Your CreatorIQ Connect 2026 Recap (HBBIP #156)

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It’s my privilege to grace your screen with what might just be my favorite edition of this blog series all year: my account of CreatorIQ Connect 2026.

If you’re reading this, there’s a decent chance that you’ve attended a previous CreatorIQ Connect, or even this year’s, in which case you understand why this magical day always brings me such excitement. Lucky man that I am, Tuesday, October 13th marked my mind-boggling sixth CreatorIQ Connect:

• Los Angeles, October 2023
• London, May 2024
• Los Angeles, October 2024
• London, May 2025
• Los Angeles, October 2025 (TWO-DAY EXTRAVAGANZA EDITION)

And now, saving the best for last, LA Part IV: Ebell Theater Boogaloo. I’ve been regularly marking my punchcard, so I’m pretty sure my next one is free.

Even for a seasoned Connect pro like me, this was a particularly exciting edition of our annual event. The stars were starrier, the programming more programmatic, the announcements more announcey. Accordingly, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover in this email.

On a day so jam-packed with great content, there are a million choose-your-own-adventures you could follow and still not wrap your head around everything. We’ve got full session replays and a lot more recap content coming, but for now, please accept this recap of my own experience at CreatorIQ Connect 2026, foregrounded with some of our key takeaways and points of messaging from the day.

Without further ado…

Part 1: Check-In

The day began, as these days always begin, at check-in. For the sixth time running, I got briefly pretty good at printing out name tags, affixing them to plastic badges, and packaging those badges with complementary event agendas and handing them to strangers while maintaining both eye contact and a smile. This is a skill that isn’t really transferable to anything but CreatorIQ Connect, but given how often I’ve attended these things, I guess there are worse uses of my time.

All images courtesy of Andrena Photography

This year my companion manning the gates was Cade Porter, CreatorIQ’s Business Development Team Lead. Cade is a nice young man, even if his impressions of public figures leave a good deal to be desired, and the Chiefs have had enough success for any sports fan’s lifetime, thank you very much. We passed the time quite amicably, at least until the line got so busy—down the block and around the corner!—that we had no time to talk as we printed badges and handed out agendas.

Tangled lanyards are the bane of my existence. So is the sun, which came out and peeked over the corner of the building to kindly roast a corner of my forehead. Hello, Mr. Sun! It wouldn’t be the last I saw of him.

Part 2: Morning Keynote

By virtue of being 6/6 on check-ins, I’m also 0/6 on attending keynotes. So alas, I missed our all-star lineup of executive speakers, who walked a rapt crowd through The Architecture of Influence: Intelligent Infrastructure for the Next Era of Creator Marketing. While I was only there in physical presence for the last five minutes or so, I was there in spirit throughout.

I’m also here right now to read some of the internal messaging documents about the keynote, so I can tell you about several exciting new things coming down the pipeline:

Q: Agentic Creator Marketing

That’s right: we’re hopping on the agentic bandwagon. Actually, as AI would say, we’re not just hopping on the bandwagon—we’re leading the charge!

Meet Q: a creator marketing agent built with Applied Creator Intelligence and powered by the Creator Graph®, CreatorIQ’s proprietary data infrastructure that draws from more than a decade of enterprise creator, content, and performance data. Q works within each organization’s existing permissions and approval rules, and is fully MCP compatible. Plug it in and watch it go! What works for James Bond now works for you.

MeasureIQ: Business Intelligence for Creator Outcomes

Launched on Tuesday—told you we had a lot to celebrate—MeasureIQ gives brands a single location in which to place to measure, analyze, and report on creator performance using their own definitions, metrics, and naming conventions. MeasureIQ’s analytics agent, which is the first deployment of our good friend Q, turns a plain-language question, such as a request for top-performing content or a stakeholder dashboard, into answers within seconds. These answers will come to you from across thousands of historical campaigns, so you can more thoroughly analyze what’s driving results and where to invest next.

Within MeasureIQ, brands can use the conversational agent, or slice performance metrics more than 37 ways across more than 32 KPIs (that’s a lot!). And if 37 ways across 32 KPIs isn’t exciting enough, we’ve another ‘PI’ for you: don’t fret, because API access and native integrations can connect MeasureIQ with existing reporting and marketing tools, so creator performance sits alongside all other data.

