Unilever Now Works With 300,000 Creators. The Real Prize May Be Experts

Unilever now works with close to 300,000 creators, up from around 10,000 two years ago — a thirtyfold expansion that shows how thoroughly the creator economy has become the engine room of modern marketing. Yet a first-person account from a podcast host who launched a show this year argues the next wave of valuable voices will not be the biggest followings, but the deepest expertise.

The author, writing in a syndicated opinion column, reports a counterintuitive result from their own studio. A clip of Irish Nigerian author Emma Dabiri explaining how the language of race was invented passed one million views on its own. Another of the most shared conversations featured Clare Rewcastle Brown, the British journalist who broke the 1MDB scandal in Malaysia from a spare room with a blog and a shortwave radio — reporting that helped put a prime minister in prison. Neither woman, the author notes, is trying to be famous, "and that seems to be the point."

The scale of the shift is measurable. Unilever's chief executive talks about building an "army of creators." Coca-Cola took 10,000 creators to the Paris Olympics. More than 200 million people worldwide now describe themselves as creators, and at Cannes Lions this June, the author writes, "you couldn't move along the Croisette without someone pushing a little furry mic into a stranger's face."

Why reach alone is losing its power?

The author's core claim is that abundance has destroyed differentiation. Andy Warhol promised everyone 15 minutes of fame; the feed made everyone a creator for 15 seconds, which "sounds wonderfully democratic until you try to tell any of them apart." A decade ago a human face talking to camera was the antidote to corporate advertising. Multiply it by hundreds of thousands, add AI presenters "who never age, never sleep, and never fluff a line," and the human face blurs into what the author calls its own kind of slop.

What cuts through, the argument goes, is "a story told by somebody who was actually there, which is the one thing a machine can't claim." That claim is easy to state and hard to verify — but audience data lends it some support.

What do the numbers show?

Trust in news fell to 37% this year, the lowest level the Reuters Institute has recorded since it began measuring in 2015. Against that backdrop, the author cites The Rest Is History, a podcast in which two middle-aged historians talk for an hour at a time, pulling around 30 million downloads and streams a month — with seven in 10 listeners under 40. "That's about as far from what we assumed Insta culture wanted as it's possible to get," the author writes.

The author calls this emerging market the "expert economy," in which experts become the new rock stars. The logic: when anyone can generate a convincing explanation of anything in seconds, the people who actually know become the most valuable voices. "Truth is starting to behave like a premium tier the way you pay Spotify to make the ads go away, and the only people who can supply it are the ones who've spent their lives checking."

The piece also predicts a comeback for the editor — a figure the industry spent 15 years trying to automate away. As audiences tire of "algorithmic overlords," people are returning to a human editor of choice, someone whose judgment they have learned to trust. Brands, the author argues, have spent fortunes renting audiences from influencers while very few have backed the judgment itself.

What should brands actually book?

The author offers four criteria, though offers no data on returns:

• Look for the obsession that came before the audience. Rewcastle Brown was writing about Borneo's disappearing rainforest long before anyone was listening.
• Ask for the whole hour. Judge a voice on their longest conversation, not their best clip.
• Footnotes are king. Sources, caveats, and the willingness to say "I don't know" are now among the strongest trust triggers in media.
• Book people who argue with your brief. "An expert who agrees with everything you said has stopped being an expert and become an influencer again."

The author also flags a structural trend: the best new voices are "double acts," pairing a 40-year specialist past the age when the industry usually stops calling, with a 25-year-old producer who can cut a clip that travels at meme speed. That division of labor, the argument runs, makes age irrelevant.

The piece closes on a promise — "the new expert economy might just be about to explode" — a hedge worth noting from a writer whose own thesis depends on it. Still, the underlying arithmetic is unforgiving: reach can be bought by the yard; belief is earned by the decade, and the people who have put the decades in are, in the author's words, mostly unbooked.