The Publish Press reports that WME launched Creator Labs last week as an in-house team to help creator clients grow their media businesses, and that the outlet spoke with Creator Labs general manager Joanne Lee about the gap the team is meant to fill. Lee said building and managing an audience at scale takes strategy, programming, production, analytics, platform expertise and consistent execution, which Creator Labs brings together in a bespoke, high-touch model built around each client's needs and ambitions. According to The Publish Press, Lee said WME hired 11 in-house staff members working across Creator Labs and its new Creator Sales team, with immediate plans to hire eight more.

The Publish Press reports that Creator Sales will handle brand partnerships for clients including comedian Julian Shapiro-Barnum's YouTube late-night project Outside Tonight and Manchester City striker Erling Haaland, whose WME-helped YouTube channel has grown to around 4.5 million subscribers per WeRSM. As a fresh example, The Publish Press says Creator Labs helped former MSNBC correspondent Joy Reid launch a commentary YouTube channel that gained 500K subscribers and 40M+ views in the past year. WeRSM adds that WME also invested in video strategy and operations company Astra Media, which The Publish Press notes helped with Kevin Hart's digital strategy.

What makes this striking is that an agency built on representation is now hiring production, programming and analytics staff to operate channels directly. WeRSM frames the shift bluntly: creators increasingly own the audience relationship, the distribution channel and the commercial upside, so representation is no longer only about securing deals around someone else's platform but about helping build the platform itself. The Publish Press reports WME declined to share how much funding it is putting into Creator Labs, making the headcount expansion the clearest public signal of the agency's commitment to running the creator business rather than just brokering it.

According to The Publish Press, WME is the latest major Hollywood agency to invest resources into helping creators build businesses beyond traditional talent representation. The outlet recounts that UTA pioneered digital representation in 2006 and rebranded to UTA Creators in 2024, helping launch businesses like Chamberlain Coffee and the experience ZCON, while earlier this year CAA started a $250M creator venture holding company. Lee told The Publish Press that clients differ but are solving the same fundamentals: how to reach more people, deepen audience relationships and monetize in more ways.