly in response to a client whose selected creator later generated PR problems for the brand, incorporating up to 4,000 content keywords and up to 15 to 20 years of social content history per creator.
“I feel like we are showing them something new that they haven’t yet seen,” Mike says.
What the Agency Now Actually Sells
Automating the operational layer has a direct implication for how NewGen positions its human work. If creator discovery, outreach, and reporting are handled by the system, the agency’s account teams have to justify their value on different terms.
“People who are just building influencer lists and saying these are the right creators, like that, will not really have a role in 12 to 18 months,” Mike says. “I think we are going that way with how quickly AI is building.”
For NewGen, that prediction is also a pitch strategy. “We should be a strategic partner for our brands and clients,” Mike says. “What is the strategy? What’s our ambassador program? Where do we show up? What’s relevant in culture today? Rather than just building a list and contracting five creators.”
He describes moving toward performance-based contracts as the logical endpoint, with agencies guaranteeing creative and commercial outputs rather than billing on execution time. The model requires a different account team profile and a different value conversation with clients.
Where Brand Creator Strategy Still Falls Short
Despite tools like Multiple and years of industry conversation about creator strategy, Mike argues that the most common brand behavior remains undisciplined.
“People are treating it just as a media buy … and a one-off media buy,” he says. “YouTube integrations of 60 seconds, which have been done for 10 to 12 years, and the audience can see straight through it.”
He acknowledges one-off campaigns have a place, for launch moments or seasonal pushes, but argues the execution is typically poor. “I still see so much one-off lazy Instagram stories or YouTube integrations that have no relevance whatsoever,” he says. The direction, in his view, is toward ambassador relationships and culturally timed activations, though the industry is moving there slowly.
Photo: NewGen team
Two Ends of the Market
Looking three years ahead, Mike expects creator marketing to diverge along clear structural lines. Performance-oriented brands and SMEs will use AI-powered platforms as pure media-buying infrastructure, running campaigns at volume with minimal human involvement. Culture-oriented brands will pursue highly selective creator programs with deep human oversight and strategic coordination. “Influence marketing is going to have two very opposite polar ends of how it works in a couple of years,” he says.
NewGen’s internal AI team is developing additional tools across social, streaming, and gaming creator verticals, with announcements expected within the next few months.
For Mike, the industry’s most stubborn unsolved problem lies outside the scope of any platform. Despite years of professionalization, brands still routinely impose 60-, 90-, or 120-day payment terms on creators and agencies, creating cash flow strain and reputational damage throughout the supply chain.
“I actually still think the biggest problem the industry faces is payment terms,” he says. “The biggest thing the industry could do better is to have standardized payment terms in the Creator Economy.”
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