For most Influencer Marketing agencies, every inbound brand inquiry is an opportunity. For Anthony Cappocchi, founder and CEO of Pretty Good Agents, half of them are reasons to say no.

Pretty Good Agents, a Seattle-area creator management and brand partnership agency that Anthony founded in 2017, represents more than 100 content creators. The agency got there largely by accident. After a decade managing retail operations at Zumiez, a skateboarding chain, Anthony was laid off from a music software company and started managing brand deals for a YouTube guitarist who did not want to negotiate his own contracts.

“He would be like, ‘Here are these emails from these brands. I don’t want to talk to them. You negotiate them, I’ll give you a cut,’” Anthony recalls. “There would be deals where he wouldn’t take them, and so I would take those deals and bring them to other people. That’s kind of how the agency started. It was by accident.”

Nine years later, Pretty Good Agents is targeting its first eight-figure year, according to Anthony. The roster leans heavily into music, outdoor, and travel creators, with expansion planned into engineering, automotive, and political content. Anthony’s thesis for getting there is less about growth than about discipline: fewer clients, faster decisions, and a willingness to turn away business that does not fit.

“A fast no is just as good as a yes,” he says.

The Campaigns That Actually Bring Brands Back

Pretty Good Agents measures campaign success by a metric that has nothing to do with impressions or click-through rates: whether the brand comes back.

“I don’t really care what they make or how the campaign goes,” Anthony says. “For us, it’s a success if we see them back again. It means we charged enough to keep the creator happy and we charged enough to make the brand money.”

That calculus is partly practical. As Anthony notes, brands rarely share sales data with agencies, making conventional ROI attribution nearly impossible. A creator integration might generate ten times what the brand paid, but the agency will never know. “They don’t share that because we would use it against them,” he says. “If I could see your numbers, I’d be like, ‘Hey, we generated you guys ten times what you paid us, so we’re gonna triple our fee.’”

According to Anthony, the clearest signal of whether a campaign worked shows up in renewal behavior. And, in his experience, the strongest predictor of renewal is how much creative latitude the brand gave the creator. “We see the best results when brands let the creator do their thing,” he says. “If a channel’s tone is silly or musical or whatever, let them do something adjacent with their audience that makes sense with the people who are going to see this.”

He points to a campaign for OneWheel in which a creator spontaneously rode his board to a coffee shop during the ad read, balancing drinks on the return trip. “Not something they asked him to do,” Anthony says. “People were blown away by it.” The brand returned.

Shorter Briefs, Bigger Licensing Asks

Brand behavior has shifted in two directions since Anthony started the agency: more disciplined going in, more flexible on creative going out.

Early in his career, brands negotiating creator deals focused primarily on follower counts and basic engagement. Today, they arrive with detailed KPI frameworks, cost-per-acquisition targets, and goals spanning purchases, data capture, and app downloads. Anthony says he has watched brands grow considerably more precise about what they want to measure, then, in the last year or two, loosen up creatively as their confidence in the format has grown.

“The briefs are getting smaller, which I love,” he says, adding that the brands that once delivered 20-plus-page creative briefs are now sending 3 or 4 pages with general tone direction. “A lot of brands are very cool, and the approvals have been pretty easy for the most part.”

Where brands have grown significantly more demanding is in licensing. Usage rights, whitelisting, and content reuse clauses now appear in nearly every contract the agency touches. “I see more licensing and reuse clauses in deals now than I have in my entire career,” Anthony says. “Brands are relying heavily on UGC content because it performs better for them. They want that video of you out in the forest interacting with their products.”

Extracting compensation for that usage has become one of the agency’s primary points of negotiation in contracts. “You can get 25 to 30% more budget for a 60-day usage license,” he says. “The brands will pay for it.” 

Exclusivity clauses, particularly provisions that would tie a creator to a single agency for an extended term, are the other line Anthony consistently pushes back on.

