Influencer and Celebrity Management for D2C Brands

4.2x

Avg. CPM lift vs. mega-influencer

22%

Seeding post-through rate

2.5%

Engagement floor we will accept

0

FTC issues since 2022

Why this service exists

You paid a mega-influencer $40,000. The post got 900,000 views and sold 38 units.

Every D2C founder under $10M ARR has heard this pitch: "Get a 2M-follower creator and watch sales explode." The math rarely works. The audience is too broad, the CPM is too high, the trust is too thin. Tier-2 creators (10K to 500K) have smaller reach and far better economics. We build programs around them, plus real celebrity work through editorial channels, not pay-for-post brokers.

You paid $20,000 for a creator with 1.2M followers. Post-purchase survey: 12 people said they came from that post.
Your agency brought a "shortlist" of 40 creators from a database tool. None of them matched your buyer.
Your last campaign had three FTC violations that your agency did not flag.
You sent free product to 200 creators. Nobody posted. Nobody emailed. You do not know why.
You want a celebrity product mention. Every broker quoted $250,000 for a single Instagram post. There is a cheaper way.

How we run influencer and celebrity

Five layers. Built to compound.

Creator vetting

Engagement rate vs. follower count (2.5 percent minimum), audience geography, sponsored-post history, and a brand-safety scan on six months of captions. We rule out anyone whose feed has red flags a client would not want to be associated with. No database black-box. Human eyes.
Brief writing

Briefs lead with hooks the creator could actually say, not marketing-speak the brand wishes they would say. Three to five optional angles per brief. Clear guardrails on what not to claim. The brief is short (one page). The call where we walk the creator through it is long (45 minutes).
FTC-clean contracting

Every contract has: required disclosure language in a spot that will not be cut, usage rights clearly bounded (paid social only, or paid plus whitelisting, or full buyout), a payment clause that kills the fee if disclosure rules are broken, and a kill-fee if the brand cancels. Boring, but zero FTC issues since 2022.
Seeding programs

Unpaid sends to 30 to 80 creators with a personal note and no post requirement. Post-through rate averages 15 to 25 percent. Those organic posts are evidence, and they become the raw material for paid amplification (whitelisting) later, at a fraction of paid-post cost.
Celebrity outreach via PR cycles

Instead of paying a broker $250,000 for a celebrity Instagram post, we work the editorial side: product sends to celebrity publicists, placement in Apartment Therapy's celebrity interview column, mentions inside a People profile. A "Zendaya says this is her favorite" inside a magazine often outperforms a paid post, and costs a quarter as much.

Deliverables

What you get, named.

Shows up in your Notion board across the 90-day campaign, and monthly on the retainer.

Creator shortlist of 20 to 40 vetted names with rationale
Four-part vetting memo per creator
Three brief templates per campaign
FTC-clean master contract plus per-creator variants
Seeding plan with 30 to 80 recipients and personal notes
Unique promo codes and UTM links per creator
Whitelisting plan for top-performing organic posts
Celebrity publicist outreach log
30-day post-campaign sell-through report with halo-effect caveat

What we do not do

The shortcuts we skip.

We will

Show you the vetting memo for every creator we propose.
Write the brief so the creator sounds like themselves, not your brand.
Run seeding programs first, paid second.
Whitelist an organic post before paying for a new one.
Pass creator fees through at cost with invoices visible.

We will not

Buy follower counts. Not ours, not a creator's.
Run campaigns without #ad disclosure in a clear spot.
Pitch a creator whose audience is not in your market.
Mark up creator fees by 40 percent and call it "talent management."
Promise a celebrity will post for a flat fee. That is not how celebrity actually works.

Creator tiers

Where we lean, and why.

Nano · 1K to 10K

Seeding and community.

Great for gifting programs and local operator work. Too small for paid campaigns unless you have 50+ of them at once. Sometimes the best review video comes from a nano you would not have found.

Tier-2 · 10K to 500K

The sweet spot.

Highest engagement, best CPM, strongest trust. 80 percent of our paid work runs here. A creator with 85K engaged followers regularly outperforms one with 1.2M passive followers on conversion.

Macro · 500K to 2M

Reach plays.

Useful for top-of-funnel brand awareness when a D2C brand is scaling past $10M ARR. Usually one macro per quarter layered on a tier-2 bench. Not where we start.

Mega · 2M+

Rarely worth it.

For under-$10M ARR brands, mega-influencer CPMs almost never pencil. We will say no and recommend a tier-2 cohort with the same budget. Mega works for CPG brands and major retail launches; we do not chase that tier.

Celebrity · editorial

Through PR, not paid.

Product sends to publicists, editorial mentions in People, Vogue, GQ, Apartment Therapy. A celebrity name inside a magazine story carries weight a paid Instagram post cannot buy, at a fraction of the cost.

