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- Creator Cloud Cast | 2026 - 9
Creator Cloud Cast | 2026 - 9
Insights, success, and what's ahead in the Creator Economy!
Justine Wheeler
September 24, 2026
In partnership with
powered by Nfinity Influencer, Webfluential and theSalt
September is the month Q4 gets won or lost.
By the time the Black Friday emails are flying and every brand is shouting “SALE”, the real advantage has already been built: the content, creator relationships, customer proof, media signals and measurement systems that give campaigns somewhere to go.
This edition is all about getting ahead before attention gets expensive.
We’re looking at why everyday South Africans could outperform polished influencer campaigns this retail season, what Rhode’s billion-dollar exit teaches us about creator-led brands, why Meta now rewards creative volume, how Gen Alpha is influencing the family cart, and what an 11x ROAS can hide when marketers measure the wrong thing.
Q4 is coming. Let’s get into it.
Want more juicy insights, campaign news and creator economy updates? Opt in to our marketing emails below and choose the updates that matter most to you.
🏆 BROADCAST
📰 Black Friday, festive gifting, December travel and year-end spending create the biggest concentration of discretionary retail spend on the South African calendar. But the old playbook of placing a few polished posts with macro-influencers is increasingly mismatched with how people actually make buying decisions. The opportunity is scale through verified, everyday customers: more voices, more relatable use cases, more social proof and more content that can be distributed throughout the buying journey.
The catch? You cannot build that infrastructure on 20 November. September is the window to recruit communities, seed products, generate content, establish paid-media winners and prepare enough creative variation to survive the most competitive quarter of the year.
📢 Black Friday is an execution date, not a planning date. The brands that build their advocacy engine now will have more proof, content and creative volume when everyone else starts shouting.
📰 For years, Meta advertising was largely an audience game: build the right lookalike, stack the right interests and keep refining who saw the ad. That model is changing. Meta’s systems are increasingly doing the audience work themselves, which shifts the marketer’s competitive advantage towards creative volume and variation. Instead of endlessly slicing audiences, brands need enough genuinely different hooks, messages, formats and pieces of content for the algorithm to learn what resonates.
That makes creator and customer content particularly valuable heading into Q4. One polished campaign asset is no longer enough to feed an increasingly automated media system.
📢 The targeting advantage is shrinking. The creative advantage is growing.
📰 Rhode launched with three products in 2022. By the time e.l.f. Beauty agreed to acquire it for up to $1 billion, it had just ten. No sprawling range. No rush into retail. No “something for everyone” strategy.
Instead, Rhode paired a tightly controlled product line with Hailey Bieber’s enormous cultural distribution, direct customer relationships and a recognisable brand world. By the quarter ending June 2026, Rhode was generating roughly $160 million in revenue, accounting for around a third of e.l.f. Beauty’s quarterly revenue.
📢 Creator-led brands do not need hundreds of products to scale. Distribution, cultural relevance and a product people genuinely want can beat range for range’s sake.
📰 Personal finance is intimidating. That makes generic advertising a particularly difficult tool for moving someone from interest to action. This campaign used one real customer story to do three jobs across the funnel. Instead of treating creator content as an awareness-only output, the story was built to work progressively through consideration and conversion too, helping explain the service, reduce uncertainty and give prospective customers a relatable proof point.
📢 One good customer story should not disappear after one post. Build trust assets that can work across the entire funnel.
📰 When user growth slows, platforms start looking beyond the feed. TikTok is pushing creator videos built around Disney IP into Disney+, while Pinterest is experimenting with a shoppable home-makeover programme on Roku, complete with QR codes linked to purchasable boards. Social, streaming, commerce and connected TV are beginning to blur into one distribution ecosystem.
📢 Stop thinking in terms of “social content” versus “TV content”. The same idea increasingly needs to travel across both.
📰 BetterHelp discovered one of its most successful social formats almost accidentally: a TikTok comment. One comment generated more than 300,000 likes. Instead of treating it as a lucky moment, the team built a system around it. BetterHelp now comments on roughly 200–350 posts each month, with 10–20 regularly exceeding 10,000 likes. Daily follower growth has reportedly increased around a hundredfold since the strategy became consistent. The rule is important: only enter conversations where the brand has a credible reason to speak, and do not turn the comment into a sales pitch.
📢 Sometimes the best brand content is not another post. It is knowing exactly when to join the conversation.
🎭 THE CAST
📰 Meet @melissa_nortey, the Ghanaian dancer, actress and painter whose career shows what modern African creator influence can look like when digital reach meets genuine creative talent. Melissa built her profile through DWP Academy in Accra, pairing sharp choreography and magnetic on-camera presence with an audience of around 1.8 million on TikTok and more than 240,000 on Instagram. But her influence extends well beyond social. She stepped into her first lead film role as Naa Dode Akabi in Queen of Akra, portraying the first female ruler of the Ga kingdom and moving from creator into mainstream cultural storytelling. That crossover matters for brands.
The next generation of creator partnerships is not simply about finding someone with followers. It is about identifying multi-dimensional talent whose credibility can move between social, entertainment, culture and brand storytelling.