SafeIQ: Brand Suitability at Creator Scale

You know and love SafeIQ, but now it’s getting even better. Our new updates to SafeIQ can help reduce manual review from 40 minutes to about one minute per video, all while keeping human judgment and decision trails central. Additional web monitoring surfaces what’s been said about a given creator anywhere on the web, while improved heatmapping shows where risk concentrates by category and severity. What’s more, SafeIQ is already working overtime: in the past year alone, SafeIQ analyzed more than 2.3 billion frames of creator video.

I know you’re all clamoring for these goodies, and fortunately some of them are already available: MeasureIQ, including the first deployment of Q, and enhanced SafeIQ are up and running, while full Q capabilities are coming early 2027. Stay tuned.

As exciting as these product announcements are, we matched that energy with yet another banger—no coincidence, that’s just about when I showed up:

Part 3: YouTube Keynote

Our YouTube Keynote, Welcome to the YouTube Era of Creator Marketing, boasted a truly superstar lineup. Our cast included Mithun Sheth, Vice President of YouTube Go-To Market Operations, CreatorIQ’s very own Tim Sovay, Chief Partnerships Officer, and some guy called Kareem Rahma, star YouTube creator and originator of SubwayTakes.

Talk about making a splash! I was waving my sad obsolete MetroCard in solidarity, but given that I was sitting in the very last row of the mezzanine in a darkened auditorium, there’s a chance that Kareem didn’t see me.

What Kareem did do was offer heartfelt testimony about the creator economy from one of its foremost experts. That said, Kareem’s own hot take was probably more lukewarm, if not outright cold: the creator marketing industry has fully arrived. Apologies once again for the AI phrasing, but it’s not growing, or rising, or on the way—it’s here, definitively. Even in the four years that Kareem has been doing his thing, the industry has gotten more polished, with far more options for creators. There’s a reason, after all, why both Kareem and Mithun were quick to confirm that YouTube is the No. 1 streaming platform in the world (and why Tim was quick to confirm that YouTube is our No. 1 creator marketing partner).

Kareem spoke humorously, and movingly, about the ins and outs of his position as creator, shouting out all the people who support his various projects, and reinforcing that for all we celebrate individual creators, content creation is a true team effort. He celebrated recent collaborations with Toyota and the UPS, noting how each team-up allowed him to pursue his traditional themes and build content his way, rather than enforcing inorganic subject matter.

On a more tactical level, Kareem also offered interesting insights into day-to-day dynamics as a multi-stream content creator. For example, he described the different approaches he brings to content on different social platforms: while Instagram functions as short-form awareness marketing, and typically doesn’t feature a direct funnel or link to YouTube, Kareem’s longform content on YouTube is where he sees his true value being consolidated. Youtube functions as his intellectual property library, while other primarily advertise that library.

Mithun backed up Kareem, noting that more and more consumers are treating YouTube as television: a medium offering content they can truly sit with and digest over a longer period of time, treating this content as multi-step narratives that build emotional investment. Key to this phenomenon is the fact that these videos possess considerable longevity: roughly forty percent of videos’ lifetime views come more than a month after publishing dates, a stat that seemed to surprise Kareem as much as it surprised me.

But it wouldn’t be a CreatorIQ session without, you know, some aspect of CreatorIQ. Tim, Mithun, and Kareem all touched upon CreatorIQ’s collaboration with YouTube Creator Partnerships, explaining how our organizations have teamed up to deliver more effective audience insights for creators, making it easier for brands to find creators and creators to prove their worth. We also just had to tout our API integration, which has helped countless brands lucky enough to sign a contract with us vet over 1M verified YouTubers, while also sparking a 30% YoY jump in YouTube campaigns amid our platform.

My hot take? That’s pretty cool.

To close things out, Kareem, a former marketer, thanked everyone in the audience for believing in creators, and encouraged everyone to invest in what resonates with them, and keep pushing for what they believe in. As a current marketer, I appreciated that. So thank you, Kareem. Catch you on the subway sometime.

