Top 10 Talent Management & Influencer Agencies

An influencer management agency (also called a talent management agency or creator agency) represents creators, negotiating their brand deals, contracts and career growth. The 10 leading ones in October 2026 are Night, UTA, CAA, WME, InterTalent, Underscore Talent, Loaded, Whalar Talent (now Sixteenth), Viral Nation Talent and Select Management Group

During the early days, the  creator economy used to be a Wild West of handshake agreements, unanswered DMs, and crossed fingers. You found a kid with a ring light, mailed them a free moisturiser, and hoped for a spike in your Shopify dashboard. Fast forward to 2026. That kid with the ring light is now the CEO of a multi-million-dollar media conglomerate, complete with a legal team, a venture capital arm, and a Chief Operating Officer. We are now operating within a highly structured, $313 billion infrastructure.

And if you want a piece of that pie, you have to go through the gatekeepers.

Today, talent managers and creator agencies negotiate partnerships, secure licensing deals, manage contracts, coordinate schedules, and help creators build sustainable businesses that transcend the platforms they started on. They act as strategic partners, serving as the heat shield that protects creators from bad briefs and lowball offers, allowing the talent to focus on the canvas while the agency secures the gallery.

Let us peel back the curtain on the most influential creator management companies in the world, look at what their rosters actually say about them, and build a playbook you can copy, paste and adapt. Here is what you will find in this article:

• The 10 creator management companies shaping the industry, each with a roster snapshot, a real-life example, and a tip you can steal.
• How agents, managers, lawyers and PR teams fit together, using one very famous creator's team as proof.
• What the 10% to 25% commission really pays for (and why going around the manager saves you nothing).
• A replicable playbook, the C.A.S.T. Framework, plus a five-line pitch email, a ten-question call script, and a negotiation-levers table.
• Insights from Alex Segal, Managing Director of InterTalent, on how agents decide what is worth saying yes to.
• Three real reshuffles (and one checklist) to keep your agency contact list from going stale.

Agent, Manager, Agency: Who Is Actually Who?

Before we meet the titans, a small vocabulary lesson, because the words get used interchangeably and they should not be. A talent agent sells, they find the deals, from brand partnerships to TV and publishing. A talent manager plans, they steer the career, the calendar and the business. Lawyers handle the paper, publicists handle the press, and the creator sits in the middle of this team like the CEO of a very small, very loud company.

The best proof that these layers stack is one of the biggest streamers on the planet. When Night acquired LFM Management in 2023, The Hollywood Reporter noted that Kai Cenat was already represented by UTA on the agency side, and he was now joining a management firm in Night.

Pro Tip: Before you email anyone, work out which seat you are actually trying to reach. Pitching a campaign to an agent when the decision sits with the manager (or the other way around) is the fastest way to be politely ignored.

The Titans of Talent: The Top 10 Influencer Management Agencies

The scene of talent management is divided into digital-first pioneers who built their empires alongside the platforms, and traditional Hollywood heavyweights who saw the writing on the digital wall. Here are the power players dictating the terms of engagement. 

1. Night: The Venture Builder for YouTube and Twitch Stars

If the creator economy had a Wall Street, Night would be its most aggressive investment bank. One of the world's most recognisable creator management companies, Night represents creators such as Kai Cenat and Mrwhosetheboss, and managed MrBeast from 2018 to 2024. The company specialises in talent management, brand partnerships, business development, and creator-led ventures.

Night builds businesses around the people it represents. It runs a venture arm, it has gone shopping for influencer rosters, and it has reportedly raised $70 million to push further into gaming, music and live events.

Want to see how a Night creator thinks about building a channel? Mrwhosetheboss tells his zero-to-10-million-subscribers story on Ali Abdaal's podcast. (Fun detail: Ali sits on a different roster, which we will get to in number 8.)

Steal this: Before pitching a Night creator, check what they already own beyond the channel (a product, a podcast, a company). Then pitch a partnership in that world, such as a co-branded drop or a long-term ambassadorship, instead of a 60-second ad read. Managers who build ventures say yes to ideas that grow the venture.

2. UTA: Hollywood’s Creator Crossover Specialist

One of Hollywood's "Big Three" talent agencies, UTA has built a significant creator economy division representing YouTubers, TikTok creators, podcasters, athletes, and digital entrepreneurs. It helps creators expand into television, publishing, merchandising, live events, and brand licensing.

UTA is the bridge to mainstream relevance, and it got there early: its Creators practice launched in 2006, making it the first major agency with a dedicated digital talent division, and the division has grown to represent roughly 1,000 clients according to The Wall Street Journal.

