By Lane Florsheim | Photography by Damien Maloney for WSJ. Magazine
KATE BARTLETT, a 24-year-old influencer with 1.6 million TikTok followers, flips through a data-filled deck with pale-pink manicured fingers, a silver-and-navy Rolex gleaming on her wrist.
Three talent executives sit across from her at a blond-wood table in a ninth-floor conference room overlooking Los Angeles's Hollywood Hills, pitching business ideas for the year ahead. Would the creator, who is pursuing an M.B.A. at NYU, be interested in getting a teaching certification so she could lead a course on influencing? What about landing an editorial director position at a magazine? Or launching an accessories line?
Bartlett says she's not sure she can create a product that people "really need." Well, what about a TV show? Raina Penchansky, co-head of the Creators division at United Talent Agency (UTA), suggests reviving a beloved fashion program that's long been off the air. "We should see if there's any way that we can buy or figure out how to license it and bring it back," she says, "because Kate would be perfect for that."
These days, there is practically no limit to what influencers can do -- and how much they can earn for it. They're starring in Netflix series, launching pop careers and running brands that rake in nine figures a year. Those at the top of their game are now up against actors and athletes for the biggest endorsement deals. They've appeared in Super Bowl commercials, staked out lucrative investment opportunities and scored ambassadorships for some of the biggest companies in the world. In 2015, influencer marketing was a $1.7 billion global industry; by 2025, it topped $32 billion, according to research company Statista. When Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research last sized up the creator economy as a whole, in 2023, it put it at $250 billion.
"The tagline for the creator economy in 2026 is, 'We've arrived,' " says Ali Berman, 38. Together, she and Penchansky, 48, lead a division of UTA that's been around for 20 years and now represents about 1,000 clients.
Berman and Penchansky have been working with influencers for longer than most people have been using that word, and ages before most of the entertainment industry -- or most anyone -- was taking content creators seriously.
"For so long, people thought it was just the most effortless throwaway career," Berman says.
As an agent for Gen Z stars like Alix Earle, Emma Chamberlain, Olivia Jade Giannulli and Jake Shane, Berman and her team work on deals that start in the five-figure range and go up to nine figures. On the management side, Penchansky is involved with aspects of her clients' day-to-day and long-term strategies that aren't necessarily related to monetization. In 2010, Penchansky co-founded Digital Brand Architects $(DBA)$, an influencer management company that was acquired by UTA in 2019; she is currently its CEO. Beauty founder Patrick Starrr, fashion designer Aimee Song and the Home Edit's organizational gurus Clea Shearer and Joanna Teplin are some of DBA's clients.
Shearer says Penchansky has an almost-psychic sense for what kinds of partnerships will make a brand successful. "If we say, 'We're thinking about reaching out to XYZ,' she'll be like, 'No, don't do it. That business is going to be dead,' and she was right." (That same sense guides the choices Penchansky makes for DBA's roster: The first two times Shearer and Teplin reached out, she said they weren't ready for DBA's representation.)
Ten or 15 years ago, building a social audience was seen as a means to an end, with the goal often being a record deal or acting career. Now Berman and Penchansky believe their clients are building modern media companies across their various platforms. Think of it as Disney, Berman says, but Mickey Mouse is the director, producer and distributor, in addition to being the star.
"I mean," she says, "it's literally the modern-day version of -- "
"Condé Nast," Penchansky says, finishing her sentence.
A COUPLE OF YEARS after graduating from college, Berman joined UTA in 2011 on the television literary team. She found herself diving down rabbit holes on YouTube and blogs when searching for talent. "Do they have a spec script?" her boss would typically ask of these digital upstarts.
"We don't know what that is," she recalled most of the YouTubers saying in response.
But Berman, who has shiny, long brown hair and wears stacks of gold jewelry on her wrists and fingers, had found her passion on the internet. "I figured I should probably go work at one of these tech companies," she says. Instead, she learned that UTA had a burgeoning digital division and quickly switched departments. Creators coalesced from the acquisition of DBA and its merger with UTA's digital, audio and gaming divisions. In 2024, UTA completed "the Bungalows," a three-building, 60,000-square-foot campus in Beverly Hills where Creators is headquartered. Around 100 of its employees work there now, and about 90 more work at DBA's nearby offices.
