Barbara Jones founded Outshine Talent in 2019 with an early conviction that TikTok would become a serious management market. Seven years later, the New York-based firm represents social creators, athletes, musicians, and creative directors, and is adding divisions across sports, entertainment production, and creative representation.

Barbara traces the logic back to what she describes as the end of mass media. “I’ve been in this industry for 18 years, and every day I come across a creator who has millions of followers who I’ve never heard of,” she says. “There is no such thing as mass media anymore.” In her view, that fragmentation has made creator communities more valuable precisely because the relationship between a creator and their audience is what traditional media can no longer generate on its own. Traditional film and television, she argues, are increasingly green-lighting creator-driven productions as a direct result of that shift.

Her read is grounded in experience on both sides of the transaction. Before launching the firm, Barbara spent nearly two decades as an SVP at Columbia, Warner, Epic, and Sony Records, then a decade running Blissful Media Group, an Influencer Marketing agency she started in 2008. That sequence placed her inside the decision-making structures of labels and brands before she moved into talent management, and she says it shapes how she reads every deal Outshine pursues today.

The company operates across five divisions: social, sports, music, entertainment, and the newly launched Outshine Artists Group, which represents creative directors, photographers, and fashion stylists. Each manager carries a small roster. “We’re not agents. We’re managers,” Barbara says. “It’s not just a sales cycle. We’re developing personal brands. We want to build legacy.”

Photo credit: Drake Hackney

The Sports Division Is Outshine’s Biggest Growth Engine

The sports division has driven most of Outshine’s growth over the past two years. Barbara entered the NIL space in 2021, signing college athletes early before the space widened, and has since expanded into sports content creators more broadly, including players on the Savannah Bananas.

Robert Anthony Cruz, also known as “Coach RAC,” illustrates what Barbara means when she talks about building beyond individual brand deals. In addition to sponsorships, his business includes camps, licensed products, a book, and speaking engagements, developed alongside the management team as a deliberate portfolio rather than a transactional list. “That takes creative headspace, that takes time, that takes focus,” she says. 

Her argument: a manager carrying too many clients cannot generate that kind of work. “If you’re just doing the deals, you have no brain space for creativity.”

An Entertainment Arm, for the Talent That Wants It

The entertainment division is newer and, Barbara is careful to note, not for everyone on the roster. A small percentage of creators have both the skill set and the desire to move into original IP, scripted series, or film. Her role, as she describes it, is to identify which ones and build the infrastructure when they do.

One announced project is “Lala IRL,” a scripted series for creator Lala Sadii, in development with Endemol Shine North America and Disney Channel. Other productions are in progress, including a web series, a horror film, and a thriller, though those have not been publicly announced. “These projects are going to be the catalyst for them to do even bigger projects,” Barbara says, adding that co-ownership of IP is part of the model she is building toward.

She is equally direct about the ceiling. “Not everyone’s a host. Not everyone can build a show,” she says. “Sometimes they just do what they do, and they do it well, but they don’t want more. And that doesn’t make them less than.” The Hollywood move, in her framing, is available to the talent that wants it, not imposed on the roster as a strategic direction.

Community Building Is Outshine’s Hedge Against the Brand-Spending Cycle

Brand deals still represent the bulk of Outshine’s revenue, and Barbara describes that reality without softening it. “It is still the biggest percentage of revenue,” she says. “Is that ideal? No.” The longer-term goal is to build passive revenue streams, licensed products, and IP ownership that reduce that dependence. For now, the commission-based model means income is tied to whatever the market wants from the talent at any given time.

According to Barbara, shifts in brand preference, from macro to mid-tier to micro and nano influencers, happen faster than any management strategy can absorb. “We’re at the mercy of the brands and their agencies on what flavor of the month it is today,” she says. Her counterweight is community. “If you’re building community and you have other things you sell or offer, ideally your community will go with you anywhere, and you have more control over your destiny.”