Kai Cenat again, because he is the cleanest illustration of layered representation. UTA on the agent side, Night on the management side. Two firms, one creator, two different jobs.

Steal this: Ask one simple question in your first call: "Who else is on this creator's team, and who signs off on brand deals?" It saves weeks of emailing the wrong person, and it tells the rep you understand how the machine works.

3. CAA: Premium Creators With Hollywood Ambitions

CAA represents some of the world's biggest entertainers and has invested heavily in digital creators over the past decade. Its creator division supports influencers looking to expand into mainstream entertainment, consumer products, venture capital, and global brand partnerships.

CAA brings a level of institutional polish and negotiation discipline honed in Hollywood to the creator space. It treats digital talent the way it treats film stars, which means brands should arrive with a serious budget and a bulletproof contract.

Amelia Dimoldenberg built Chicken Shop Date from a youth-magazine column into a YouTube interview show that, over 12 years, turned into a production company (Dimz Inc.) and a youth summer academy, according to Variety. She announced in September 2026 that the show is wrapping up.

She has also said that managers and publicists were initially reluctant to place talent on a YouTube show, a hesitation that, by her account, has faded as the show became a must-do stop for stars promoting new projects.

Steal this: Sponsor a format, not a post. Ask the rep, "What does this creator own that could become a series, a product or an event?" Brands that attach to a repeatable format earn repeat exposure, and agents love a partner who thinks in seasons.

4. WME: The Packaging Powerhouse

WME was one of the first traditional talent agencies to recognise the commercial potential of digital creators, refusing to treat them as a passing fad. Today, it represents leading influencers, athletes, actors, entertainers, and digital creators while connecting them with global brands and media opportunities.

WME excels at packaging: bundling a creator's digital reach with a podcast, a live tour, and a book deal, so a viral moment becomes a multi-vertical career.

WME's Digital department has a Creator Sales team, described in a recent job listing as focused on sponsorship and advertising revenue for the agency's YouTube roster. In plain English, the agency now has people whose job is to hand brands a ready-made media plan built from its creators.

Steal this: Pitch packages, not people. Instead of "we love Creator X," send "here is a three-month plan: one hero YouTube video, three cut-downs and a newsletter mention, with a target audience and a budget." It matches how agencies sell, and it is much easier to say yes to.

5. InterTalent: Where UK Digital Meets Broadcast

Crossing the pond, we find InterTalent Rights Group, one of Europe's largest independent talent agencies. It represents a diverse roster of television personalities, journalists, athletes, authors, presenters, and digital creators.

The agency has expanded significantly into the creator economy, helping influencers secure brand partnerships, media opportunities, publishing deals, and long-term commercial growth across the UK and international markets.

At the helm is Alex Segal, InterTalent's Managing Director. Alex was appointed MD in 2020, becoming the youngest person ever to hold the role, and has negotiated more than £40 million in talent deals since joining in 2012. As MD he has launched divisions in Brand Partnerships, Comedy, Digital, Events, Gaming and Sport on top of the established Scripted and Unscripted business. He runs a team of about 50 and a roster of around 300 clients while still representing his own clients and writing the Dealmakers newsletter.

Francis Bourgeois went from beloved TikTok trainspotter to co-host of Prime Video's The Grand Tour, alongside YouTube duo Throttle House (James Engelsman and Thomas Holland). The new series dropped all six episodes on 4 September 2026. InterTalent is the master of the British media scene for a reason: it moves talent between digital platforms and broadcast television.

What Alex Segal taught us about saying yes (and no)

I have the privilege of knowing Alex, and I have spoken with him a few times. I am always amazed by how brilliant and intuitive he is, which is probably key to running a business built on promoting people. Most of the knowledge nuggets in this section come straight from those conversations.

When I interviewed Alex for our Industry Voices editorial, he was quick to puncture the Hollywood fantasy: “It’s not Entourage.” It is, in his words, a lot of emails, messages and phone calls. But two frameworks from that conversation are gold for anyone pitching a talent manager:

• The Two-out-of-Three Rule. Every opportunity gets judged on enjoyment, credibility and money. If it ticks two of the three, it is worth doing.
• Active vs. reactive scouting. Reactive scouting is stumbling across talent in your feed. Active scouting starts with a taste: you decide who you want, then go into research mode to find them.

