The creator economy has flipped: Why the West is now looking East

For years, the marketing industry has assumed innovation flows in one direction. Ideas are born in Silicon Valley, New York or London before eventually making their way into Australia and Southeast Asia

But co-founder and chief product and strategy officer at Fabulate, creator marketing is turning that assumption on its head

Speaking at MARKETING-INTERACTIVE’S inaugural Expand conference in Sydney, Powell argued Southeast Asia has quietly become the world’s most advanced testing ground for creator marketing, social commerce and AI-powered campaign orchestration. Increasingly, he said, Western brands are looking East to understand what comes next

“For a long time, the model was simple. Innovation started in the West and then moved outward,” Powell said. “But in creator marketing, that flow is starting to reverse

SEE MORE: TikTok and Fabulate team up to scale creator content

“The most sophisticated thinking around creator scale, social commerce, livestreaming, affiliate ecosystems and campaign orchestration is now coming out of Southeast Asia.”

Goodbye celebrity creators

One of the clearest examples is how brands choose creators. For years, the formula was straightforward: find the biggest influencer the budget could stretch to and build the campaign around them

Recommendation algorithms have fundamentally changed that equation. Rather than rewarding follower counts alone, platforms increasingly favour relevance, engagement and creative quality. As a result, brands are moving away from celebrity creators towards larger networks of micro and mid-tier talent capable of producing more authentic, niche content

Powell said Southeast Asia recognised that shift earlier than most markets

“To do creator marketing properly, you need both quality and quantity,” he said. “It is no longer feasible to put your entire budget behind one creator, produce one hero asset and hope it carries the campaign.”

Instead, brands need multiple creators producing different ideas across different audiences, giving campaigns enough creative diversity to optimise performance as algorithms and consumer behaviour continue to evolve. That trend is now beginning to emerge in Australia

Fabulate’s inaugural Australian Fab 100, based on search behaviour from brands and agencies using its discovery platform, showed marketers increasingly looking beyond the biggest names in favour of creators offering stronger relevance and creative fit

Creators become infrastructure

The shift extends well beyond content creation. According to Powell, one of Southeast Asia’s biggest competitive advantages is the way creators have become embedded throughout the customer journey rather than simply appearing at the end of a campaign

Creators are not treated as a layer added to the end of a campaign. Their role extends well beyond a social post. 

“They can become the event host, the product educator, the livestream presenter, the affiliate, the se.”

That model has helped fuel the rapid growth of social commerce across the region, where creators are increasingly responsible not only for awareness, but for driving consideration, conversion and customer feedback

Powell pointed to TikTok Beauty Fest as an example. Rather than building a traditional influencer campaign around a single event, the activation connected 68 creators producing 132 pieces of content alongside livestreams, brand activations, media events and a large-scale consumer experience

The campaign blurred the lines between content, commerce and community in ways many Western brands are only beginning to explore

Scale creates a new AI challenge

Ironically, the more successful creator marketing becomes, the harder it is to manage

Campaigns involving hundreds of creators across multiple countries, languages and platforms create enormous operational complexity

Reviewing creator histories. Checking brand safety. Approving content. Monitoring compliance

Those tasks simply don’t scale manually. That’s where Powell believes AI becomes genuinely valuable

Rather than replacing marketers, AI should remove repetitive administrative work so people can focus on better creative decisions

“The point isn’t to replace marketers,” he said. “It’s to remove the repetitive work, so people can spend their time making better creative decisions instead of checking the same compliance rules hundreds of times.”

Powell said Southeast Asia has become an ideal proving ground for those technologies because of the sheer complexity involved in coordinating creator campaigns across diverse markets

Why agentic AI matters

While much of the industry’s attention has centred on generative AI, Powell believes the bigger opportunity lies with agentic AI

“We’ve already started using agentic solutions within our campaigns and platforms to further remove the laborious parts of creator marketing,” he said

“This is not about replacing human effort. It is about augmenting it.”

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In practice, that means AI agents capable of coordinating creator outreach, approvals, compliance and optimisation around the clock while marketers remain focused on strategy, creativity and judgement

“If we can make it work here,” Powell said, “we can make it work anywhere.”

Three lessons for brands entering Asia

Powell closed with three pieces of advice for Australian brands looking north. The first was straightforward: invest in local teams

“Cultural nuance and language are just the first step,” he said. “The next part is relationships.”

Second, brands need to move beyond treating localisation as translation. 

“If you think translation is localisation then you’ve already missed the brief,” Powell said. “Google Translate can do that, but you miss the true understanding of how products are actually viewed, cultural references or even the uniqueness of purchase behaviours.”

Finally, he argued marketers should rethink the role creators play altogether

In the West we are only just starting to grapple with the power of creator marketing. In Southeast Asia they’ve already unlocked it to its true potential

For Powell, creators are no longer simply another media channel. 

“They are the infrastructure layer that connects everything together – from marketing to shopfront and beyond.”

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Source: www.marketing-interactive.com