Berman traces her skills as a negotiator back to her teenage years, when her cellphone would break and she'd go to the Verizon store and come out with a new phone despite the contracts and carriage agreements her parents had signed. "It used to be a point of contention with my dad," she says. "He said, 'I will not walk into another Verizon store with you.' "
Of the early days of the division, Berman says, "We were making these rules up as we go, and our clients were the guinea pigs."
In the burgeoning world of influencer reps, "there were like 15 of us, basically," Penchansky says. "We were all just talking to each other."
When she was 19, Penchansky dropped out of college to work in public relations. "What I didn't love about fashion was there was an innate snobbiness," she says. "You were always being told what was cool by someone." While leading PR at Coach, Penchansky worked on projects with early bloggers such as Man Repeller's Leandra Medine Cohen and Cupcakes and Cashmere's Emily Schuman.
"It was primarily women who were speaking directly to their audience and building from the bottom up," she says.
Earle, one of today's biggest social-media stars, started working with Berman and her team of agents while she was an undergrad at the University of Miami. "I honestly didn't even know what agents were or what they were supposed to do," the 25-year-old influencer says.
What she found was that the relationship went beyond business; she sees her agent as part negotiator, part therapist, part big sister. "One time in New York, I had gotten dinner with Ali and my dad after a project we were working on, and it just felt like family," she says.
When Earle was contemplating a deal with Poppi -- the prebiotic soda company that PepsiCo acquired for $1.95 billion last year -- Berman and her team steered her toward an equity agreement. "Instead of just endorsing the product and doing it as another campaign, she really helped me to think outside the box with that one," Earle says.
Berman was early to the Alix Earle effect. She and Penchansky say UTA is as willing to sign a supernova as an upstart; follower counts are less important than a unique point of view. "Some of my proudest moments of my career are my clients I've worked with since they had 1,000 subscribers on YouTube," Berman says.
PENCHANSKY, who is tall with dark hair and likes to wear bright colors, says she's most drawn to clients who are endearing. "We all have those people in our lives, whether it's from high school or your friends now, where they have this personality where they're sort of oversharing," she says. "And they're always able to tell the story and draw people in. Those are the people who are content creators."
Both Berman and Penchansky operate off the industry-standard commission rates -- 10% of deals for agents, 10% to 20% of overall income for managers. At a time when top creators can earn seven figures for a single sponsored post, it's a lucrative field. It's also one with many women both at the top and throughout the ranks. In the handful of meetings I shadow, nearly all of the UTA and DBA employees are women. (There are, of course, men on the team, such as Berman and Penchansky's third division co-head, Oren Rosenbaum, who oversees audio.)
"Women are in a lot of ways the backbone of this economy," says Penchansky. For creators themselves, "There are spaces that didn't exist for women to create these businesses and these brands 20 years ago."
When signing a new client, Berman says, "We come in with a road map written in pencil." Penchansky says that it's impossible to have a five-year plan in an industry that changes so quickly: "Eighteen months is our runway. Our love language is, OK, what's next?"
Part of their job is to make sure their clients are able to build audiences across multiple platforms, even as those platforms change tastes by the day. "What it requires to make a really good YouTube video in today's world is drastically different than what's required to make a really great TikTok or Instagram post," Berman says.
She sees opportunity in these shifts. "We've been in this space for so long that we've seen platforms come and go. We've seen platforms rapidly change," she says. "So, if anything, I get excited over what others might consider a threat, because it just means the landscape
is evolving."
As Gen Alpha enters the picture -- the oldest are now teenagers -- Berman and Penchansky see almost infinite possibilities. Millennials and even some Gen Zers know a world in which social-media platforms weren't part of their daily lives, but Gen Alpha has grown up immersed.
"They're ready to consume, whether it's the content, whether it's the commerce, whatever it is, they're all in, because it's all they know," Berman says. At the heart of all of that consumption is creativity and business savvy -- the alchemic mix every brand needs to sell in a market like this.
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March 04, 2026 14:03 ET (19:03 GMT)
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