The Creator Economy has professionalized fast, but its talent management layer is still catching up. The gap between what creators need and what most reps deliver is where Eddie Pietzak has built his career.
Eddie, Senior Vice President of Digital at CESD Talent Agency, sat down with Net Influencer Senior Editor Ceci Carloni to discuss why the Creator Economy’s talent management problem has less to do with deal flow than with professional training. Eddie started his career in the Hollywood mailroom, worked his way through traditional representation, and spent six years as a talent manager before moving into creator-focused work. He now leads the digital department at CESD, one of the few agencies operating across both Hollywood and the Creator Economy simultaneously.
The conversation covered what Hollywood figured out about representing talent, why so many creator managers are failing their clients on execution, and what a real mentorship pipeline looks like in practice.
1. YouTube Is the #1 Streamer. The Industry Hasn’t Fully Absorbed That.
The Creator Economy isn’t niche anymore. The question is whether the professional infrastructure around it has caught up.
“The number one streamer is not Netflix, it’s not HBO, it’s actually YouTube,” Eddie said. “And that’s huge.”
The evidence keeps stacking up. This past weekend, a horror film driven by YouTuber Curry Barker posted a 30% box office increase in its second week, a near-impossible feat in the genre. Mainstream audiences are not just watching creator content. They are spending money on it.
The competitive signal from Hollywood was direct. When Netflix was considering a potential merger with Warner Bros., Eddie noted, it identified YouTube as its actual competitive threat. “If that’s viewed as competition as a model,” he said, “that shows that’s really the 500-pound gorilla in the room.”
Pop culture attention has shifted. The professional class serving creators is only beginning to reckon with what that means.
2. Hollywood’s ‘Always On’ Model Is What Creator Reps Are Missing
The complaint Eddie hears most consistently from creators who have worked with other shops: they cannot reach their manager.
“I can’t get a hold of my manager, my agent after 6,” he said, echoing what clients tell him when they arrive at CESD. “They don’t answer my emails on weekends.”
What Eddie carried from the traditional Hollywood model was the opposite of that. “What I learned coming from Hollywood is: you’re always on. If your client calls you at 6, you’re taking the call at 6.”
It is not a style preference. It is a business reality. In a competitive market, responsiveness is retention. The manager who does not answer loses the client to the one who does.
Eddie frames it plainly: “If we’re not moving fast with you, then we are failing you.”
3. Anyone Can Close a Deal. Protecting a Client Is Something Else.
The Creator Economy has no shortage of people calling themselves managers. What it’s short on is people who know how to execute.
“Any person could just close a deal,” Eddie said. “Get the right number and do whatever you can. But how do you execute it properly where your client is satisfied, protected, covered, and runs with a smooth process where there are no hiccups?”
That gap, he argues, comes from skipping the professional training that traditional Hollywood representation requires. Young managers who have not been through a formal mentorship system do not know what contract clauses to ask for, how to structure usage rights, or what a complete execution process looks like.
“That attention to detail is kind of key here,” Eddie said. “If you’re not focused, laser focused on the deal points in a contract or the execution of the campaign, then you’re just not doing well by your client, and you’re failing.”
The difference between closing a deal and protecting a client over time is training. Most creator managers never got it.
4. The Mentorship Pipeline That Made Hollywood Work
Eddie started in the mailroom. Literally.
“In my career, I started off in the traditional Hollywood model in the talent agency world, in the mailroom, actually delivering mail,” he said. It is the entry point at every major Hollywood agency. The logic is deliberate: you learn the entire system before you are trusted with a client.
That pipeline, from mailroom to assistant to junior agent to full representation, produces professionals who know what they are doing when it matters. CESD runs the same model for its digital department. Assistants work alongside agents, building rosters incrementally before managing accounts independently.
“The assistants work with their agent, helps raise them up, to the point where they’re hip pocketing their own clients,” Eddie said. Eventually, the junior agent stands on their own. “But more importantly, they’re trained. They’re not doing something by the seat of their pants.”
