Emma Heiland’s first question for any creator she works with is not how large their audience is. It is where they want to be in a decade. This month, after more than nine years in talent representation, the Los Angeles-based executive joined TBN Talent as Director of Talent Management to build a practice around that orientation.

TBN is a boutique agency operating across talent, brands, and culture, connecting creators with partnerships designed for long-term growth. Emma’s hire shows the agency’s intent to formalize that strategy. “I feel like it’s such a growing company,” she says, “who really want to focus on giving their talent strategy and looking at the big picture rather than the one-off campaigns.”

Emma’s path to TBN began at Shine Talent Group, where she started in 2018 as a bookkeeper, moved into talent management, and eventually became Head of Casting, a role she held for three years before leaving in April 2026. After a short stint at 1AM Talent, she joined TBN.

Shine’s approach, which she credits as a formative influence, centered on pairing creators with managers who would genuinely engage with their content. “If you’re not going to watch their content organically,” Emma says, “you’re probably not going to pitch them as well as someone who does.”

Now in her first 90 days at TBN, she is building out the talent roster by category, working from conversations with brand partners about what they are casting for and what clients are asking for. The framework she is applying is a direct extension of that pairing philosophy, now at the agency level.

A Casting Background Changes How Creator-Brand Pairings Get Made

Emma’s years in casting inform an approach that begins with the creator’s point of view, not their metrics. “When I look at their page,” she says, “do I understand who they are?”

The question goes beyond niche or aesthetics. Emma is looking for the values animating a creator’s content and whether those values have a credible counterpart on the brand side. “So many of us know what causes a brand supports, what plans they have in the future,” she explains. “Having that knowledge and then seeing it on the creator side, you’re able to create those pairings where you’re like, ‘Oh, I know you.’”

That alignment, she argues, is what turns a one-off collaboration into a sustained relationship. Her approach to creator strategy is to identify long-term ambitions early and work backward from them, building the brand relationships that will support where a creator wants to be in five or ten years.

A Single Viral Video Can Be a Creator’s Biggest Liability

Emma’s benchmark for commercial value is community depth. “I don’t care if you have a hundred thousand followers or a million followers,” she says. “What I care about is that your community is engaged.”

The most compelling audience, in her view, is not the largest but the most specific. She uses BookTok to illustrate the dynamic: a creator whose audience trusts their literary taste delivers recommendations with a conviction a general lifestyle creator with ten times the reach cannot match. Brands, she says, are increasingly recognizing this.

A viral spike creates the opposite problem. When a video overperforms and pulls in followers outside a creator’s core demographic, it distorts the engagement data brands rely on. “You’re skewing the engagement and the response from someone’s audience,” Emma explains, “because you’re not in their core demographic. You just happened to get served this one video off of Instagram Reels.”

Creators Are Pricing Themselves Below What Their Niche Is Worth

A common error Emma encounters is creators failing to understand the premium attached to a specific angle. “You might be the only person talking about this specific topic from this angle,” she says, “and that comes at a premium.”

Negotiating rates, she adds, requires market intelligence most creators do not systematically gather. The result is that “their general baseline rates are lower than they should be, just not understanding their peers in the space and how they’re speaking about the same topic from a different angle,” she says.

Discomfort with self-advocacy compounds the issue. Emma paraphrases the logic many creators apply: “I love this, and I don’t want to feel greedy.” Part of her role at TBN is to provide the market context that helps creators understand what their positioning actually commands.

Brands That Script Creator Content Are Undermining What They Paid For

The most persistent brand-side mistake Emma encounters is over-prescription, i.e., requiring creators to deliver specific messaging in the first seconds of a video, or to demonstrate a product in a predetermined way. “These creators built their audience,” she says. “You did not build it. Give them more creative freedom.”

She also highlights a generational shift inside brand teams, noting that more people with creator-side experience are now in brand marketing roles, and they understand why tightly scripted briefs produce content that reads as inorganic. “I see how difficult it is to have a natural video do well if in the first three seconds you have to say these five things,” she says, relaying how those brand-side contacts describe the problem.

A separate breakdown, according to Emma, occurs between a brand’s social team and its PR agency. A creator’s organic post performs well, the brand’s social team responds, but that signal never reaches the PR agency that selects talent for paid campaigns. “They’re not the same people who are picking talent for campaigns,” she says, adding that brands that want organic-feeling partnerships would benefit from closing that internal loop.

Affiliate Income Is the Creator Economy’s Most Underestimated Revenue Stream

The revenue source people outside the industry consistently miss, in Emma’s view, is affiliate marketing. Platforms like ShopMy and LTK function as a financial backbone for a significant portion of creators. “The average person would underestimate how much they’re getting paid, how much they’re making from doing that,” she says.

Emma notes that affiliate marketing gives creators more freedom over what and when they post, so the content comes across as more organic, which she says produces higher click-through rates. “It is pushing creators a lot of the time away from more traditional campaigns,” she says, “because they can say and post whatever they want whenever they want.”

The competition for a creator’s attention is not just other brands. It is the freedom and income that affiliate revenue provides, according to Emma. A creator with a reliable affiliate income stream has both leverage and a stronger reason to be selective about paid campaigns. Her advice to creators: no deal is worth compromising the trust that makes organic links convert.

Creators Have Audience Intelligence Traditional Media Cannot Buy

Three to five years ahead, Emma expects creator-led brands to become a defining feature of consumer marketing. “There’ll be a lot more consumer-focused brands where they’re building products based on the need of their audience,” she says, “rather than these larger conglomerates just pumping out fast fashion.”

The pattern is already visible at the top of the market. BookTok creators hold leverage in production conversations because they have daily, high-volume feedback on what their communities want to watch. “I don’t see Warner Bros. being as in tune with Gen Z or Millennial women as somebody in that niche who’s talking about it on socials,” Emma says.

That audience intelligence is the underlying asset creators have been accumulating. Whether it goes into product lines, media production, or brand partnerships, the creators who understand what their community wants are better positioned than those measuring success in follower counts. 

“They have an opportunity to shape the way that our traditional media is creating content,” Emma concludes, “based on the people who are watching their stuff.”

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