What does it mean to do creator marketing well in gaming when most brands still can’t agree on what it’s supposed to deliver?

Justin Smith has spent 15 years inside that disconnect, from explaining what Influencer Marketing was at Electronic Arts to walking gaming brands through why their outcomes still don’t match their spend. As SVP of Marketing at Open World, a gaming-focused creator marketing company and division of Loaded Holdings that is building SaaS platforms for brands, Justin sits at a vantage point few people in the industry share.

“At any given point, we can see the entire landscape,” Justin says. “And how each one is changing and how that change is going to affect the rest of the influencer ecosystem.”

Open World, which Justin joined in March 2026 after a stint as Chief Commercial Officer at gaming data and analytics platform Stream Hatchet, works with publishers and entertainment brands on creator campaigns, community strategy, brand research, and go-to-market for game and movie releases.

The Education Phase Never Ends

When Justin started at EA Games in 2015, he was sending game codes and gift baskets to pet channels in exchange for content about a game called “Life of Pets.” Few people inside studios had heard the term “Influencer Marketing.”

After EA closed its Salt Lake studio, Justin moved to BENlabs, where the agency side of the equation came into focus. Brands needed convincing from scratch. “We had decks that were like: what is influencer? How many people are watching YouTube? What are the engagement rates?” he recalls. “We’d have to find the early adopters inside each gaming division just to have someone internally who could help take that message to stakeholders.”

The education phase hasn’t ended. It has changed subjects. “UGC during my day was someone organically saying, ‘I like this product,'” Justin notes. “Now, UGC is someone being paid to generate content that a brand is going to use as paid media. Even the acronyms keep changing.”

Paid Media and Influencer Are Finally in the Same Room

The most notable structural shift Justin has observed is also one of the most recent. For most of his career, Influencer Marketing teams had to fight paid media teams for budget. The two operated in separate silos, with separate metrics and separate logic.

That’s changing. “The brands that are ahead have their paid media team and their influencer team in lockstep,” Justin says. “Everything they’re doing on influencer usually has a distribution funnel across traditional media.”

Brands are increasingly treating creator content as a production source for their paid media pipeline, not as a standalone channel. A creator video that performs organically can be repurposed and amplified through programmatic and social placements. Static ads gave way to video ads; video ads gave way to creator ads. Now the two pipelines are converging.

The driver is partly structural, partly economic. Traditional digital advertising is under pressure from ad blockers, cookie deprecation, and platform fragmentation. “People are looking for a recognizable face,” Justin says. “Someone they know and trust. When you see someone using a product, you are more likely to slow down scrolling.”

The Biggest Problem Is Outcome Alignment, Not Budget

When brands struggle with creator marketing, Justin says the root cause is almost always the same: nobody agrees on what success looks like before the campaign launches.

He points to Solo Stove’s Snoop Dogg campaign as the clearest cautionary example. “Huge engagement. Huge awareness. They fired their CMO because they said we’re not selling anything.” The campaign delivered on one metric and failed on another, and the brand hadn’t resolved that tension internally before it went live.

“When you ask what success looks like and someone says one thing, but the internal stakeholders are holding the team to a different metric, that is by far the number-one issue,” Justin says. According to him, brands need to decide whether they’re running a conversion play, building mass awareness, driving cultural relevance, or generating long-tail content. Each requires different creator profiles, different deal structures, and different measurements.

Transparency on spend is the second major friction point. Traditional agencies have operated without disclosing margins on media buys, and brands have largely accepted that. Influencer Marketing has pushed in the opposite direction, with brands expecting full visibility into what each creator costs and what the agency is taking. “With influencer, there’s a kind of lack of trust that you’re just spending on whoever says yes,” Justin explains.

Why Always-On Programs Outperform Campaign-to-Campaign Buying

One of the structural problems Justin has worked to address throughout his career is the industry’s default to transactional, one-off campaigns. Every time a brand activates a creator for a single post or a single week, it starts from scratch: sourcing, vetting, contracting, briefing. Justin notes that such a relationship has no compounding value.

Always-on creator programs solve three problems simultaneously. First, sourcing: a pre-approved roster of creators who already know a brand’s game eliminates research overhead on every activation. Second, brand alignment: the more a creator works with a brand, the more naturally they represent it. “Content feels more organic,” Justin says. “Audiences have seen them talk about it before. It builds trust.” Third, exclusivity: a creator inside an ongoing program is unlikely to post for a competitor the following week. 

Justin frames the internal conversation at brands simply: “I don’t want to be Pizza Hut and see a creator post for Domino’s next week.”

The budget structure changes, too. An always-on program is effectively a bulk purchase, covering three to six months of content at once. In most cases, that volume produces a discount because it represents guaranteed revenue for the creator. The tradeoff is organizational: brands need marketing plans built far enough in advance to support the commitment. 

“Apex Legends,” which runs annual events that its creator network promotes consistently, is the model Justin points to. “The creators are prepped for what’s next. You have a feed of content into your paid pipeline. The system feels natural.”

Gaming’s Three-Pillar Future

Justin sees live service games converging around three pillars: creator programs, community management, and influencer campaigns.

Creator programs are typically managed internally by the brand, maintaining relationships with a standing group of creators who provide early access, feedback, and content through product cycles. Community management, separate from creator marketing, addresses the players who may never create content but whose engagement determines a game’s longevity. Influencer campaigns then layer on top, translating what community and creator programs surface into broader market activation.

The clearest example of that model working is Bungie’s “Marathon.” “It was not received well at first. They talked to the community, received feedback, adjusted their game, and they’ve done very well at launch,” Justin says. “That was built on community, creator programs, and influencer campaigns.” Brands that haven’t integrated all three, he argues, are leaving both reach and signal on the table.

For Open World, the three-pillar framing shapes what the company is building. The SaaS product under development is designed to give brands a self-service layer for running creator and community programs. When they need managed execution for a major title launch or movie release, that infrastructure already exists.

Influence Is Still a People Business

As programmatic logic and media-buying frameworks shape how brands approach influencer spend, Justin offers a counterweight. The efficiency arguments for treating creators as media inventory are real. The risk is losing what makes the channel work.

Movie and game release campaigns illustrate the point. Open World structures those activations across three tracks: earned media, where creators attend events and red carpets because the access itself is the value; paid content, covering gameplay, watch parties, and lore-focused long-form; and short-form social, where creators extend cultural relevance after a launch moment. The goal is a through line from an event appearance to long-form channel content to shareable clips, all packaged into a single deal that locks in the creator’s schedule and reduces costs. “Every time you don’t factor it into a package, the cost goes up,” Justin says.

Legacy media, he notes, cannot replicate the experiential or community-facing dimensions of that model. “Traditional media cannot play a video game. It cannot create short-form, memeable content. It can run ads behind it, but it takes both to be cohesive.”

Which brings Justin back to the tension he wants the industry to hold onto. “People want influencer to work like a media buy,” he says. “They want to say: ‘I have this much money, this is what I get for it’. But what I would hope is that people continue to treat influencer as people who genuinely love their craft, not as a media buy.”

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

Check Out Our Podcast