Your guide to growing and monetizing creator-first businesses.
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Marketing is the first language of social media.
I’m defining “marketing” broadly as the optimization of content to reach and resonate with audiences. This is a creator-economy context — what good is a post that no one sees?
I increasingly believe “learn marketing” is the new “learn to code.” Today’s newsletter explains why.
— Francis Zierer, Editor
On the podcast this week, we spoke with Sophia Smith Galer, a journalist with a talent for engaging audiences through short-form video. We spoke about:
🧠 Building an AI app using your own content as training data
🎯 The difference between creators and journalists
💼 Maintaining a 50-50 portfolio career
And more. Watch below or listen wherever you get your podcasts.
Gen Alpha speaks marketing as a native language
Attention is the oil of the internet, and marketing skills form the rig.
As Yves Citton writes in The Ecology of Attention, “While the calculations of the classical economy of material goods are based on the scarcity of factors of production, the attention economy is based on the scarcity of the capacity for the reception of cultural goods.” Marketing is the work of making a consumer forget the scarcity — and thus high value — of their attention, of ceding importance to the cultural good. It’s giving your audience no choice but to pay attention.
A manager of mine, at a marketing job a few years ago, told me, “We are competing with anything you can look at on your phone.” Pithy, but correct. Instagram, The New York Times app, YouTube, Robinhood, even your photo app; they’re all breathing the same lithium dust.
Yesterday, for an upcoming episode of our podcast, I interviewed a journalist who is in the early stages of building his independent, YouTube-first media company. He told me that the most difficult part was packaging; distilling all the nuance he wove into ten or twenty minutes of video into a clickworthy title and thumbnail.
This is marketing.
Besides hosting Creator Spotlight, I co-host a podcast called Tasteland. My co-host is Daisy Alioto, CEO of Dirt Media. We cover culture, marketing, and tech. Casey Lewis, youth trends researcher, joined us this week to discuss what she gleaned from her annual study of back-to-school-haul TikToks. She is also working on a report about Gen Alpha and told us about an 11-year-old interviewee who said, “Gen Alpha will be the richest generation of all time because they’re so good at marketing themselves.”
@caseymorrowlewis we’re babydoll top-maxxing this year #hollister #pacsun #lululemon
Gen Z grew up engaging with these platforms as well, but at a lower saturation. The gamability of social media is more established now than ever, particularly in the post-COVID, TikTok era. Some members of Gen Alpha have had iPhones since they had the arm strength to hold them ... but none of them are older than the iPhone.
On Tasteland, our conversation turned to Emily Sundberg’s August piece about an increase in social media comments on brand deals specifically praising the “marketing.” Casey is quoted in the piece: “TikTok or maybe Substack or both have made everyone tuned-in and extra opinionated on marketing strategies and business in general.”
If you post to a social media platform like TikTok or Substack, I assume you’re after attention. If you want attention, I assume you’re optimizing it. If you’re optimizing for attention — this is marketing.
Marketing is a broad field, but broadly speaking, success on any of the social platforms that Gen Alpha is growing up with requires an innate understanding of marketing skills. How to structure a video for viewer retention, how to put forward a character; how to capture and engage an audience. It’s their native language.
Innate understanding, of course, is not necessarily in-depth understanding. The native speaker and the as-a-second-language student see different patterns.
Should journalists have to build a personal brand?
A creator, as we define the term at Creator Spotlight, has three jobs: create content, market it, monetize it. While “marketing,” broadly speaking, is second nature for Gen Alpha and much of Gen Z, for previous generations, it’s typically a foreign language if one did not study it in college or pursue a career in the field.
Earlier this week, our Assistant Editor, Natalia, and I spoke to a college media writing class — a group roughly in the middle of Gen Z. One of the students asked a question to the gist of do you have to produce audio and video content to be successful in journalism? Not necessarily, I answered, but it sure doesn’t hurt — I urged them to experiment with these formats. If you seek an audience, give them more opportunities to find your work.
Should journalists have to build a personal brand? We can argue about that until the money runs out and people stop reading. It’s the wrong question. Writer and longtime newsletterist Delia Cai, on this week’s episode of the Study Hall podcast, makes the right point:
“The journalist-as-a-personal-brand conversation was raging when I was in college, because it was the golden age of being on Twitter and being Twitter famous and getting jobs from Twitter. It’s funny, because I think that argument has pretty much been settled, which is, yeah, absolutely; you need to tend to your personal brand. You need to know how to market yourself. ”
What used to be a question, even taboo, is moot. This week’s episode of The Creator Spotlight Podcast featured Sophia Smith Galer, a Zillennial British journalist known for her ability to translate high-quality, longform writing into engaging short-form videos. In preparing for my interview with her, I wrote down something she said on another podcast:
"Any journalism I do has to put audiences first. It's great that I can hold power to account; if nobody can see that or find out about it, what purpose is it actually serving?"
Sophia exemplifies the creator-journalist: presence in multiple formats (written investigations, video explainers, social media engagement), each serving as a different entry point for audiences to discover the work.
She's not abandoning journalism for marketing — she's foregrounding distribution at the point of production. The most effective creator-journalists build systems where quality and reach each reinforce the other.
This shift from craft-first to audience-first thinking is exactly the kind of marketing fluency Gen Alpha might take for granted; older generations are still adapting to the mode.
“Media will become marketing”
The mass of information on the market is increasing exponentially. The attention available to receive it grows ever so slowly.
Doug Shapiro, veteran media industry consultant and author of The Mediator newsletter, recently wrote a piece asking What If All Media is Marketing? The gist of this (long, nuanced, and expertly researched) article is that, thanks to generative AI, the information surplus is going to make it impossible to monetize media through traditional (advertising and subscription) means.
Exactly: “content may cease to be a profit center. Instead, it will become top-of-funnel to something else. Media will become marketing.” This is most evident, Shapiro notes, in the creator economy. He lists a bevy of creator businesses (MrBeast, Mark Rober, Jonathan Katz-Mose) where the content is free and the money comes from products (respectively: chocolates, toys, woodworking tools).
Does this worry or model apply to journalism? No, we will always need intrepid reporters gumshoeing around for facts. Because this is a service we will always need, there will always be people willing to pay for it. It does, however, undermine those whose trade is in opining on reporting, those who trade in spin.
A good marketer knows when one oilfield is about to run dry — and how to find the next. As long as people buy software and supplements, of course, the opinion merchants will be alright; this is marketing.
