Creator marketing is now a major channel that’s growing faster than the broader advertising market, according to the IAB’s 2025 Internet Advertising Revenue Report. Spending on creator advertising hit $37 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $44 billion this year, as many brands put creators at the center of their media strategies and product development.

But not every brand is moving at the same speed when it comes to working with creators. While small and startup brands have been quick to take advantage of creators, larger companies are much slower to use this channel. The CEO of data firm Gospel Stats told the Wall Street Journal that more than 94% of all brand-sponsored creator videos in 2025 were from small and D2C brands. I talked to Megan Vasquez, director of influencer strategy for creator platform Grin about why it’s taking the big brands so long to utilize this channel and how they can be successful doing so. An excerpt from our conversation is later in this newsletter.

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The curtain may be closing on the network late night comedy/talk show. Last week saw the final episode of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” ending CBS’s 33-year franchise. Colbert’s show had the top ratings in the late-night broadcast spot for years, writes Forbes senior contributor Toni Fitzgerald. And his last show drew 6.7 million viewers, according to preliminary Nielsen data reported in the New York Times—close to three times as many as “The Late Show” drew for the rest of the quarter, and besting all of Colbert’s weeknight shows in his 11-year run in late night.

Colbert said in his closing monologue that his job was not to read the news to the audience, but to “feel the news with you.” And though the circumstances of the show’s cancellation were somewhat suspect—CBS said it was “purely a financial decision” last July, right after Colbert skewered the network for making a seemingly political move to gain President Donald Trump’s approval for a business deal—the celebrity-filled finale seemed to be a swan song for a TV format that is falling out of favor with viewers. In decades past, late night TV had millions more average viewers. The May 2015 final show of Colbert’s predecessor David Letterman drew 13.7 million viewers.

But the media landscape of today is different—and the other late-night hosts who appeared in a bit about a wormhole swallowing up Colbert’s show acknowledged that fact; Seth Meyers quipped, “Without you, where will Americans turn to see a middle-aged white man make jokes about the........

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