Steal this: Score your own offer before you send it. If your budget is modest, you cannot win on money, so make sure you clearly win on enjoyment and credibility. An offer that only wins on one of three will get a polite no, however well it is written. And borrow the second idea too: define your taste (the exact creator profile) first, then use data to find the matches, instead of waiting for the algorithm to serve you someone.

6. Underscore Talent: Gaming and STEM Specialists    

Underscore Talent was launched in January 2021 by the Studio71 co-founders Michael Green, Reza Izad and Dan Weinstein, and it operates where the attention economy is arguably the stickiest, gaming and live streaming. It is one of the leading agencies representing gaming creators, livestreamers, YouTubers, and digital personalities, and it focuses on long-term career development alongside brand partnerships.

Its gaming division, launched in June 2021, now sits next to a dedicated division for STEM creators, which is rare in this business. In late 2022, TheSoul Publishing took a majority stake.

A good picture of what a STEM-minded brand integration looks like is Michael Reeves' "Building a Laser Baby" for Amazon Prime Video, which won the Branded Video category at the 2021 Streamy Awards. The brand supplied the premise; the creator supplied the chaos.

Steal this: With gaming and STEM audiences, never write a script. Brief the outcome ("show the product surviving a ridiculous challenge") and let the creator design the challenge. These communities spot a read-aloud ad from a mile away.

7. Loaded: Twitch-First Gaming Management

Born in the gaming world in 2016, Loaded has evolved into one of the largest creator management companies, representing gaming creators, streamers, podcasters, and digital talent while offering strategic consulting and commercial partnerships.

Loaded understands the intersection of endemic brands (hardware, energy drinks) and non-endemic brands (luxury cars, fashion) trying to capture the elusive, ad-blocking gamer demographic.

Look at how Loaded itself is measured. Its pitch is not followers but hours watched: 277.6 million of them, from about 35 creators. That is the language gaming marketers speak.

Steal this: When you talk to a gaming rep, ask for hours watched and average concurrent viewers instead of follower count. They show how many people actually sit through a stream, which is what your integration will live or die on.

8. Whalar Talent (Sixteenth): Long-Term Creator Careers

Part of the broader Whalar Group, Whalar Talent focuses on long-term creator representation. The agency helps creators build sustainable businesses through brand partnerships, intellectual property development, product launches, and media expansion. Whalar acts as a strategic incubator, often pairing highly creative, visually stunning talent with blue-chip brands that need to modernise their narrative without losing their prestige.

One thing to know before you email them: in October 2024, Whalar Group acquired UK management company Sixteenth and merged it with Whalar Talent. The combined division operates under the Sixteenth name, led by Victoria Bachan. If your contact list still says "Whalar Talent", it may be out of date.

Sixteenth's own history is a case study in long-term thinking. Its "our story" page says that clients such as Unjaded Jade and Ryan Libbey have stayed with it for more than five years, and that Eleanor Neale's podcast Usual Disclaimer hit number one in Spotify's True Crime chart, a career extension that goes well beyond brand posts.

Steal this: Ask any long-term-minded agency, "What is the 12-month arc for this creator?" Then propose a campaign that fits inside it (a launch, a series, a podcast season) instead of a one-off post that sits outside it.

9. Viral Nation Talent: Scale Across 35 Verticals

Operating alongside its massive influencer marketing agency counterpart, Viral Nation Talent represents creators across entertainment, gaming, sports, technology, beauty, and lifestyle. Its integrated model combines talent representation with global brand campaign opportunities. 

Because it has a 360-degree view of the industry, acting as both the buyer-facing agency and the seller-facing talent firm, it holds a lot of data on what a fair price and a winning campaign structure look like.

Scale cuts both ways. Viral Nation notes that its own aggregate follower total is a sum across creators and platforms, so it measures roster footprint rather than unique audience. That is a useful reminder for every buyer, a big roster does not equal big unique reach.

Steal this: Two questions for any agency that sits on both sides of the table: "How do you handle conflicts between your brand clients and your creators?" and "Can you share audience overlap across the creators you are recommending?" (Our guide to audience overlap shows how to check it yourself.)

10. Select Management Group: Lifestyle Ambassadorships and Production

Select Management Group represents many of the world's most influential lifestyle digital creators across TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and emerging platforms. The agency specialises in endorsements, product launches, entertainment projects, and long-term business development.

SMG is the architect behind some of the most lucrative, multi-year beauty and fashion ambassadorships in the industry. They understand that brand equity is a marathon, not a sprint.