The Creator Economy, Eddie argues, needs to build this infrastructure. A 20-something-year-old manager who has never been trained does not know what they do not know. Their clients pay for that gap.
5. Representation Is Now Career Architecture, Not Just Brand Deals
A few years ago, getting a creator a sponsorship was the whole job. It is not anymore.
“Anyone could do a brand deal, of course, goes without saying,” Eddie said. “But are we working with someone where, is there a book in them? Should we find them a really good literary agent? Are we doing professionally produced films?”
The scope of what is now possible for creators has expanded faster than most reps have adjusted. Licensing deals, film acquisitions, podcast launches, speaking engagements. Eddie’s job, as he describes it, is to map the full range of what a creator could build and then sequence the path.
“It’s coming up with a creative aspect where to figure out with your talent, where do they want to go, and how you can kind of drive the car and design the map to get them there,” he said.
The conversation also involves managing what is realistic at each stage. A creator with 50,000 YouTube subscribers asking about a licensed product gets a direct answer: the current following does not yet make financial sense for a brand to invest in. But the conversation does not end there. He maps the trajectory from where they are to where that discussion becomes viable.
“I make suggestions, but you make decisions,” he said. That distinction, between guidance and control, is central to how he works.
6. Creators Who Won’t Diversify Are Planning to Stagnate
When a creator tells Eddie they just want to keep making their content and nothing else, he does not argue. He redirects.
“Great, cool, let’s keep doing that,” he said. “But then let’s think of ways to make it sustainable for you.”
The harder version of that conversation is with creators who are all-in on a single platform. A year ago, that platform might have been TikTok. “If your whole focus is just going all in on TikTok,” he said, “I would argue that’s a really poor strategy.”
Eddie’s framework is direct: “If you were not diversifying, you were not scaling. If you were not scaling, then you were stagnant. And if you’re stagnant, you may not be here in three years.”
Diversification, as he defines it, goes beyond platforms. Content format, revenue streams, team structure, where time and energy go. The creators building durable careers are spreading across all of it.
7. The Star System for Creators Is Being Built Right Now
MrBeast has a Netflix show. Curry Barker’s “Obsession” was acquired by Focus Features. Mainstream celebrities show up on creator-led shows to promote their projects. The convergence is happening, but it is not happening automatically.
“I think we’re kind of getting there,” Eddie said about the emergence of a creator star system. “I think when you have folks like MrBeast, where they have their own TV shows and products and whatnot, I think that’s the start of the star system.”
The professional class needs to help drive that legitimization, not just observe it. Eddie sees the job as getting creators into the rooms that signal cultural parity: the Met Gala, major sporting events, awards shows, and the same circuit musicians and actors work.
“It’s treating them the same as we do musicians and artists and actors and just having them part of that category, part of the conversation,” he said.
Hollywood took decades to formalize its own star system. The Creator Economy is compressing that timeline. The agents and managers who bring the training and discipline of traditional representation to creators who have never had access to it are positioned to define how that system gets built.
Conclusion
The Creator Economy’s talent management problem is not structural. The deal volume is there, the brands are spending, and the platforms have scale. What is missing is professional depth, the kind that gets built through training, mentorship, and the hard work of representation done properly over time.
Eddie spent years in a system that required that depth before it gave you responsibility. He thinks the Creator Economy is ready to build something similar.
“Naturally came in the Hollywood model too, way back in the early days of that,” he said. “So that’s what I’m really excited about, to see this kind of formalize and really solidify as a business.”
The question is how many creators cycle through underprepared managers before that happens.
Listen to the full conversation on “The Big Three” podcast.