Vetting Talent Starts With a Policy and Ends With Audience Data

Barbara’s standard for signing talent starts with a blunt disqualifier. “We have a no-asshole policy,” she says. “So you have to be a nice person. Number one.” Beyond character, she looks for consistency, creativity, and what she calls a clear vision, i.e., a sense of what a creator wants to become, not just what they’re producing now. “I always say, ‘I can’t want this more than you do.’”

Consistency, she argues, matters more than raw creative output. Brand agencies now use sophisticated back-end tools that check posting frequency, sponsored-to-organic ratios, and engagement patterns long before reaching out to any creator. A creator who posts irregularly, or who is already overweighted toward sponsored content, may never appear on those shortlists. “If you think they don’t see that, you’re kidding yourself,” Barbara says. “It’s very sophisticated now.”

Outshine also coaches talent on what Barbara calls “dropping breadcrumbs”: genuine, sustained engagement with a brand’s content over time, not an engineered pre-campaign sprint. “Showing that you are actually an organic fan of the brand over a period of time,” she says. “Not just because you want to go to Fashion Week and you start posting about a brand three weeks before.”

For pitches, Outshine uses an ad tech partner to show how a creator’s audience over-indexes for a specific brand’s behavioral patterns, going beyond standard demographic overlap. “We say, ‘Her audience over-indexes for your brand and the behaviors of your brand. That’s why this is a good fit,’” Barbara explains. She frames it as helping brand-side teams make the internal case. “They’re still selling up to their C-suite on why it’s a good spend. If you make it easy with data, you have a much better chance.”

Photo: Outshine’s Friendsgiving event 2025
Credit: Emily Badgley

Brands That Approve a Script Should Trust the Process

The friction Barbara most often sees in brand-creator relationships comes after the work is already approved. A brand hires a creator, signs off on a concept, approves a script, and then sends back notes. “You’ve got to just let it roll,” she says. “You picked somebody for a reason because you like the way they do things.”

The revision loop, she argues, erodes the creator-brand relationship faster than a failed campaign would. “Sometimes they’ll say, ‘We just want you to be you,’ and then there are literally three or four revisions.” Her position is that once the concept and the script have cleared approval, the brand’s role is to trust the output. “Trust the creator to create. That’s why you came in the first place.”

AI Can Run Discovery but Cannot Make the Call

Barbara separates AI into two categories: operational tools she accepts and creative applications she does not plan to pursue. In her view, search, discovery, and workflow efficiency are fair uses. AI-generated personas are not. “I’m never going to work with an AI influencer,” she says. “It’s just not interesting to me.”

Her reasoning traces back to what management actually requires. “There are still human beings picking who they want to work with,” she says. “I tell my team, ‘You’ve got to get out and meet people.’” Negotiations involve nuance and back-and-forth that automated systems can approximate for mass-market campaigns, but cannot navigate at the level of high-touch creative representation. 

She sees a plausible role for AI in streamlining UGC and micro-influencer matching at scale, while holding the line for top-tier talent. “Actually dealing with top creatives, I think you’ve got to have that relationship.”

Building Toward the Next Chapter

On the personnel side, Outshine has added structure to support its expansion. Aaron Koschitzki has been named a partner. Caroline Shin Sixt has been promoted to SVP and now leads Outshine Artists, the recently launched creative representation arm, which includes Nicola Formichetti, global creative director for MAC Cosmetics, and Hunter Clem, a fashion stylist whose clients include Lady Gaga, Slayyter, and 2hollies.

Financial literacy runs through Barbara’s thinking about her roster of younger creators, including athletes. Creators accumulating revenue quickly, she says, often lack the infrastructure to manage it, a pattern she sees across the Creator Economy more broadly. For Barbara, that is part of what management firms should be doing. 

“Protecting creators,” she says. “I want to make sure they know how to pay their taxes, how to save, how to invest. That’s the momager in me.”

Cover photo credit: Emily Badgley

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