Inside the big business of the creator economy, with Ali Berman and Raina Penchansky

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**Nilay Patel** (1:18)
Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. We've had another special episode of Decoder recorded at the Cannes Lion Advertising Festival in the south of France. I'm talking with Ali Berman and Raina Penchansky, who run the Creators Division at United Talent Agency. UTA is an enormous agency. Half the people you've ever heard speak or perform or show up anywhere have UTA agents representing them. For full disclosure, that includes me.
UTA handled the sale of the forthcoming Decoder book, which means I paid them money, making this a reverse conflict of interest.
Now you know.
Anyhow, that has nothing to do with Ali and Raina, whose Creators Division represents some of the biggest creators and influencers in the world. Stars as diverse as Charli D'Amelio and Markiplier, Kai Sanat and Emma Chamberlain, Alex Cooper and Alex Earl. So I really wanted to know how Raina and Ali identify up-and-coming talent, how they work with that talent to build durable businesses, and what the machinations of being a top creator actually look like. After all, all of these folks are running multi-million dollar businesses with several different revenue lines. You'll hear Ali and Raina talk directly about what it takes to build those businesses, what kinds of deals they strike, and how it's all very different than the traditional Hollywood model, where your agent just takes a cut of your movie earnings. Here UTA is helping creators literally launch products, and it's fascinating that the stars of today are going from making media to making products of their own. Not all of them can do it, so I wanted to know how Raina and Ali help their clients make that jump and what makes them successful at it. Of course, we also talked about AI, which was all the rage it can, and the nature of the social platforms themselves, which enable these creator businesses, but can also destabilize them at the drop of a hat. I think you'll find Ali and Raina to be refreshingly chill about all of that, even though they represent some VTubers of their own. There's a lot going on in this one. Ali and Raina have been working with digital talent going back to the blogger days, and they have a lot to say about how it actually works. Okay, Ali Berman and Raina Penchansky, here we go.
Raina Penchansky, Ali Berman, you are the co-heads of the Creators Division at United Talent Agency. Welcome to Decoder.

**Ali Berman** (3:27)
Thank you. Thank you for having us.

**Nilay Patel** (3:29)
Yeah, I am really excited to talk to both of you. I need to disclose right away, I'm a UTA client. This is like a reverse conflict of interest.
Like, I think I pay UTA money, but that's fine. It's a good conflict. I'm hoping it causes a journalism scandal, and this gets shared widely. I am very curious about how the Creators Division works. You guys have been in the game forever. One of our ideas here on Decoder is that the structure of organizations tells you a lot, and Creators has been reorganized. You guys are the new heads. It started in 2024 We're here at Cannes. It's creators everywhere here. They are the future of advertising. There's so much money floating around this festival and in advertising. Tell me how UTA works with Creators, how this division is structured, your backgrounds, how we got here.