In marketing circles, the word “influencer” has a reputation problem. Not just with consumers, but with the people building the courses meant to prepare the next generation of brand professionals for the space. Dr. Jacob Hiler has been in both roles, and his verdict on the word is clear.

“Influencers are just the unfortunate byproduct,” he says. “Most people tend to want to be content creators, not influencers.”

Jacob is the Fox Associate Professor of Marketing and Executive Director of the Center for Consumer Research and Analytics at Ohio University. The CRA operates like a professional market research agency, where Jacob trains students to conduct real-world projects for client companies, including Xbox, Red Bull, and Nivea. That structure reflects his own formation: before pursuing his PhD, he spent years on the industry side, working with clients including Disney, Coca-Cola, and Miller Beer. Twenty years of consumer research experience, spanning both practitioner and academic roles, underpin everything he teaches. He is also the architect of the university’s “Influencer Marketing” course, part of a still-emerging wave of higher-education offerings in the U.S. built around the full creator journey.

Jacob’s vantage point is rare. Before designing the curriculum, he spent years as a content creator himself, recording nearly 200 podcast episodes and later experimenting with YouTube and Twitch streaming specifically to understand what the job actually demands. That firsthand experience now shapes a classroom he describes as a mirror for everything brands still misunderstand about the Creator Economy.

“I always say, sometimes I’m gonna keep it too real,” he says. “Because I don’t want anyone to take my class and go, ‘Oh, this is an easy career path.’”

The Marketing Curriculum That Forgot to Update Itself

The course exists, in part, because of a conversation Jacob had with his former department chair. She had been speaking with marketing professionals and arrived at a dispiriting conclusion: the marketing curriculum had barely changed since she was in college.

“It was still the same kind of four Ps (product, price, place, promotion), marketing principles, consumer behavior, consumer decision-making model curriculum,” Jacob says. “It was still kind of playing by the same playbook.”

The problem was not that the fundamentals were wrong. It was that the toolkit had expanded, and the syllabus had not. When Jacob won a university professor award decided entirely by student vote, it came with one unexpected benefit: the freedom to design a new course from scratch. The result, originally titled “Content Creation and Influencer Marketing” and now simply “Influencer Marketing,” was built with a specific constraint in mind.

“I wanted to create something that wasn’t just some one-off temporary type of course that was going to be a topic of whatever cultural zeitgeist is going on in the day,” he says.

The class is structured around a semester-long project. Students first define a channel identity and audience, then produce content, and finally build a media kit and business plan. About 15% to 25% of his students want to become creators; the rest are there because they want to work on the brand side. Jacob requires both groups to actually make content, and his reasoning is strategic.

“I thought it really important for them to have to go through all that themselves so that they can gain an appreciation and a value for what the content creator is actually bringing to your brand,” he says.

The Authenticity Catch-22 That Brands Created

Jacob is precise about where the economics of the Creator Economy have placed creators in an uncomfortable bind. Ad revenue share on YouTube, once roughly $1,000 per 100,000 views when he tested the platform, has fallen to around $400-500 for the same threshold. The gap is pushing creators toward active brand relationships as a matter of financial survival.

“Content creators who want to do this professionally have to learn how to navigate the marketing world and the business world,” Jacob says. “The ones that are able to learn and master those skills are the ones that are going to be financially successful in the future.”

According to Jacob, the quality that makes creators valuable to brands is authenticity: the sense that they are a peer rather than a spokesperson. But the more sponsored content a creator takes, the more that quality erodes. He frames it as an unavoidable “catch-22.”

“The more sponsored content you take, the inherently less authentic you become,” he says. “Are you stifling your growth long-term by cashing out too early or too much at a certain point?”

He describes what he calls access reviewing, a dynamic borrowed from journalism in which creators who critique products too harshly simply stop receiving review units. The brand never issues a directive. The threat is structural.

“They don’t tell you you can’t say bad things about their product,” Jacob says. “But if you’re a little too critical, are they going to send you that package the next time? Probably not.”

Why Micro-Influencers Are Not a Safe Bet

One of the most persistent myths Jacob encounters in the classroom is the idea that micro-influencer campaigns are essentially low risk. Smaller spend, smaller exposure, smaller downside. His research suggests the framing is wrong in an important direction.