SelectNext co-produced This Is Everything: Gigi Gorgeous, the documentary that premiered at Sundance in 2017 before streaming on YouTube Red and went on to win the Streamy for Best Feature. The same arm helped develop a mascara line for the McKnight sisters. That is what business development looks like when a manager also owns a production shop.

Steal this: Ask any lifestyle-focused agency whether it has a production or product arm. If it does, you can pitch something bigger than a post: a mini-series, a limited collection, a co-created range.

Which Agency for Which Goal? A Quick Cheat Sheet

Bookmark this one. It is the 30-second version of everything above, starting with a map of who sits where.

The Anatomy of the 20% Commission

There is an elephant in the Zoom room, and it is usually wearing a quarter-zip sweater and asking about usage rights. Let us talk about the talent manager's commission.

Marketers often grumble about the typical 10% to 25% cut that managers and agents take from a deal. The knee-jerk reaction is to view the manager as a tollbooth, an unnecessary friction point standing between the brand's money and the creator's audience.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the industry. First, the commission generally comes out of the creator's earnings, not on top of your invoice, so going around the manager does not save you a cent. Second, a good talent manager is not a tollbooth; they are a translator, a legal scholar, a strategist, and a bad-cop rolled into one. Here is what that commission actually pays for, and why brands should be relieved these professionals exist.

1. Translating Brand-Speak into Influencer-Speak

Marketers speak in KPIs, ROAS, brand safety guidelines, and deliverable timelines. Creators speak in vibes, algorithmic hooks, community sentiment, and creative flow. A talent manager is the Rosetta Stone. They take a dry, 14-page creative brief and distill it into an actionable hook that the creator can actually execute without alienating their audience.

2. Guarding the Intellectual Property

Today's creator managers do far more than negotiate sponsorships; they protect the creator's likeness like a dragon hoarding gold. Brands love to slip phrases like "usage rights in perpetuity across all known and unknown digital channels" into standard contracts. A talent manager spots this poison pill immediately.

They understand that a creator's face and voice are their entire business, and that letting a brand run ads with them forever can destroy their ability to sign future deals in that category. Our guide to negotiating influencer content rights goes deeper.

3. Filtering the Noise

For every legitimate brand deal a top-tier creator receives, there are a hundred lowball offers, scams, equity-only gambles, and logistical nightmares in their inbox. The manager acts as a highly calibrated filter. If a brand reaches the creator's desk, it is because the manager has already vetted the company, ensured the budget aligns with the creator's floor rate, and confirmed the product is brand-safe.

4. Building Long-Term Equity over Short-Term Cash

A creator left to their own devices might take a quick payout from a fast-fashion brand. A manager looks at the board three moves ahead. They counsel the creator to turn down the fast cash to maintain a premium positioning, paving the way for a long-term ambassadorship with a legacy luxury house six months later.

They diversify revenue streams beyond platform monetisation, pushing the creator into podcasting, publishing, or launching consumer brands. (That is Alex Segal's "least regret" mindset in action: choose the path whose worst case you can live with.)

5. The Bad Cop Dynamic

Content creation is an incredibly parasocial and intimate process. Creators want to be liked. They want to please the brand. This makes them terrible negotiators. The manager absorbs the friction. They are the ones who push back on unreasonable revision requests, demand net-30 payment terms instead of net-90, and enforce late fees.

They preserve the positive creative relationship between the brand and the talent by handling all the financial and legal hostilities themselves.

The Marketer's Cheat Sheet: How to Work with Talent Agencies

If you treat a talent manager like an obstacle, your influencer campaigns will stall, your emails will be ignored, and your budgets will be rejected. If you treat them like a strategic partner, you unlock the full commercial potential of their roster.

Here is a practical, stealable framework for engaging with creator agencies. We will call it the C.A.S.T. Framework: Casting call, Alignment brief, Sign-off, Track and thank.

C: The Casting Call (Do Your Homework)

Do not bring a knife to a gunfight, and do not bring a mass-BCC pitch to a top-tier agency.

When you approach a company like UTA or Night, you need to know exactly who you want, why you want them, and what your budget parameters are. Agencies represent dozens, sometimes hundreds, of creators. If you send an email saying, "We are looking for lifestyle influencers for our new app," you will be routed to the bottom of the pile.

The Fix: Use data to build your casting call. Dive into audience demographics, historical brand collaboration performance, and geo-concentration. When you email the manager, your pitch should read: "We are targeting [Creator X] because their audience has a 45% overlap with our target demographic of female professionals in the UK. We have a budget of $X for a three-month narrative integration." (The 45% is an illustrative number; use your own.)

