July, 2026.- The practical difference between a creator who is executing a brief and a creator who is acting as an author is ownership. Leah Chaney, Director of Influencer at CYLNDR Studios, explains that a creator executing a brief is delivering against a brand’s vision, while a creator acting as an author is helping define that vision. They bring a deep understanding of audience behavior, platform nuances, and storytelling instincts that brands simply cannot replicate from the outside. When creators are treated as authors, the work feels less like advertising and more like culture because it is being shaped by the people who actively participate in it every day.
You can feel that difference on set. When a creator is simply executing a brief, the day is often centered around direction and approval. When they are treated as an author, the environment becomes far more collaborative. Ideas evolve in real time, creative discoveries happen organically, and there is a shared commitment to making the work better than what was originally on the page. The best creator-led productions are not about controlling the outcome; they are about creating space for creators, brands, and production teams to build something together that none of them would have arrived at alone.
In this interview, Chaney discusses the single biggest change needed to break through the “ceiling on influencer”: stopping the treatment of creators as a media channel and starting to treat them as a creative discipline. Creators are being brought into the process after the strategy is set, the creative is approved, and the campaign is already built. When that happens, creators are left to amplify ideas rather than help shape them. Breaking through that ceiling requires all of them—brands, agencies, and creators—but the responsibility starts with brands and agencies. We have to create room for creators earlier in the process and recognize that their value extends far beyond reach.
Chaney also addresses why creators are still so often brought in at the end of the process rather than embedded at the beginning. The simple answer is control. Bringing creators in at the end allows brands and agencies to maintain ownership over the strategy, creative, and decision-making process while still benefiting from a creator’s reach. Bringing them in at the beginning requires a willingness to share authorship, and that is a much bigger shift than most organizations realize.
On the “handoff tax,” Chaney explains that embedding creators earlier reduces the tax because it keeps the creative process connected to the audience throughout its development. The most expensive handoff tax she has seen is the loss of conviction. An idea starts off bold, differentiated, and culturally relevant, but after enough reviews, revisions, and stakeholder inputs, it becomes something safer and more familiar.
1. Authorship vs. Output: You said the industry has treated influencer as an “output,” but the real opportunity is treating it like “authorship.” What’s the practical difference on a shoot day between a creator who is an author versus a creator who is executing a brief?
The practical difference is ownership. A creator executing a brief is delivering against a brand’s vision, while a creator acting as an author is helping define that vision. They bring a deep understanding of audience behavior, platform nuances, and storytelling instincts that brands simply can’t replicate from the outside. When creators are treated as authors, the work feels less like advertising and more like culture because it’s being shaped by the people who actively participate in it every day.
You can feel that difference on set. When a creator is simply executing a brief, the day is often centered around direction and approval. When they’re treated as an author, the environment becomes far more collaborative. Ideas evolve in real time, creative discoveries happen organically, and there’s a shared commitment to making the work better than what was originally on the page. The best creator-led productions aren’t about controlling the outcome, they’re about creating space for creators, brands, and production teams to build something together that none of them would have arrived at alone.
2. The Ceiling on Influencer: You noted there’s been a “ceiling on influencer” because of how the industry has treated it. What’s the single biggest change needed to break through that ceiling, and who needs to make it—brands, agencies, or creators themselves?
The change is simple — we need to stop treating creators as a media channel and start treating them as a creative discipline. Creators are being brought into the process after the strategy is set, the creative is approved, and the campaign is already built. When that happens, creators are left to amplify ideas rather than help shape them.
Breaking through that ceiling requires all of us — brands, agencies and creators — but the responsibility starts with brands and agencies. We have to create room for creators earlier in the process and recognize that their value extends far beyond reach. The brands that will win in the future won’t be the ones with the biggest creator budgets, they’ll be the ones that best leverage creators as strategic and creative partners from the very beginning.
3. Creators as Directors, Editors, Storytellers: You said creators understand attention better than most of the industry.” If that’s true, why are creators still so often brought in at the end of the process rather than embedded at the beginning?
The simple answer is control. Bringing creators in at the end allows brands and agencies to maintain ownership over the strategy, creative and decision-making process while still benefiting from a creator’s reach. Bringing them in at the beginning requires a willingness to share authorship, and that’s a much bigger shift than most organizations realize.
4. The Future is Entertainment: You said, “The future is entertainment.” What does that mean for influencer marketing specifically? Are we talking about longer-form content, episodic storytelling, or something else entirely?
“The future is entertainment” doesn’t mean every brand needs to become a Hollywood studio or that content needs to be long-form. It’s more a reflection on how we’re moving from an attention economy to an engagement economy. Consumers aren’t differentiating between content, advertising and entertainment the way marketers do, they’re simply choosing what deserves their time. The work that wins is the work that makes people feel something, learn something, laugh or connect with something larger than a product.
For influencer marketing, that means shifting from creating content about a brand to creating content for an audience. Sometimes that’s a six-second TikTok, sometimes it’s a podcast, a live experience, an episodic series or original IP. The format matters less than the value exchange. Again, it’s a shift. A shift from chasing culture to building it, shaping it and contributing something meaningful to it.
5. The Handoff Tax: CYLNDR Studios is built to mitigate the “handoff tax”— the cost of watering down ideas across multiple decks and departments. How does embedding creators earlier specifically reduce that tax, and what’s the most expensive handoff tax you’ve seen in your career?
Embedding creators earlier reduces the handoff tax because it keeps the creative process connected to the audience throughout its development. When creators are brought in at the end, they’re often asked to adapt an idea that was built without their perspective. When they’re involved from the start, audience insight, platform fluency and storytelling instincts become inputs into the idea itself, creating fewer translation points between strategy and execution.
The most expensive handoff tax I’ve seen is the loss of conviction. An idea starts off bold, differentiated and culturally relevant, but after enough reviews, revisions and stakeholder inputs, it becomes something safer and more familiar. Nobody intentionally waters it down, but the cumulative effect is that the work becomes optimized for internal approval rather than external engagement. Then the content doesn’t “perform” — not because the audience rejected, but worse, they didn’t even notice it. That’s a costly lesson, and one that reinforces the value of keeping creators closer to the creative process, where audience perspective can help preserve what made the idea compelling in the first place.