Nii A. Ahene is the founder and managing director of Net Influencer, a website dedicated to offering insights into the influencer marketing industry. Together with its newsletter, Influencer Weekly, Net Influencer provides news, commentary, and analysis of the events shaping the creator and influencer marketing space. Through interviews with startups, influencers, brands, and platforms, Nii and his team explore how influencer marketing is being effectively used to benefit businesses and personal brands alike.
The Creator Economy has professionalized fast, but its talent management layer is still catching up. The gap between what creators need and what most reps deliver is where Eddie Pietzak has built his career.
Eddie, Senior Vice President of Digital at CESD Talent Agency, sat down with Net Influencer Senior Editor Ceci Carloni to discuss why the Creator Economy’s talent management problem has less to do with deal flow than with professional training. Eddie started his career in the Hollywood mailroom, worked his way through traditional representation, and spent six years as a talent manager before moving into creator-focused work. He now leads the digital department at CESD, one of the few agencies operating across both Hollywood and the Creator Economy simultaneously.
The conversation covered what Hollywood figured out about representing talent, why so many creator managers are failing their clients on execution, and what a real mentorship pipeline looks like in practice.
1. YouTube Is the #1 Streamer. The Industry Hasn’t Fully Absorbed That.
The Creator Economy isn’t niche anymore. The question is whether the professional infrastructure around it has caught up.
“The number one streamer is not Netflix, it’s not HBO, it’s actually YouTube,” Eddie said. “And that’s huge.”
The evidence keeps stacking up. This past weekend, a horror film driven by YouTuber Curry Barker posted a 30% box office increase in its second week, a near-impossible feat in the genre. Mainstream audiences are not just watching creator content. They are spending money on it.
The competitive signal from Hollywood was direct. When Netflix was considering a potential merger with Warner Bros., Eddie noted, it identified YouTube as its actual competitive threat. “If that’s viewed as competition as a model,” he said, “that shows that’s really the 500-pound gorilla in the room.”
Pop culture attention has shifted. The professional class serving creators is only beginning to reckon with what that means.
2. Hollywood’s ‘Always On’ Model Is What Creator Reps Are Missing
The complaint Eddie hears most consistently from creators who have worked with other shops: they cannot reach their manager.
“I can’t get a hold of my manager, my agent after 6,” he said, echoing what clients tell him when they arrive at CESD. “They don’t answer my emails on weekends.”
What Eddie carried from the traditional Hollywood model was the opposite of that. “What I learned coming from Hollywood is: you’re always on. If your client calls you at 6, you’re taking the call at 6.”
It is not a style preference. It is a business reality. In a competitive market, responsiveness is retention. The manager who does not answer loses the client to the one who does.
Eddie frames it plainly: “If we’re not moving fast with you, then we are failing you.”
3. Anyone Can Close a Deal. Protecting a Client Is Something Else.
The Creator Economy has no shortage of people calling themselves managers. What it’s short on is people who know how to execute.
“Any person could just close a deal,” Eddie said. “Get the right number and do whatever you can. But how do you execute it properly where your client is satisfied, protected, covered, and runs with a smooth process where there are no hiccups?”
That gap, he argues, comes from skipping the professional training that traditional Hollywood representation requires. Young managers who have not been through a formal mentorship system do not know what contract clauses to ask for, how to structure usage rights, or what a complete execution process looks like.
“That attention to detail is kind of key here,” Eddie said. “If you’re not focused, laser focused on the deal points in a contract or the execution of the campaign, then you’re just not doing well by your client, and you’re failing.”
The difference between closing a deal and protecting a client over time is training. Most creator managers never got it.
4. The Mentorship Pipeline That Made Hollywood Work
Eddie started in the mailroom. Literally.
“In my career, I started off in the traditional Hollywood model in the talent agency world, in the mailroom, actually delivering mail,” he said. It is the entry point at every major Hollywood agency. The logic is deliberate: you learn the entire system before you are trusted with a client.
That pipeline, from mailroom to assistant to junior agent to full representation, produces professionals who know what they are doing when it matters. CESD runs the same model for its digital department. Assistants work alongside agents, building rosters incrementally before managing accounts independently.
