At first glance, it was corporate Hollywood at its most forgettable. Sixteen people sat in rolly chairs around a white conference table. Three more faces peered from a video screen. Cans of LaCroix awaited polite sips.
But this was actually a pivotal moment in how Hollywood defines — and monetizes — stardom.
The 90-minute meeting took place inside Creative Artists Agency in March. It was an all-hands-on-deck strategy session for a nontraditional client: Dhar Mann, a digital creator with more than 170 million social media followers. His own agents were there from CAA Creators, a division formed a few months earlier. Other attendees included agents from the firm’s scripted television, film, consumer products, reality TV, publishing, and brand marketing departments, among others.
The fact that Mr. Mann, 42, had the full attention of Hollywood’s most powerful talent agency seemed to surprise even him. He signed with CAA in 2021, when digital stars peppered the agency’s talent roster but remained far from its center of gravity.
In recent years, “the only way you’d see that many CAA agents in a room was for an A-list director or A-list actor,” Mr. Mann said. “That’s where all the resources were allocated.”
The shift inside CAA is perhaps the strongest indication yet that creators have moved from the margins of Hollywood to its center. The agency has lately been in a sprint to expand its creator business, signing some of the biggest names, poaching creator-focused agents from smaller rivals and generally repositioning what was a growing but marginal division into one of its most urgent bets.
New clients include the Stokes Twins, who have 140 million YouTube followers and specialize in elaborate pranks; the extreme-challenge-oriented Ben Azelart, who has 51 million; and Rebecca Zamolo, who has 23 million and makes zany, lightly scripted family videos. New agents include Greg Goodfried, a former United Talent Agency executive, and Kendall Ostrow, who came from YouTube.
Earlier this month, CAA and the private equity firm TPG joined to create a $250 million holding company to acquire, operate and expand businesses led by YouTubers and other creators.
For the first time, CAA is making a major showing at Cannes Lions, the annual advertising and marketing gathering in France that has become a dealmaking-palooza for creators. The agency teamed with F1 to transform a prominent restaurant into an “epicenter” called CAA House. Nearly two dozen creator clients were on hand for meetings and schmoozing, along with a squadron of agents.
“It’s recognition that the shift toward creators is beyond real,” Bryan Lourd, CAA’s chief executive and co-chairman, said of the agency’s increased focus on digital stars. “The numbers are undeniable in terms of the audiences creators are reaching and what the economics are starting to become.”
CAA is a behemoth in movies, television, music and sports. But certain legacy businesses — namely movies and television — are challenged. Even with a recent box office boom, annual theatrical attendance in the United States remains below prepandemic levels. Streaming services have reduced spending on scripted TV shows as they have given priority to live events and cheaper reality programming.
The creator economy, by contrast, is growing at breakneck speed. Advertisers spent an estimated $37 billion to sponsor content by United States creators last year, a 26 percent increase compared to the previous year, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade organization. The average YouTube account holder spent 99 minutes on the platform per day last year, up from 87 minutes in 2024, a media research firm in Britain recently found. Netflix dropped from 100 minutes to 93.
Creators are also — at long last — demonstrating a real ability to cross over into the traditional entertainment business, an arena where CAA is a powerhouse. Over the past six months, three creators with no Hollywood track record have turned online followings into surprise box-office hits.
The success of “Beast Games” on Amazon’s Prime Video and “Ms. Rachel” on Netflix — both creator-led shows — has prompted a scramble among some streaming services for creator-powered projects.
A few of the most successful creators are building full-blown studios. Mr. Mann employs about 200 people and makes two and a half hours of scripted content a week for YouTube and Facebook alone. CAA has helped him expand into podcasting and close content deals with Samsung TV Plus, a free streaming service, and MyDrama, a microdrama app. In January, CAA got Mr. Mann, who specializes in morality tales, named “chief kindness officer” for the N.F.L. as part of a Super Bowl-related partnership.
A theatrical film is also on the horizon, Mr. Mann said, as is another streaming deal.
“Not to be hyperbolic, but I imagine it’s what Charlie Chaplin’s studio looked like when he was starting it in the early 1900s,” Mr. Lourd said of the three Burbank, Calif., warehouses where Dhar Mann Studios is based. “If these talents are nurtured and helped to get enough capital to grow their businesses in a sound way, the growth can be profound.”
There is plenty of eye rolling in the agency world about CAA opening the throttle in the creatorverse. What took so long? Competitors like United Talent have been treating digital stars as a core business for at least a decade. So have a vast number of boutique start-up agencies and management companies that focus entirely on creators.
William Morris Endeavor, which represents YouTube stars like Sean Evans (“Hot Ones”) and the engineering whiz Mark Rober, said creators should be cautious about CAA’s plan to buy pieces of their businesses through its $250 million fund. “We see the greater opportunity in providing the services that help talent own more of what they build,” said Ben Davis, co-head of W.M.E.’s digital department.
But others said they welcomed CAA’s ambition.
“Their making this a priority is validating,” said Max Stein, the founder of Brigade, a management company that focuses on digital talent. “If it’s this important to their future, that really says something about where the whole space is headed.”
CAA first dipped its toe into digital representation in 2010. For a time, however, the agency was mostly interested in creating opportunities for movie and TV clients.
“We were the redheaded stepchildren in the agency,” David Freeman, who co-founded CAA’s digital media division, said on a February podcast. Mr. Freeman, who left CAA last year to start his own creator-centric firm, added that the agency could afford to pay scant attention to digital stars at the time because television was making so much money during the boom known as “Peak TV.”
The agency shifted decisively toward creators roughly a year ago, when it recruited the godfather of digital talent representation, Brent Weinstein, to its senior leadership team. Mr. Weinstein, who spent two decades building and leading United Talent’s internet division, restructured CAA’s digital departments and hit the gas. In a coup, the popular YouTube duo Rhett & Link and their production company Mythical joined for representation. Existing clients like Mr. Mann and Trisha Paytas, a multifaceted digital star, have seen their careers take off in new directions.
“When a sports team makes a leadership change, it’s less about the new general manager poring through game film and practice film and cataloging all the things we did wrong,” Mr. Weinstein said. “And it’s more about someone coming in with new energy and a new playbook and saying, ‘It’s a new day. Let’s go win championships.’”
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