And then, for something completely different, I went to work at the…

Part 4: Product Gifting Suite

Chaos. Seventy-five minutes of staring into the maw of human greed beneath the pitiless sun. Basically the first scene of Saving Private Ryan but with lipgloss and magnesium gummies. The less I say about it, the better. So I’ll just clarify that I’m exaggerating for comedic purposes. Everyone was actually really lovely, and bringing them joy sparked joy for me in turn.

Having clarified that, between this and check-in, I’d spent a good amount of time (three hours and fifteen minutes, but who’s counting) on my feet in the sun. So lunch was a welcome break.

Part 5: Creator Speed Dating

Once I’d more or less successfully recharged, and was as chipper and friendly as I can ever be, I was back at it for a very full afternoon schedule.

The first stop on the tour was a cool session pairing off a diverse team of A-list creators with brands that were absolutely clamoring to work with them. Think something between Speed-Dating (you know, like the name), a Charity Auction, and a talent show. With everyone from family and lifestyle creator (specifically, overstimulated toddler-parent creator) Reza Khan, to racecar driver Alexandra Hainer, to lifestyle superstar Amanda Mccants, to one of the world’s top beauty creators (and longtime friend of CreatorIQ) Shima Katouzian, brands were positively flush with options.

I lingered for a while to watch the creator introduction videos and listen in on some of the multi-million deals being brokered right there in the CreatorIQ Studio, and then I dashed off to catch the next session…

Part 6: Prove It: Creator Marketing That Holds Up in the Boardroom

As a fellow who gets a fair amount of questions about creator marketing measurement, which really boil down to questions about proving the efficacy of creator marketing, this session was very welcome. Moderated by Jamie Gutfreund, Founder of Creator Vision, the conversation featured fascinating insights from Stephen Peteritas, VP of Social Media EMEA at SharkNinja, along with Julie Haleluk, Global Head of Growth at Amazon Shopping Video, as well as Tyler Vaught, Global Head of Creator Marketing at Edelman.

Stephen underscored how everything at SharkNinja boils down to performance, and the creative ways that the brand looks at search data, unpacking it in order to yield down-funnel insights. Julie applied a similar level of detail from her experience at Amazon, wonk-ing out about page view rates as a signal of how content resonates, alongside ways of gauging creator fit and relevance. Meanwhile, Tyler unpacked the secrets of branded search, giving a full rundown of Edelman’s metrics suites for gauging creators’ impacts, and walking through how the formula agencies differs from brands’ methods.

However, I’d be lying if I claimed that this session was about anything other than cheese pulls. Stephen did kind of steal the show when he discussed how the marketing push for SharkNinja’s bestselling airfryer was amplified when he discovered that the response rate for videos featuring time-lapse cheese melts was drastically higher than videos which featured an unfortunate dearth of molten dairy. Better living through data!

With my stomach rumbling, I hung in there and locked in for the next session…

Part 7: Cruising Into Culture: Rewriting the Rules of Creator Marketing

Featuring Keiko Mori, the Head of Creative Product Marketing and Ops, North America, at TikTok, alongside Billy Bohan Chinique, Vice President of Marketing and Digital Innovation at Virgin Voyages, this session was all about one of the most creative and ambitious marketing campaigns that I’ve encountered in my decade of covering the industry.

Basically, Virgin Voyages filled a boat with creators and watched what happened. But this wasn’t just a sailboat or something—oh no, far from it. This was one thousand creators on a full-blown cruise ship. The mind reels. Or shorts, if that’s your format of choice.

Keiko and Billy walked us through both sides of this blockbuster collaboration, explaining how it came to be and the marketing philosophies underpinning it. Because, as you might be able to imagine, it’s kind of hard to pitch a boardroom who might not know what creators even are on the proposition of paying for a thousand of them to take a cruise. (As Billy noted, some of those board members were under the impression that creators would be paying their own way. Uh, not exactly the case.)

Billy further spoke about the “delusional bravery” required for significant marketing ventures, and how that belief fuels his commitment to creators, and his treatment of creator marketing as an extension of Virgin Voyages’ brand identity. It’s that same bravery that resulted in astronomical ROAS for the cruise campaign, fulfilling Keiko and Billy’s shared proposition that creators aren’t a vessel to tell a brand’s predetermined story, but rather partners with which brands can mutually shape a story.