Reliability Beats Reach

Anthony’s creator selection process starts with data, but ultimately turns on character. Initial outreach is driven by audience analytics: YouTube allows granular demographic data, and the agency uses it to identify channels worth approaching. Whether he keeps someone on the roster is a different calculation entirely.

“The retention is all about people,” he says. “Whether or not we decide to keep this channel is almost 100% about them.”

His argument is direct: a creator with millions of subscribers who ignores emails or walks away from deals at the last minute is worth less to an agency than a smaller creator who delivers on time and negotiates in good faith. “You could be PewDiePie,” Anthony says. “If I can’t get you to turn in a read, it doesn’t matter.” 

Agencies that hold onto uncooperative talent, he argues, lose credibility with brands when deals fall apart. “Now I have to go back to the brand and explain why I have no control over this creator. It just seems backwards.”

What the agency actively looks for, he says, are creators who are hungry and collaborative, the ones who say yes to deals, hold reasonable rates, and turn in work on time. “That’s music to my ears,” Anthony says. “Put me to work.”

AI Is Coming for Creator Rates

Anthony is skeptical of AI-generated influencers as commercial replacements for human creators. He is considerably less skeptical about AI’s potential to put downward pressure on creator earnings.

“I worry it’s going to be a race to the bottom for content creators,” he says. “Whereas this channel needs $5,000 for an ad read because they have children and overhead, this AI content creator is not real, and a dude with a computer has $700 a month in overhead.”

From the inbound side, he is already seeing the shift. AI product companies have flooded the brand pipeline in recent months, joining what he describes as an earlier wave of portable battery brands chasing outdoor and lifestyle creators. The pattern is consistent: a new product category enters the market, brands rush to influencer channels simultaneously, and rates compress as the supply of willing creators struggles to keep up with demand.

The particular irony, he notes, is that many music creators on his roster refuse to promote AI brands. “You’re not going to promote your replacement,” Anthony says. He sees broader consumer backlash as a likely check on fully synthetic influencers over time, alongside potential regulatory intervention. 

His longer-range prediction is a pendulum effect: AI adoption peaks, audiences grow fatigued by synthetic content, and demand for human creators rebounds. “Humans are going to be so starved for something raw and organic,” he says. “They’re going to want that human experience again.”

Fewer Creators, One Athlete

Pretty Good Agents’ growth strategy for 2026 runs counter to the conventional playbook of scaling a creator roster. Anthony wants fewer clients.

“I’d love to have 25 dedicated talents, all firing on all cylinders, busy as hell all the time,” he says. “As it is now, we manage a ton of creators, and most of them aren’t busy. There just isn’t enough money to go around.” 

A more concentrated roster, in his view, allows the agency to focus effort on creators who can support premium deal flow rather than spreading across a long tail of smaller placements.

The longer-term ambition is a different category of client entirely. Anthony wants to sign an athlete, specifically a young player in golf, hockey, or basketball who could develop into a crossover brand property. “I want to sign an athlete in the next two to three years,” he says. “I want to have one person where I’m like, ‘I think this guy’s the next Michael Jordan.’” 

He is already tracking a local basketball player breaking school records and has been in contact with the player’s father about representation.

Discipline as a Growth Strategy

Anthony is not trying to build the biggest agency in creator marketing. After nine years and seven figures in annual revenue, he believes his competitive edge is built on restraint: walking away from brands that are not a fit, dropping creators who will not perform, and negotiating contracts that protect long-term trust over short-term commission.

“Managing and mitigating loss, not doing stupid things that are going to hurt the reputation we built over a decade, that’s what it’s about,” he says. 

For brands operating in the Creator Economy in 2026, his advice is simpler: give creators room to work, price for usage, and stop mistaking data complexity for insight. “You can kind of drown yourself in the data,” Anthony says, “and at some point you learn so much that you go back all the way around to knowing nothing at all.”

The few things that actually matter, in his view, remain straightforward. “Are you making your money back? Are people responding to the advertisement? Is the brand coming back?” he says. “That’s it.”

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