TikTok native · variable

For local operators.

A tier-2 TikTok creator in your city can drive foot traffic to a salon, dental group, or HVAC operator in ways Instagram rarely does. We run a local operator creator program with one partnership per quarter.

A D2C founder's note

"We spent $60,000 with a mega-influencer agency and moved 180 units. GetDigitize ran a 22-creator tier-2 program for $38,000 and moved 1,400 units in the first 30 days. Same category, same product."
Founder, home-goods D2C brand. Name on request.

Every D2C founder we talk to has been pitched a mega-influencer deal. Most have run at least one. Most are quietly disappointed with the outcome but cannot articulate why. The why is: the CPM math does not work under $10M ARR, and trust at 2M followers is diluted to a level where a single post does not move a buyer.

For D2C brands

Best for. Not best for.

Fit check.

Best for

D2C brands between $500K and $10M ARR launching into a consumer category.
Beauty, home, food, apparel, wellness, pet, baby, and consumer-tech brands.
Multi-location local operators running a seasonal campaign in-market.
Consumer launches where a press hit needs a creator wave to amplify.
Brands that have tried mega-influencer and want a different economic model.

Not best for

B2B SaaS with a 6-month sales cycle and a 20-person buying committee.
Brands with no ecommerce or retail channel to measure sell-through.
Categories where creator endorsements are restricted (gambling, some financial products, some regulated health).
Teams that want "viral" and will not accept 22 percent post-through as a success metric.
Brands under $200K ARR where the creator budget cannot buy a meaningful cohort.

Pricing

Retainer or add-on.

MONTHLY

Creator Program Retainer

$3,500 / mo + creator pass-through

Ongoing creator program: vetting, briefs, contracts, seeding, reporting. Creator fees pass through at cost.

See full plan

PROJECT

Launch add-on

+$2,500 / campaign

Add a 12 to 20 creator wave to a launch campaign. Briefs, seeding, contracts, and sell-through tracking included.

See launch plan

Recent work

Creator programs that moved real units.

DENTAL CHAIN · LOCAL CREATOR WAVE

BrightSmile Dental: four Houston TikTok creators, 41% booking lift

A 12-clinic dental group ran a regional press push plus four local tier-2 TikTok creators (80K to 320K followers). New-patient bookings jumped 41 percent in 90 days. The creators drove the booking spike, the press drove the trust.

Read case study

SERIES A SAAS · EXEC CREATOR PROGRAM

Northbeam AI: 8 B2B LinkedIn creators during launch quarter

A 22-person AI infra startup paired the TechCrunch launch with 8 vetted LinkedIn tier-2 creators in the analytics space. Organic amplification generated 240+ inbound demo requests tied to creator posts.

Read case study

Common questions

Answered before the call.

Why focus on tier-2 creators instead of mega-influencers?

Creators between 10K and 500K followers post CPMs that are 3 to 8 times better than creators over 1M. Their audiences trust them as a peer, not a celebrity. For D2C brands under $10M ARR, tier-2 is where the actual unit movement happens. We will run celebrity on top of that, not instead of it.

How do you vet creators?

Every creator we propose gets a four-part check: engagement rate vs. follower count (floor 2.5 percent), audience geography (must match your buyer), sponsored-post history (we read six months of their feed), and brand-safety scan (we review captions for anything disqualifying). No black-box tool. Human eyes, notes in the file.

Do you handle FTC compliance?

Yes. Every contract includes FTC endorsement guidelines, required disclosure language (#ad not buried at the end), and a clause that kills the payment if disclosure rules are broken. We have never had an FTC issue on a client campaign, and we would not run one we could not disclose cleanly.

What is a seeding program?

We send product to 30 to 80 creators unpaid, with a personal note and no post requirement. About 15 to 25 percent post organically anyway because they actually like the product. That gives you real endorsements instead of paid posts, and those organic posts become the raw material for paid amplification later.

What about celebrity work?

Celebrity engagements run on a different cycle. We briefly outreach through PR publicists for editorial opportunities (interviews, mentions, product send-ins) rather than paid endorsements. A celebrity citation in an Apartment Therapy piece or a People interview often outperforms a paid celebrity Instagram post.

Can you prove creator ROI?

We set unique promo codes and UTM links for every paid creator and track sell-through for 30 days post. For seeding, we track organic brand mentions and direct traffic. Creator ROI is not always clean (halo effects, delayed buys) but we will never tell you the work "moved the brand" without showing the data.

What do creators typically cost?

Tier-2 creators (10K to 500K) run $300 to $8,000 per post depending on platform, exclusivity, and usage rights. Our fee is the management and strategy on top, not a markup on creator fees. Creator pay passes through at cost with invoices you can see.

Related services

What pairs with creator work.

01

Tier-2 creators that move units. Celebrity briefings that land.