ShortTake is your weekly FYP from The Shorty Awards for quick, new and thought-challenging takes on culture, creativity and TLDR. Things that need a closer look and things that need a completely different perspective.

Will 50% of the budget become the norm for creators?

Unilever sure thinks so. Its new CEO says it’ll spend half of its media dollars on social channels and work with 20x more creators.

There was enough success at 30% of the budget to give it a significant raise. But industry wide, creators account for 6% of the marketing budget on average. Right now this is an encouraging outlier. Unilever is seeing a 150% increase in intent to purchase from UGC. 

There’s a bigger debate coming about the long-term effectiveness of UGC, what it means for established creators, what kind of certainty it provides for brand ROI. But a budget is going up and people are paying attention. 

Every school is going to be looking for an “Aura”

Amir Khan’s NIL Deals Are Rapidly Multiplying

Amir 'Aura' Khan is now the most famous team manager in college sports. And as he follows coach Will Wade to North Carolina State, so will brands and recruits.

As NIL (name, image, likeness) grows, programs will be looking to recreate “Aura.”

It’s fairly obvious now that the most attractive schools will be the ones that pair their NIL athletes with the top content creators at the school to help elevate everyone’s content.

It’s 2025 now and money and exposure both talk louder than fight songs.

Is the movie business becoming too risky?

There’s no better resource for box office talk and inside Hollywood than The Town w/ Matt Belloni. I’ll leave the key points to them. There are still plenty of box office successes in the past couple years. Barbenheimer, Gentelminions and The Smile campaign jump out as moments that tap into culture. But it seems like we’re seeing more and more movies fail and struggle to break even. And at a $270M production cost and years of planning, Snow White was a big swing. 

Will this make studios rethink their marketing? Their budgets? Their IP. 

A running theory I have expressed on the pod recently. What if creator IP is the next Marvel? Sure, the superhero movie benefits greatly from being able to appeal globally to almost any audience. But for a generation that connects to people on their phone – with the success of MrBeast on Amazon – we may be seeing several factors lean toward creators in the next five years – as they may become safer bets with built-in audiences.