I was further inspired by Billy’s parting, one-line advice for all those seeking to improve their creator marketing: talk to the interns. Get outside your “geriatric millennial” algorithm (shots fired, directly at me). The most creative ideas come from those who are just starting out in the industry, and bringing new styles to the table. Young folks have a different, exciting idea of what social media means, so you should probably talk to them.

That spirit of discovery and experimentation was carried forward into the next session…

Part 8: Earned Podcast LIVE

Headlined by a pair of downright megawatt charisma-rators, e.l.f. Beauty’s Global Director of Influencer & Creator Marketing Micah Jesse Koffler and CreatorIQ’s Global Head of Strategic Services Joy Osinloye, a lucky audience was treated to the world’s first live recording of CreatorIQ’s Earned podcast.

In a chatty and extremely insightful session that truly covered so much ground, Micah described his experience moving from the more rigid world of food and beverage to wide-open inclusive world of e.l.f. Beauty, where the target consumer is literally everyone under the sun. As Micah unlearned the idea of guardrails, he expanded his worldview and conception of a brand audience, while also leveling up his experience as a creator marketer.

Running 135 campaigns per year, each one attached to a new product, is a daunting task, but Micah handles it all with grace and aplomb (and excellent eyebrows). Whether it’s becoming the first beauty sponsor in two decades 0f the Texas and Minnesota State Fairs or launching in Sephora Brazil, under Micah’s leadership e.l.f. Beauty’s creator program is constantly breaking new ground. A lot of that expansion stems from Micah’s golden ratio of balancing 60-70% tried-and-true brand fans with 30-40% new e.l.f.-heads, while never sacrificing affinity and audience ties for the sake of empty views.

It must be working, because how else would e.l.f. Beauty compel state fair attendees to line up for four hours for free pickle-flavored lip balm? That’s a stat that I might have doubted before Tuesday, but after seeing Micah’s dedication, and how people turned out for the Product Gifting Suite, I believe it.

Micah’s exhortation for brands to treat creators as cultural forces, rather than vendors, was echoed in a big way during the day’s final session…

Part 9: Jordan the Stallion’s Creator to Operator Pipeline: From Eyeglass Thrower to Chief Content Officer

Here’s a first: a creator who parlayed his social media expertise and millions of followers into a c-suite position. And this isn’t just some kind of cynical marketing gag (not that I know anything about those). It’s a legit gig, and the creator is absolutely crushing it—and, in the process, pushing the creator economy to new heights.

I’m referring, of course, to international superstar Jordan Howlett, aka Jordan the Stallion, of “come here” fame. Having risen from the fast food industry to the Time100 Creators list by the precocious and frankly insulting age of 29, Jordan has the rest of us playing catch-up. Thankfully, he was kind enough to let us in on a few of his secrets.

Alongside Lia Haberman, author of that other creator marketing newsletter, ICYMI, as well as Doug Landers, Cofounder of Greenlight Group, and Jack Gray, CEO of Blenders Eyewear, Jordan and friends discussed his role as CCO of Blenders Eyewear, a partnership he initially said no to. The teammates took the audience on a journey through this innovative position, and what jumped up to me was the intentionality behind it: this was so much more than just slapping Jordan’s face on some glasses and calling it a day. This was a full-fledged creative endeavor, one that’s yielding dividends both for Blenders and other creators, who I’m sure will follow the trail that Jordan’s blazed.

Jordan’s hard work and creativity, as well as his humor and intelligence, capped off the day on a high note, and I was ready to join nearly a thousand other happy attendees at…

Part 10: Cocktail Hour & Goodnight

A cool breeze amid the setting sun. Twilight in the garden. Specialty cocktails, tasty snacks. Laughing and learning. Friends old and new.

Admittedly, I’m writing these words (which are, still somewhat unbelievably, not AI) on not much sleep and 12 hours of nonstop activity, so my attempts at profundity might just sound kind of goopy, if not downright loopy. But as I gazed out at the crowd, full of smiling faces and freshly found wisdom, I remembered just how special CreatorIQ Connect truly is. We pulled it off, bigger and better than ever. I can’t wait for next year, when we’ll do it all again.

*All data, unless otherwise specified, stems from CreatorIQ's public-facing brand leaderboards. We will never share performance metrics from a customer's CreatorIQ profile, or any brand's private information.

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