📢 The creator economy is producing more than influencers. It is producing the next generation of African cultural talent.
🔮 FORECAST
📰 Gen Alpha may not earn the household income, but they are increasingly influencing where it goes. Research suggests 48% of parental spending across the US and UK is directly influenced by children. Back-to-school shoppers plan to spend an average of $922, while 40% of parents already allow children to add products directly to digital carts. AI is entering the family purchase journey too, with 73% expecting to use it for product research, price comparison or budgeting.
🥜 In a nutshell: Gen Alpha is moving from audience to active participant in the household buying journey.
📰 Women’s sport is becoming one of the most interesting growth spaces for brands. Meta reports that the category is growing significantly faster than men’s sport, while women’s basketball and football are generating enormous volumes of platform attention. Athletes are becoming powerful commercial creators too: 76% of sports fans surveyed said athlete content influences what they buy.
🥜 In a nutshell: Women’s sport is not an emerging niche waiting to happen. The audience and influence are already here.
📰 Creators built the social era on TikTok and Instagram. AI search may push them somewhere else. Answer engines favour sources they can crawl, understand and cite. YouTube and Reddit are already powerful sources of AI citations, while Instagram remains much harder for models to interpret.
For creators and brands, that changes the value equation. Content needs to do more than earn engagement inside a feed. It increasingly needs to be useful, searchable and specific enough to become a reference elsewhere.
🥜 The next creator distribution strategy may need to answer two questions: Will people engage with this? And can AI find it?
☁️ OVERCAST
Consumers are not necessarily rejecting AI in advertising. They are drawing a line around what AI should be allowed to replace.
Most Americans appear relatively comfortable with AI being used behind the scenes for tasks such as brainstorming and drafting, and just over half accept its use in producing final advertising content. But attitudes shift dramatically when AI starts impersonating humanity.
Nearly two-thirds object to businesses creating an artificial version of a person’s face or voice, even with disclosure. Younger consumers appear particularly sceptical, with 66% of under-30s viewing AI-generated advertising negatively overall and 73% rejecting synthetic people or voices. That distinction should matter to brands rushing towards cheaper production.
AI can accelerate an idea, resize creative, generate variations and eliminate repetitive production work. But using efficiency to replace the very human signals audiences use to judge authenticity can make the saving expensive.
The irony is hard to miss: as synthetic content gets easier to make, recognisably human content becomes more valuable.
💡 Takeaway: Use AI to accelerate creativity, not counterfeit humanity. Efficiency is useful. Trust is irreplaceable.
An 11x ROAS sounds like the kind of result you put in a slide deck with an aggressively large green arrow. There was just one problem. The account was losing money.
Once returns, VAT, product costs and fulfilment were removed from what the advertising platform called “conversion value”, the picture looked very different.
Part of the inflated performance came from brand campaigns reporting returns close to 18x, despite many of those shoppers already having decided to buy. Genuine non-brand performance was closer to 3x. And even “optimising for profit” was not as simple as cutting inefficient spend. When one apparel SKU was pushed too aggressively towards margin, sales volume dropped and excess stock eventually had to be marked down below cost.
The solution was not another dashboard metric. It was rebuilding conversion values around actual contribution margin and deciding what job each product needed advertising to perform: profit, volume or cash recovery.
💡 Takeaway: ROAS is not revenue. And revenue is not profit. If your media platform cannot see the economics underneath the conversion, it may optimise beautifully towards the wrong outcome.
🎙 PODCASTS WORTH YOUR TIME
Mega-influencers are dead. Long-term partnerships are always better. Follower count does not matter.
Tinashe Chaponda, founder of Sosani, has some thoughts.
This episode challenges several of influencer marketing’s favourite assumptions and explores when celebrity and mega-talent genuinely make sense, how brands can negotiate top-tier creator rates, and why creators should play different roles depending on where the audience sits in the funnel.
There is also a useful discussion around whitelisting and how the right creator asset can move from organic content into paid performance media.
Caleb Ralston helped take Gary Vaynerchuk’s TikTok from roughly 300,000 to 3.5 million followers in a matter of months and grew Alex and Leila Hormozi’s combined audience from 1.2 million to 11.5 million.
But this episode is less about chasing viral numbers and more about building personal brands with intention.
Caleb shares the framework behind his content strategy, why he sometimes deliberately sacrifices reach, and how one seemingly underperforming video can be more commercially valuable than millions of passive views.
He also breaks down the content equation he uses to turn five meaningful customer problems into 25 pieces of content.
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Stay ahead of the curve with these top strategies AI helped develop for marketers, built for real-world results.
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🚀 Until next time - keep it real, keep it creator-led.
Creator Cloud Cast is your go-to bulletin for the latest insights, trends and tools powering the creator economy across our ecosystem. Whether you're building your brand or growing your campaign ROI, this newsletter is where strategy meets storytelling.
It all ties into our trio of brands:
Webfluential: our premium hub for top-tier creators with advanced monetisation, data-driven analytics, and brand campaigns that scale.
theSalt: empowering creators and nano-influencers through community-driven content and real-life brand advocacy.
Nfinity Influencer: bridging brands with creators through smart campaign execution and data-led media planning.
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