Specificity signals professionalism. It tells the manager you are a serious buyer, not a window shopper.

Copy, paste and adapt: the five-line agency pitch

1. Subject line: [Brand] x [Creator]: [one-line campaign idea] ([budget range])
2. Why this creator: one sentence with one data point (audience fit, past performance or brand affinity).
3. The idea: what you want to make together, in two sentences, with the format named.
4. The terms at a glance: deliverables, timeline, usage window, exclusivity (if any) and budget range.
5. The ask: "Could we take 15 minutes on [day] to see whether this fits [Creator]'s calendar and goals?"

A: The Alignment Brief (A Sandbox, Not a Straitjacket)

The fastest way to kill a deal is to hand an influenceer a script they are forced to read verbatim. Talent managers hate this because it performs terribly, damages the creator's credibility, and ultimately results in the brand complaining about poor ROI.

The Fix: Give the agency a sandbox. Outline the non-negotiables (brand safety guardrails, specific product features that must be shown, the call-to-action). Then, leave the creative execution up to the talent.

Say to the manager: "Here are the three key messages we need to land. How would [Creator X] organically weave this into their current content formats?" This collaborative approach enlists the manager as a co-strategist. They know what works for their client's audience better than your creative director does. Trust the localised expertise. If you need a template, our guide to crafting an effective influencer brief has one.

S: The Sign-Off (Understanding the Levers)

Price is what you pay; value is what you get. When an agency quotes a rate that makes your procurement team sweat, do not immediately walk away. Understand that the initial rate is a starting point, and there are multiple levers you can pull to make the deal work for both sides.

For numbers to anchor on, our guides to influencer rate cards and how much to pay for a Reel are good starting points.

T: Track and Thank (The Debrief Nobody Does)

Here is the step almost every brand skips, and the one that quietly separates the brands agencies call back from the ones they screen. After the campaign, send the manager a short debrief within a week, what worked, what the numbers were, what you would do next. Managers are building a case for their creator's next deal too, and your results are ammunition.

The Fix: Put the debrief in the calendar before the campaign starts. A good one covers four things: reach and engagement, conversions or the metric you promised, the best-performing piece of content, and an invitation to book the next window. Our guide on how influencer reporting shapes your next negotiation shows why this pays off.

Ten questions to ask on your first call

1. Who represents this creator (agent, manager, lawyer), and who signs off on a brand deal?
2. Is the representation exclusive, or does the creator also work with other managers?
3. What categories does the creator already have exclusivity commitments in?
4. What usage rights and whitelisting windows do they normally grant, and at what price?
5. How do you handle conflicts if your agency also works with brands?
6. What is the approval process, and how many revision rounds are included?
7. What are your standard payment terms and invoicing entity?
8. Can you share past campaign results and audience data for this creator?
9. Which other creators on the roster would fit this brief?
10. What would a successful partnership look like for the creator, six months from now?

Trend Analysis: Where the Industry is Heading

To understand the talent management scene today, you have to look at the macroeconomic shifts reshaping the creator economy. We are witnessing four massive trends that dictate how these agencies operate.

Trend 1: The B2B Creator Revolution

Influence is no longer confined to beauty tutorials and gaming streams. The creator economy has matured into a multi-hundred-billion-dollar infrastructure that is quietly reshaping how B2B buying decisions get made.

Talent managers are now representing enterprise software experts, RevOps leaders, and supply chain analysts. A B2B creator might only have 15,000 followers on LinkedIn, but if 800 of those followers are Chief Technology Officers actively evaluating SaaS solutions, that creator wields immense commercial power. Agencies are adapting by learning the nuances of B2B sales cycles, lead generation, and pipeline attribution. We dug into this in our piece on B2B influencer marketing and LinkedIn creators.

Trend 2: Equity Over Cash

The smartest creators (and their managers) are tired of renting their audiences to brands for a flat fee. They want to own the house. We are seeing a shift toward equity deals, performance-based upside, and joint ventures.

Illustratively, instead of taking $50,000 for a sponsored post, a manager might negotiate $20,000 upfront plus a 2% equity stake in the startup, or a revenue share on all products sold through the creator's unique funnel. Agencies are morphing into venture studios, assessing the long-term viability of the brands pitching them, rather than just cashing the checks. Night, with its venture arm, is the clearest example on this list.

Trend 3: The Flight to Quality (and Brand Safety)

As marketing budgets shift from experimental line items to institutional spend, the scrutiny on brand safety  has skyrocketed. Procurement teams want guarantees. Talent managers have adapted by running rigorous audits on their own clients. They scrub old tweets, manage public relations, and ensure their creators can pass a corporate compliance check. The agencies that thrive are the ones that can look a Fortune 500 CMO in the eye and guarantee their talent will not become a crisis communication case study tomorrow.

