Reign Maker Group (RMG) and Launchpoint announced a joint venture in August 2026, pairing Jonathan Chanti‘s creator-focused holding company with Tristan Rhee‘s AI-powered execution platform. Both describe the partnership’s logic the same way: RMG, through The Now Agency, provides the creative direction and brand strategy, while Launchpoint provides the infrastructure to execute it at enterprise scale.

Jonathan has been operating in Influencer Marketing since 2012, building through early deals at Platinum Rye Entertainment and HYPR Brands before a five-year tenure at Viral Nation, where he eventually led the talent agency before departing in 2025. That career, he says, made one problem impossible to ignore. “Brands were not truly being serviced to the extent that they should, with the consultative level of knowledge and resources that they deserved,” he says. RMG operates The Now Agency, an influencer and social media marketing firm, alongside Reign Maker Talent, a creator representation division.

Tristan arrived at the same market from a different direction. After two years in investment banking at Deutsche Bank and earlier work as a tech investor, he co-founded Launchpoint in January 2025 on a premise about where modern businesses most commonly fail to grow. “The main problem was no longer building the product,” he says. “The best way for anybody to know about you nowadays is through social media and through creators.” Launchpoint operates as an AI-powered infrastructure platform: a system that automates creator acquisition, briefing, compliance, content production management, and performance reporting for enterprise clients.

The joint venture divides labor along two clear lines, with The Now Agency handling the talent selection and brand positioning, and Launchpoint taking that brief and running end-to-end execution from creator acquisition and compliance through payment and reporting. “We can work with brands from a strategic level on what the roadmap to success looks like, but that road lives on Launchpoint from a destination and execution level,” Jonathan says.

Why Staying Separate Produces the Stronger System

Both companies enter the partnership with independent capital structures and their own mandates. The collaboration lives in a defined middle zone: joint enterprise client work, shared data development, and combined service capacity. Jonathan describes the arrangement as a Venn diagram, with each company continuing to develop its core product independently while the overlap grows. “When people merge too soon or align too quickly on everything, you lose innovation,” he says.

Tristan frames the structure as a direct consequence of what made the partnership worth building in the first place. “The very best partnerships are when people are very good at different things,” he says. Keeping the companies separate means neither operation is flattened into the other’s priorities, and the joint work reflects each side at full strength rather than a compromise of both.

What the joint venture produces that neither company builds alone is a proprietary dataset. Together, RMG and Launchpoint are benchmarking creator pricing across categories, talent tiers, and historical campaign performance. The goal, Jonathan explains, is to tie creator cost to expected campaign return rather than to follower count alone.

At Enterprise Scale, Every Step in the Campaign Process Carries a Failure Risk

The operational problem the partnership is built to address becomes specific in Jonathan’s account of what breaks when brands run creator programs at volume. 

The first constraint is discovery: brands planning to activate a few hundred creators need a much larger pool to account for drop-off at every subsequent stage. “If you’re executing 300, you better have a thousand options,” he says. “Something somewhere is going to potentially break even if you nail all the fundamentals correctly.”

Budget structure is a second early failure point. Entering a campaign without market comp data, or without understanding how creator pricing varies by category, leads to deals priced incorrectly from the start. According to Jonathan, niche categories command higher average rates than broad lifestyle or entertainment categories because creator supply is limited, and brands without that knowledge find themselves unable to fill their planned creator mix.

Once campaigns go live, accountability and brand safety become the dominant risks. Creators who agreed to a brief do not always deliver on schedule, and content that misses it generates revision cycles. Safety incidents are often invisible during creator selection and surface only after posting. “I’ve had deals where a guy had a SWAT sticker on a statue in the very far corner of the content that no one noticed,” Jonathan says. When it posted, the brand’s audience caught it immediately. 

Payment terms and post-campaign measurement create a final layer of potential breakdowns after the content is live.

Launchpoint Automates What Human-Led Campaign Management Cannot Handle at Volume

Launchpoint’s platform is designed to address each of those stages. When a brand brings a marketing objective, the system sources creators from its existing network and through automated outreach, briefs them, confirms compliance, surfaces them for brand review, manages content production, and delivers post-campaign performance data. “We can acquire creators much more quickly than typically a human can if they’re just outreaching and DMing people,” Tristan says.

Fraud detection is integrated throughout. Tristan notes that purchased social statistics are readily available online, with hundreds of sites offering follower counts or view totals for nominal cost. “It’s surprisingly easy to buy any social statistics,” he says. Launchpoint uses nine internal indicators to screen for inauthentic activity, a system developed in part with enterprise clients including Capital One. The objective is to ensure that the performance figures brands receive reflect genuine audience engagement.

Enterprise readiness is a differentiator Tristan emphasizes when brands compare platforms. He says Launchpoint holds official business partnerships with Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, which affects data access and platform-level compliance. “You don’t want to be the first big customer they’ve ever had,” he says, characterizing the risk of working with platforms that have not previously handled enterprise-scale programs.

Brands That Haven’t Made Technology a Requirement Are Already Falling Behind

The pace of change in creator marketing has removed the margin for experimentation that characterized the industry’s early years. “The education curve in our business right now is moving at light speed,” Jonathan says. “It’s very different than 2012 to 2016. There was a lot of buffer and a lot of opportunity for trial and error.”

Brands are no longer simply reaching audiences through creators. They are optimizing content for the platform algorithms that determine what audiences see. “We’re actually marketing to the algorithm,” Jonathan says. “That’s ultimately the biggest cause for success today.” He explains that a strategy calibrated to one algorithmic moment may underperform the next quarter as platforms update, making technological infrastructure and real-time strategic guidance non-negotiable.

Tristan puts the competitive dimension in concrete terms. “Unilever is trying to scale to 300,000 influencers,” he says, adding that such volume is not achievable through manual processes. The brands building the right technology partnerships, Tristan notes, are separating from those that haven’t. “You’re seeing the winners and losers being minted in real time,” he says.

When the Partnership Works, Managing Creators Should Feel Programmatic

Two years from now, Jonathan says, the mechanics of running a creator campaign should be invisible to the people responsible for marketing strategy. “The time should be spent on the content strategy and the approach and not on the actual facilitating and execution,” he says. According to him, brand managers and creative directors should focus on what a campaign needs to communicate and why, while the operational work of managing the creator relationship runs in the background.

Tristan characterizes the endpoint as fully programmatic: a brand allocates a budget, a strategic partner determines how to deploy it, and the platform executes cleanly with minimal manual intervention. The joint venture’s combination of RMG’s deal flow on the strategy side and Launchpoint’s automated throughput on the platform side is helping build the data foundation both companies say will make that possible.

For Jonathan, the broader case for creator marketing at this scale is already settled. “Influencer Marketing is now applicable to every facet of business and communication,” he says. “There isn’t any business that cannot be leveraging this.”

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