In our third guest episode, host Ceci Carloni sits down with David Abbey, co-founder and CEO of Endlss, to explore what happens when you actually listen to what brands need—and rebuild your entire platform around those insights.

🔄 The Pivot That Changed Everything: David shares the story of building Trend, a social marketplace designed to solve multi-brand checkout friction, only to discover creators wouldn't adopt it. Instead of forcing the product, he spent years listening to hundreds of brands describe their real problems: gifting chaos, manual payments through PayPal spreadsheets, communication nightmares at scale. This led to rebuilding from scratch and launching Endlss—an all-in-one influencer and affiliate platform where the entire feature set is free, and brands only pay as they scale.

📈 Where Creator Programs Break: Drawing from migrating brands with 1,000+ creators from competitors, David pinpoints exactly when systems fail: it's not one thing, it's the compound effect. Manual gifting works with 10 creators but breaks at 100. Email communication is fine for 25 but becomes impossible at 500. The 90-10 rule applies—90% of your results come from 10% of creators, but you can't identify them without proper infrastructure. The brands crushing it? Three-year-old digital natives who grew up in this space versus legacy companies still figuring out change management.

🎯 The Alignment Problem: David argues the biggest miss in creator marketing isn't budget or tools—it's alignment. Brands think "we need influencers" instead of "we need influencers aligned with our brand values whose audiences will resonate." He contrasts spray-and-pray approaches (message 100 people, hope for results) with strategic selection (carefully choose 100, introduce yourself, build relationships). One partner agency increased client revenue 80% in a single month by focusing entirely on alignment over volume.

From the hard lessons of building the wrong product to identifying exactly where scale breaks to why AI should accelerate creativity but never replace content—this conversation captures the builder's perspective on what infrastructure the creator economy actually needs.

The Big Three by Influence Weekly: 3 Biggest Stories. 1 Essential Conversation.

In this 2026 kickoff episode, hosts Ceci Carloni and Nii Ahene tackle three stories, two of which were built from original Net Influencer research that reveal where the real gaps and opportunities exist in the creator economy:

🤝 Trust Isn't Declining—It's Just Misunderstood: A Harvard Business Review piece challenges the narrative that influencer trust is eroding, arguing that authenticity gets co-created through interactions between creators, brands, agencies, and audiences. Nii introduces the concept of "Content-Audience Fit" (CAF)—the idea that brands can't just drop the same activation across 100 creators and expect results. The real issue isn't trust disappearing; it's brands treating influencer marketing like a media buy instead of a relationship that requires genuine alignment.

📊 The CRM That Doesn't Exist: Net Influencer's roundtable with 24 industry professionals revealed zero consensus on how agencies manage creator relationships at scale. From Salesforce to Airtable to Google Sheets to custom builds—the infrastructure layer is still wide open. We debate whether this chaos reflects the beauty of a people-first industry or signals massive opportunity for innovation, and why one-size-fits-all tools may never work when workflows vary wildly across platforms, creator types, and campaign objectives.

🗑️ What the Industry Needs to Ditch: In a survey of 77 creator economy professionals, four themes dominated what needs to be left behind: late payments, vanity metrics, broken measurement, and over-scripting creators. But what surprised us most? The near-universal alignment on these issues. We explore what should have made the list (hint: the AI vs. creator debate), why the organic vs. paid divide needs to die, and what excites us most about the industry's continued professionalization heading into 2026.

From reframing trust as a co-creation process to exposing infrastructure gaps to identifying what's holding the industry back—this episode captures both the maturity and growing pains of an ecosystem finding its footing.

The Big Three by Influence Weekly: 3 Biggest Stories. 1 Essential Conversation.

In our second guest episode, host Ceci Carloni sits down with George Mani, Chief Growth Officer at ehko.ai, for a provocative conversation about how creators are becoming the new media companies—and why traditional media's resistance to change is creating the opportunity of a generation.

📺 The Death of Traditional Media: George shares his journey from finance to media, witnessing firsthand how zero-click search, walled gardens restricting traffic, and the expensive TV newsroom model are all fundamentally broken. His work with multicultural publishers revealed a harsh truth: brands showing up only for Heritage Months without year-round authenticity is bad business—and the $1.7 trillion LGBTQ purchasing power proves multicultural isn't niche anymore.

🔥 Creator Burnout & The Pressure Cooker: With media budgets shifting from 10% to 70% flowing through walled gardens, creators face unprecedented pressure from brands expecting unlimited scale at unsustainable rates. George unpacks why the "more is more" advertising mentality doesn't work in the creator economy, how creators receive tens of thousands of DMs daily, and why the industry needs to shift from quantity metrics to quality influence.

🤖 AI as Augmentation, Not Replacement: ehko.ai's mission is to create digital "auras" of creators—not headless avatars, but authentic extensions that handle administrative burden while preserving the human connection that makes influence work. George delivers a bold prediction: within years, AI-generated content will flood social platforms, but this will only make genuine human creators more valuable. He argues AI should automate tedious tasks so creators can focus on what matters: building community and producing content.

From why creators are the new media infrastructure to how brands must fundamentally rethink measurement in the walled garden era to building sustainable economic futures for creators—this conversation captures a watershed moment where the entire media ecosystem is being rebuilt in real time.

The Big Three by Influence Weekly: 3 Biggest Stories. 1 Essential Conversation.