Trend 4: Consolidation

Rosters are being bought and merged at speed. Night acquired LFM Management (2023) and Bottle Rocket (2024). Loaded acquired GG Talent Group (2024). Whalar Group acquired Sixteenth (2024). For brands, the practical consequence is simple: the name on the email signature may not be the name on the contract.

When the System Shifts: Three Real Reshuffles

Theory is great, but reality is where the contact lists break. Here are three real shifts that show why "who represents whom" is a moving target.

1. MrBeast and Night (May 2024). MrBeast had worked with Night since February 2018. In May 2024, Semafor reported that he had told the company it would no longer be his primary talent management agency. Business Insider framed it as a wake-up call that creators will not always need middlemen.

Lesson: representation is a snapshot, not a fact. Re-check before every campaign.

2. Whalar Talent becomes Sixteenth (October 2024). Two management teams became one, under a different name.

Lesson: if your CRM still says "Whalar Talent," you may be emailing a department that no longer exists under that name.

3. Rosters arrive by acquisition. When Night bought LFM, Kai Cenat and the AMP collective arrived in one deal. When Loaded bought GG Talent Group, more than 90 creators did.

Lesson: a creator you reached through one firm last year may sit with a different one today.

Roster-hygiene checklist (steal it):

• Log the creator's agent, manager and PR contact separately in your creator database, with the date you last confirmed each.
• Re-verify representation before every new campaign, not once a year.
• Note exclusivities and usage windows in the record so nobody has to dig through emails later.
• Record who responded, how fast, and how it went so the next campaign starts warm.

If you manage a lot of creators, an influencer relationship management (IRM) tool with custom fields and notes makes this a habit instead of a chore. We covered the same problem from the agency side in our guide to scaling rosters without losing the personal touch.

The Social Selling System: Finding the Right Match

So, how do you operationalize all of this? How do you ensure you are reaching out to the right agency, for the right creator, with the right offer?

This is where a systemic approach replaces gut feeling. Relying on your intuition to navigate a $313 billion market is like trying to navigate the London Underground blindfolded. You might eventually get where you are going, but it is going to be painful, expensive, and you will probably end up in Croydon.

You need technology to map the scene. Before you ever draft an email to UTA or Viral Nation, check five things:

1. True engagement rate: not just likes, but how the audience actually responds.
2. Audience location and demographics: where the followers actually live, and whether they match your customer.
3. Audience quality: the share of real, active followers (see our guide to vetting influencers).
4. Audience overlap: whether the creators on your shortlist are reaching the same people twice.
5. Sponsored-content saturation: whether the feed is organically pristine or full of competitors.

When you use a platform that visualises these metrics, you change the power dynamic of the negotiation. You are no longer asking the agency to tell you what the creator is worth; you are coming to the table with a data-backed valuation. You are speaking the manager's language: the language of actionable intelligence. Influencity's discovery and analysis features do exactly this, and the IRM keeps the results next to every conversation.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does an influencer talent manager do?

A talent manager guides a creator's career and business. That usually means vetting and negotiating brand partnerships, overseeing contracts and usage rights, planning long-term strategy, and building revenue beyond the platform, such as podcasts, products and publishing.

What is the difference between a talent agent, a talent manager and an influencer marketing agency?

A talent agent mainly sells opportunities for the creator. A talent manager plans and runs the creator's career. An influencer marketing agency works for brands, planning and running campaigns. Some companies, such as Viral Nation, run both a marketing agency and a talent business, so it is worth asking how they manage the two.

How much commission do talent managers take?

Typically between 10% and 25% of what the creator earns, depending on the firm and the services included. It generally comes out of the creator's fee rather than being added to the brand's invoice, but it is built into the rate you are quoted.

How do I contact a creator's manager or agent?

Start by confirming who currently represents the creator (check their profile, the agency's roster page and press coverage), then send a short, specific pitch with one data point, a clear idea, your budget range and one question. Our five-line pitch template above is a good starting point.

Which are the biggest creator talent agencies in 2026?

Among the most influential are Night, UTA, CAA, WME, InterTalent Rights Group, Underscore Talent, Loaded, Whalar Talent (now operating as part of Sixteenth), Viral Nation Talent and Select Management Group. Which one is right for you depends on the creator category, the platform and the kind of partnership you want.