How s’mores got me on Europe’s biggest stage

I owe you an apology… I ghosted you, and it’s no excuse.

Our last newsletter: July 28. That’s 3 months of silence.

Every weekend I said “I’ll write it.” Every weekend, something else won. A new hire. A client fire. A flight booked 12 hours before takeoff.

The to-do list never shrinks. It just grows. I know I’m not the only one struggling to keep up in this AI era.

Truth nobody posts on LinkedIn: even CEOs miss deadlines. I miss them all the time.

And that’s ok. You don’t win by doing everything. You win by doing the most important things first.

So here I am, writing this on an (economy) flight from Mexico City to Paris. Running on airport coffee and zero sleep. Just me and spotty airplane wifi against the world.

Recently I woke up (on a couch in NYC) to 50+ people on our team at Creator Match 🧩. Living out of a carry-on. Paris, Texas, LA, New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, and Sri Lanka all coming up. 2 months away from my Miami apartment.

I may be exhausted but I’ve never been more excited for the future. We recently hit 3 years in business (in July 2026) and it feels like we are just getting started.

Look… I’ve been in a lot of rooms these last few months. Some I’ve been invited to, some I broke in to. But the biggest one started with a fire pit and a bag of marshmallows.

So I’ve got big news, plus a few lessons you can steal.

Let’s get into it…

THE BIG NEWS 🇫🇷

I’m co-emceeing Paris Creator Week, the largest creator event in Europe.

And it all started with s’mores.

Back in March, our CM team was at SXSW for our first ever Creator Match offsite. We rented a villa and hosted a marketer’s meetup. Just a fire pit and way too many marshmallows.

That’s when Pierre Allary walked in.

We started talking about what he was cooking up with Paris Creator Week. I had no idea that conversation would go anywhere. A few months later, we ran into each other again. This time in France, at Cannes Lions.

Now I get to share the news: I’m co-emceeing Paris Creator Week 2026 with Trish Seidel Startsman from our Creator Match team.

↳ 8,000+ attendees
↳ 3,000+ creators
↳ 300+ speakers
↳ 120+ partners, including YouTube, Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, Spotify, Twitch, and Substack

📍 Grande Halle de la Villette, Paris
📅 November 4 and 5 (yes, this week!!)

2 years ago, B2B creator marketing wasn’t even a category. This week, Trish and I are hosting the room where the entire industry shows up.

WHY I’M SHARING THE STAGE

This isn’t the first time a Creator Match teammate has grabbed the mic.

A few weeks ago, I was supposed to emcee Creator Economy Live East, the biggest creator conference on the East Coast. Instead, storms turned my flight from SF to NYC into a 36 hour nightmare. I was stranded in the Raleigh airport while my phone blew up: “AJ WHERE ARE YOU?? CONFERENCE IS IN A FEW HOURS!”

At 12:30 AM, I called in a Hail Mary: Jerrica Long, our Head of Creator Marketing.

Her answer: “Yes, I’m here to support, and I’d love to take on this opportunity.”

The goal was never for me to be the only face of Creator Match. We invest in our team’s personal brands the same way we invest in our clients’ creator programs. So when Europe’s largest creator conference asked me to emcee, the decision was easy: fly one of our top performers (who also happens to be part French) to Paris and share the stage.

THE 6 SHIFTS RESHAPING CREATOR MARKETING

A few weeks ago, I was invited to dinner at Din Tai Fung in NYC with the 2 co-founders of Lumanu, the payment platform that moves $1.5 billion a year in creator payments.

Over a table full of dumplings, they shared the news: Creator Match made their top 10 agency growth list.

I started Creator Match out of a bedroom in a tiny apartment. The agencies next to us on that list have thousands of employees, tens of millions in funding, and decades of history. Still doesn’t feel real.

But the bigger story is why agencies like ours are growing so fast. Here’s what we’re seeing:

1) Growth across channels.
We started on LinkedIn. Now it’s every short form and long form channel. YouTube has become so big for us that we hired a Head of YouTube (Josh Gabay).

2) Growth in spend.
Brands are deploying real capital, not test budgets.

3) Growth in speed.
Getting $100K deployed used to take 3 months. Now it happens monthly. We’ve even had $1M weeks in approved creator contracts.

4) Growth in paid media.
Brands are buying usage rights out of the gate and putting ad spend behind creator content, mostly on Meta and LinkedIn. (It helps when your COO, Tara Knight, has managed over $200M in paid media.)

5) Growth in bundle size.
Nobody wants a one-off post on one platform anymore. It’s multi-post bundles across multiple channels with usage baked in. Many brands are paying for exclusivity too.

6) Growth in unique activations.
Both IRL and URL. Brand trips, events, gifting, experiences.

Put it all together and it’s a gold rush.

For creators: there has never been a better time to create. Stop pitching single posts. Package multi-channel bundles, price in usage rights, and know what exclusivity is worth before a brand asks.

For marketers: product parity is the norm in most categories. What separates you is whether anyone can tell your story better than your competitors can tell theirs. Creators are the best distribution channel for that. Just make sure you have the infrastructure (contracts, payments, usage tracking) to move at the new speed.

5 PROMOTIONS IN 90 DAYS

That’s not a typo. It’s what happens when you hire people who are better than you and get out of their way.

When I started Creator Match, I was the account manager, the creator marketing manager, the strategist, and the guy sending invoices at 1 AM.

Today, these people run entire parts of the business:

↳ Trish Seidel Startsman: Head of CS and Marketing Strategy
↳ Jerrica Long: Head of Creator Marketing
↳ Joshua Gabay: Head of YouTube
↳ Amanda Tayte-Tait: AI & Project Manager
↳ Naek Mejia: AI Strategy Lead

We’re hiring for 4 roles:

→ Brand Manager (Client Success)
→ Creator Marketing Manager (Creator Marketing)
→ Account Manager, YouTube Specialist (YouTube Success)
→ Creator Marketing Manager, YouTube Specialist (YouTube Success)

WHAT ELSE YOU MISSED

⚾ The brand trip playbook (Airwallex x SF Giants)
Airwallex brought 16 tech creators to their private suite at a Giants game. Every creator got a custom jersey with their name on the back (mine said “Creator Match,” #10 for my bday) and a $100 Airwallex corporate card to use at the team store. So we actually used the product. Then we heard the founder story straight from the team, including how they turned down a $1.2B offer from Stripe and grew to $1.3B in revenue on their own terms. I was on both sides of this. Creator Match 🧩 helped orchestrate the trip. I was also a creator in it.

🎯 Getting paid to go to events
Our whole team was slammed during SF Tech Week, but missing it wasn’t an option. So we piloted the Creator Match ambassador program: we paid 2 creators $500 each to attend events on our behalf, meet our brand partners and creators, and make new connections. We made intros before they arrived and kept them in a group chat with our team all week.

🎤 Advertising Week New York
I was one of 12 Chief Creator Officer Ambassadors hand-picked by Dhar Mann. 2,500+ creators, 500 CMOs, and a target of $100M in new creator x brand deals in one week.

Thanks for getting this far with us… See you in Paris!!

— AJ

P.S. If you want to work with Creator Match (as a brand or a creator) — start here.