“The assistants work with their agent, helps raise them up, to the point where they’re hip pocketing their own clients,” Eddie said. Eventually, the junior agent stands on their own. “But more importantly, they’re trained. They’re not doing something by the seat of their pants.”
The Creator Economy, Eddie argues, needs to build this infrastructure. A 20-something-year-old manager who has never been trained does not know what they do not know. Their clients pay for that gap.
5. Representation Is Now Career Architecture, Not Just Brand Deals
A few years ago, getting a creator a sponsorship was the whole job. It is not anymore.
“Anyone could do a brand deal, of course, goes without saying,” Eddie said. “But are we working with someone where, is there a book in them? Should we find them a really good literary agent? Are we doing professionally produced films?”
The scope of what is now possible for creators has expanded faster than most reps have adjusted. Licensing deals, film acquisitions, podcast launches, speaking engagements. Eddie’s job, as he describes it, is to map the full range of what a creator could build and then sequence the path.
“It’s coming up with a creative aspect where to figure out with your talent, where do they want to go, and how you can kind of drive the car and design the map to get them there,” he said.
The conversation also involves managing what is realistic at each stage. A creator with 50,000 YouTube subscribers asking about a licensed product gets a direct answer: the current following does not yet make financial sense for a brand to invest in. But the conversation does not end there. He maps the trajectory from where they are to where that discussion becomes viable.
“I make suggestions, but you make decisions,” he said. That distinction, between guidance and control, is central to how he works.
6. Creators Who Won’t Diversify Are Planning to Stagnate
When a creator tells Eddie they just want to keep making their content and nothing else, he does not argue. He redirects.
“Great, cool, let’s keep doing that,” he said. “But then let’s think of ways to make it sustainable for you.”
The harder version of that conversation is with creators who are all-in on a single platform. A year ago, that platform might have been TikTok. “If your whole focus is just going all in on TikTok,” he said, “I would argue that’s a really poor strategy.”
Eddie’s framework is direct: “If you were not diversifying, you were not scaling. If you were not scaling, then you were stagnant. And if you’re stagnant, you may not be here in three years.”
Diversification, as he defines it, goes beyond platforms. Content format, revenue streams, team structure, where time and energy go. The creators building durable careers are spreading across all of it.
7. The Star System for Creators Is Being Built Right Now
MrBeast has a Netflix show. Curry Barker’s “Obsession” was acquired by Focus Features. Mainstream celebrities show up on creator-led shows to promote their projects. The convergence is happening, but it is not happening automatically.
“I think we’re kind of getting there,” Eddie said about the emergence of a creator star system. “I think when you have folks like MrBeast, where they have their own TV shows and products and whatnot, I think that’s the start of the star system.”
The professional class needs to help drive that legitimization, not just observe it. Eddie sees the job as getting creators into the rooms that signal cultural parity: the Met Gala, major sporting events, awards shows, and the same circuit musicians and actors work.
“It’s treating them the same as we do musicians and artists and actors and just having them part of that category, part of the conversation,” he said.
Hollywood took decades to formalize its own star system. The Creator Economy is compressing that timeline. The agents and managers who bring the training and discipline of traditional representation to creators who have never had access to it are positioned to define how that system gets built.
Conclusion
The Creator Economy’s talent management problem is not structural. The deal volume is there, the brands are spending, and the platforms have scale. What is missing is professional depth, the kind that gets built through training, mentorship, and the hard work of representation done properly over time.
Eddie spent years in a system that required that depth before it gave you responsibility. He thinks the Creator Economy is ready to build something similar.
“Naturally came in the Hollywood model too, way back in the early days of that,” he said. “So that’s what I’m really excited about, to see this kind of formalize and really solidify as a business.”
The question is how many creators cycle through underprepared managers before that happens.
Listen to the full conversation on “The Big Three” podcast.
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