Nano and micro-influencers frequently produce higher return on investment than their macro counterparts, but they require more intensive management. Brands have to find them, qualify them, and sustain multiple relationships instead of one. The temptation, Jacob argues, is to treat those creators as delivery vehicles rather than as a resource brands are badly underusing.

“Not just looking at them as a tool for delivering a message, but looking at them like a creative partner who can help you refine that product to be the best version of that product,” he says. “They know that audience way better than you probably ever will.”

He draws an analogy to the research behind the Got Milk campaign. Its success came not from promoting calcium or bone strength, but from focus groups revealing the actual driver of milk purchases: fear of running out. The insight came from listening. Jacob argues the same principle applies to creator partnerships.

“Brands are not actively building a relationship with those micro-influencers,” he says. “They’re your customer too. Get them involved in the creative process.”

The question he argues brands almost never ask is what the creator’s audience actually thought, not as a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, but as raw material for product development. That shift, from transactional to collaborative, is the gap the course is designed to close.

Photo source: Ohio University
Credits: Emily Matthews

The Double Whammy No Marketing Textbook Covers

Jacob’s time as a content creator gave him something no research paper could: a direct experience of what he calls the mental health double whammy that ends most creator careers before they reach maturity.

“Not only is that just your sense of success from a validation standpoint, but it’s tied to your financial well-being,” he says. “The mental toll and the mental health impact that can have on someone when your feelings of success and self-validation get taken away, and it’s out of your control, now your financial well-being is subject to that same whim. It’s a double whammy.”

For creators, a bad stretch is not just a bad month. It is a simultaneous loss of income and identity validation, arriving together, without warning. Jacob references a concept from a creator named Aprilynne Alter: that success in any endeavor depends on how a person handles the dip.

“It’s easy to ride the roller coaster up,” Jacob says. “It’s not easy to keep pushing forward after a few months of, well, the algorithm doesn’t like my content now for some reason.”

His course uses that reality as a corrective to the most dangerous idea circulating among Gen Z and Gen Alpha: that being a content creator is the most desirable job precisely because it looks frictionless from the outside.

“It’s actually a lot harder than most other jobs because you have to be able to do so many different things,” he says.

Why AI Keeps Failing on YouTube and TikTok

Jacob’s read on AI in the Creator Economy is clinical. Consumer resistance to AI-generated content is not primarily an aesthetic objection. It is a relational one.

“It isn’t authentic,” he says. “It’s literally the opposite of what someone wants to connect with.”

He points to the reason someone streaming from their bedroom routinely outperforms a hundred-million-dollar Netflix production. Audiences are evaluating relatability rather than production quality. The scale and polish of traditional media actively work against the parasocial connection that makes creators valuable in the first place.

“People crave authenticity. They don’t crave perfection. They don’t crave someone who is going to say the lines perfectly every time,” Jacob says.

He stops short of dismissing AI entirely, noting that music generation has improved dramatically and that consumer behavior is not fixed. But in the YouTube and TikTok context, the rejection is consistent. When AI attempts to simulate human connection, audiences detect and reject it. When it leans into visible absurdity, the response is occasionally different.

“When it’s just someone trying to fake being a real person, people reject it,” he says.

The Circular Economy Jacob Is Building Toward

Jacob’s ten-year vision for the Creator Economy is not built around better attribution software or larger platforms. It is built around a structural change in the relationship between brands, creators, and audiences.

The current model, as he describes it, runs in one direction. Brand pays creator. Creator delivers message. Audience receives it, or skips it. Each party extracts what it can and moves on. The version Jacob wants to replace it with is circular: brands gain consumer intelligence, creators maintain credibility while channeling that intelligence back, and audiences gain an actual voice in the process.

“The creator can keep the authenticity with their audience because they’re not just going, ‘I’m not gonna say anything bad about this brand,'” he says. “They’re saying, ‘let’s help this brand fix this thing.’ And they’re giving their audience a voice to the brand, which is a positive thing.”

His course is a bet that the next generation of brand-side professionals, trained to understand what the creator role actually costs and actually delivers, will move the industry toward that model. It depends, in his view, on whether brands are willing to stop treating the relationship as a transaction.

“I hope that the relationship between creators and brands will become more trusting and mutually beneficial,” Jacob says. “Right now, it feels very, and I don’t want to say one-sided, but the content creator needs money, they take the brand’s money, they say the thing the brand wants, and then they move on with their life.”

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