How Do You Hire Commercial Talent for the Creator Economy?
You hire commercial talent for a creator business the same way you’d hire for any other media company that’s started generating real, repeatable revenue: by working out which parts of the operation are still deal-by-deal and which ones now need someone accountable for the number, not just the relationship. Most creator businesses get this wrong in the same direction. They hire a second talent manager when what they actually need is someone who can run a P&L.
A founder got in touch a few months ago managing three creators who’d grown past the point where any of this was still a side hustle. Combined brand revenue was into seven figures, and his instinct, reasonably enough, was to hire another talent manager to keep up with the volume of deals coming in. Twenty minutes into the conversation it was obvious the actual gap was somewhere else entirely. Nobody owned renewals. Nobody was negotiating usage rights properly, so brands were quietly getting more out of each deal than they’d paid for. And nobody had looked at margin across the three creators to work out which partnerships were genuinely worth the time versus which ones just felt busy. That’s not a talent management problem. That’s a commercial operations problem wearing a talent management job title, and it’s a pattern that’s showing up constantly right now.
Why this is suddenly a real hiring question
UK creator partnership revenue is forecast to pass £1.2 billion in 2026, up 26% year on year according to IAB UK’s first dedicated measurement of the category, itself up more than 20% the year before that. Growth at that rate outpacing the rest of UK digital advertising isn’t a niche-interest statistic. It means a meaningful number of creator businesses have crossed from “the creator plus whoever they trust” into something that actually needs a commercial function, often faster than the people running them have had time to notice.
The shift shows up most clearly in how talent management itself is changing. Ashley Villa, founder of Rare Global, put it bluntly in a piece on where the industry is heading this year: “Not all creators will be able to launch their own brands. The ones that move the needle are those who are evolved in their thinking and are involved in every step of the process from sourcing to marketing and not just promotional” (Forbes). The same piece makes the point directly: the leading talent managers now function as operating partners rather than deal brokers, pulling in legal, financial, production and data capability around multi-year strategy rather than negotiating one post at a time.
What’s actually changing underneath the job titles
Brands have moved with this too, and it’s worth understanding why, because it changes what “commercial” means in this context. Chrissy Walker, who runs a PR consultancy working across this space, describes the direction of travel as creators owning their content while brands license it on specific terms around usage, duration and distribution, much closer to a traditional talent agreement than an ad placement (The PR Net). That single change, usage rights with real terms instead of a flat one-off fee, is exactly the kind of thing a deal-broker misses and a commercial operator catches. It’s also, not coincidentally, where most of the margin in a growing creator business actually sits.
So the useful split isn’t talent manager versus business manager as job titles, it’s deal-broker versus operator as functions. A deal-broker is excellent at sourcing opportunities, managing the relationship, and closing individual briefs. An operator is accountable for renewal rates, usage-rights enforcement, margin across the whole partnership book, and increasingly some combination of legal, finance and data that didn’t need to exist when the business was one creator and one spreadsheet. Plenty of people are genuinely good at both. Fewer than you’d think are good at both at once, past a certain scale, which is usually the actual hiring decision hiding underneath “we need more talent management capacity.”
What good commercial hiring actually looks like at this stage
The honest answer on seniority is that it depends more on partnership complexity than on headline revenue. A creator doing five simple product placements a month doesn’t need a Commercial Director. A creator doing two long-term brand retainers with equity components, content licensing terms and cross-platform distribution rights absolutely might, even at a fraction of the revenue, because the complexity is what actually demands the skill. Danielle Wiley, CEO of Sway Group, makes a related point about where agencies are heading: data informing the customisation of every campaign, with the technology to support it now a prerequisite rather than a nice-to-have (Forbes). That’s not a reason to hire a data team on day one. It is a reason to think about whether the first commercial hire can actually read a deal structure and a performance number, not just a brief.
Our own 2026 Emerging Media Salary Survey actually maps this progression quite cleanly. Brand Partnerships Manager, the entry point for most people coming up through deal-broking, sits at a £65,000 median UK salary. Move into Head of Brand Partnerships and the median jumps to £105,000. Commercial Director takes it to £140,000, and VP Commercial runs £130,000 to £220,000, with a £160,000 median. That’s not a smooth curve. It’s a visible step up every time the job stops being about sourcing deals and starts being about owning a number, which is exactly the distinction this piece keeps coming back to. Overall pay movement across Emerging Media has stayed fairly steady this year, broadly in the 2 to 5% range, but the meaningful increases are concentrated in brand partnerships, growth and commercial strategy specifically, because genuinely high-quality, experienced operators remain scarce even as businesses get more selective about who they bring in.
When it’s genuinely too early to hire for this
Not every growing creator needs a commercial hire yet, and it’s worth saying so rather than pushing everyone toward the same answer. If deal flow is still inbound-only, if partnerships are mostly single-post and low-complexity, and if the creator or their existing manager can still hold the whole picture in their head without anything slipping, a commercial hire is probably early. The signal to watch for isn’t revenue reaching some threshold, it’s the first time a usage-rights clause gets missed, a renewal gets forgotten, or a brand quietly renegotiates terms because nobody on the creator’s side was tracking what the original deal actually said. That’s usually when the gap stops being theoretical, and the cost of it doesn’t show up as neatly as what happens when a role sits open for 30, 60 or 90 days, but it compounds in much the same way.
If you’re trying to work out whether your next hire should be another talent manager or your first proper commercial operator, or you’re weighing recruitment agency costs versus hiring directly, run your own numbers through our recruitment cost calculator and talk it through with our Emerging Media team. We’d rather tell you honestly that you don’t need the hire yet than place someone into a role that isn’t really there.
About the author
Hussain Chowdhury, Director & Practice Lead Hussain leads Ultimate Asset’s Emerging Media practice, specialising in building commercial, partnerships and content teams for creator and social-first businesses across the UK, Europe and the US. He co-authored Ultimate Asset’s 2026 Emerging Media Salary Survey.
