“I was like, I am the richest woman in the world,” she told Fortune. The then-nascent content creator took her friends out to the nicest sushi restaurant she could find in San Francisco (but was really a “hole in the wall place,” she said) and bought everyone dinner.
Pretty soon after Marshall started making content, she realized she could make real money from content creation. To build rapport and the illusion that she was already a well-established creator, she created a fake assistant.
“I made an assistant who was actually just me, operating on my other email alias, looping in my assistant to handle this brand deal,” Marshall said. “So it seemed like I had this whole business and this world around me.”
“Brands pay massive amounts of money for one singular video to creators, and they often never meet them or talk to them,” Marshall said. “Agencies play this intermediary role that creates separation between the creator and the brand. I sat with that with my team, and we decided we wanted to launch [a] creator led influencer marketing agency.”
But for Marshall, more money doesn’t always equate to better outcomes. She argues it’s actually made influencer marketing less efficient.
When you’re a creator, Marshall explained, a brand or agency will reach out to you and offer a certain amount of money to talk about certain topics on their channel, and they’re given a creative brief. But “oftentimes these briefs are written by copywriters, not creators,” which means there can sometimes be several calls to action, many text overlays, and requests for making brand points that have all been approved by their legal teams, she said. She’s rewritten scripts up to 10 times to satisfy briefs that were never built for the type of content she makes.
“We understand that there’s things you have to do to get your message across, but it’s often really difficult, because me, as a comedy creator… how am I supposed to make a joke but also mention all of these things?” Marshall said. “I think the sweet spot that really makes incredible content is when I meet with the brand directly, and we talk through [the] main problem point [they’re] trying to solve.”
Expand Co-Lab’s premise is simple: Bring creators into the room earlier.
“I don’t know how the campaign performed. I don’t know if I’ll ever speak to them again. Were they happy? Were they sad? I don’t know,” Marshall said. “There’s no communication.”
Marshall has spent six years operating at the intersection of creator culture and the professional world, so she knows both how brands think and how creators work. But even as Marshall continues to expand her business ventures, she’s careful not to make it seem as if everyone can or should be a content creator, no matter how fun or fulfilling the job may be.
“I don’t think everyone needs to be a content creator. If you love filming yourself and you love filming videos, absolutely—stick with it,” she said. “Find the thing that makes you uniquely you… that single point of failure. If you left the company because you’re so good at this one thing, the company would fall apart in some small way.”
