If your brand wants to work with creators and it matters that it works, you hire a company that specializes in exactly that: the strategy, the selection, the idea and the creative direction, from someone who’s done it at scale. Not a platform. Not a talent agency. Not a generalist agency with a creator team bolted on. The category is small and most of the names in it aren’t what they look like, so here’s how to tell them apart.
Most brands have already tried this once. They paid for posts. They ran a gifting program. They got a deck with a hundred handles and a CPM, approved a mix, and ended up with content their customer recognized as an ad in two seconds. The problem was never finding creators. It was knowing what to do with them, and who to trust to figure that out.
The five places brands go, and what each one is actually for
An influencer platform. Software that matches you to creators by audience data and handles the contracts and payments. Useful if you already know what you want and need to run it at volume. It will not tell you what to do, and the creators it surfaces are the ones who opted into the platform, which isn’t the same as the ones your audience follows.
An influencer agency. A team that sources, briefs, manages and reports. Its business scales with the number of creators and the size of the spend, so the recommendation tends to be more of both. That’s not dishonesty, it’s the model. If you need two hundred posts by Friday, this is who you call.
A talent agency. Represents creators. Works for them, not for you. A great place to book a specific person once you’ve decided who. A bad place to ask what your creator strategy should be, because the honest answer will always involve their roster.
A generalist agency with a creator practice. Your brand or media agency says it does creators too. Sometimes true. More often the creator work is a junior team running a playbook that was built for paid media, and the creators get treated as placements.
A specialist consultancy. A senior person or small team whose only job is figuring out how a brand should show up with creators, then directing the work until it ships. Sells judgment, not reach. Doesn’t take a cut of the creator budget, so the advice isn’t tied to the spend. This is what Secret Menu is.
What the specialist actually does
Four things, usually in this order.
Decides the corner of culture. A brand doesn’t reach “18 to 30 year old men.” It reaches a scene: a game, a sport, a sneaker subculture, a streaming community. Each has its own creators and its own rules. Naming the corner first is most of the strategy, and it makes the creator list short.
Picks the creators, with a reason next to each name. Not by follower count. By whether their audience is your audience, whether their format can carry an idea, and whether they’d do it if nobody paid them. A good specialist says no to names you were excited about. That’s part of what you’re paying for.
Builds the idea. The part everyone skips, because it’s hard and it doesn’t scale. A sponsored integration is content. A creator doing something only they could do, with your brand as the reason, is a moment. The TONE launch at Target with Kai Cenat hit 150K+ concurrent live viewers because the idea was built for his audience and his format. The Island Breeze creator launch pulled 12M+ community views the same way.
Directs it through to launch. The brief, the creative direction, the back and forth with talent teams, and the final review where good ideas usually get sanded down. Strategy without this part is a PDF.
How to tell if you’re talking to the right one
Ask who’ll be in the room six weeks after signing. At an agency, it’s usually someone you haven’t met.
Ask how they get paid. If the fee grows with the creator budget, the advice will too.
Ask them to name the corner of culture your brand belongs in and three creators who live there. If the answer is a tiering system by follower count, keep looking.
Ask for one idea. Not a strategy, an idea. The specialist will have one in the first conversation. The others will need a brief.
Ask what they’ve shipped, and get a number. The work either moved something or it didn’t.
What it costs
Senior independent consultancies in the US run roughly $150 to $500 an hour when they bill hourly, and project work generally starts in the low five figures (OuterBox, 2026). Most specialist engagements are a fixed project or a monthly arrangement, not hourly. The number to compare it against isn’t the agency fee. It’s the creator budget it’s directing. One program that produces content instead of culture usually costs more than a year of the advice that would’ve prevented it.
01Who should a brand hire to work with creators?
It depends on the problem. For volume execution, an influencer agency or platform. For booking a specific person, their talent agency. For deciding what the brand should do with creators and directing it through launch, a specialist consultancy like Secret Menu.
02What's the difference between an influencer agency and a creator marketing consultancy?
An agency sources, manages and reports on creators, and scales with the spend. A consultancy decides the strategy, picks the creators, builds the idea and directs the work, and isn’t paid on the creator budget.
03How much does it cost to hire a creator marketing specialist?
Senior independents in the US typically charge $150 to $500 an hour or, more commonly, fixed projects from the low five figures. Most engagements are a project or a monthly arrangement.
04Can a brand run creator marketing in house instead?
Yes, once the strategy exists. Many brands bring in a specialist to set the strategy and the first ideas, then run the program with their own team. The expensive mistakes happen when the in house team is handed a budget without a point of view.