Think about the content you scroll through on your social media feeds. How much of it would you guess is sponsored — as in, bought and paid for by a brand? Perhaps it’s an influencer lauding the features of a new vacuum, or prominently displaying the logo of a beverage with a hashtag “ad” in the caption. The influencer marketing industry has more and more dollars behind it. An industry report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau projects U.S. advertising spending on creators to reach $44 billion in 2026. And while you may not realize it, with that increased advertising spend, there is a burgeoning industry of professionals making it work behind the scenes.“I'm always in my inbox,” said Sofia Perez, one of 73 employees at The Sociable Society, a creator management agency based in Southern California. It’s one of a growing number of companies that have gotten into the business of connecting creators and brands. TSS has more than 300 creators on their roster. Perez’s job title is “creator coordinator.” That day, she uploaded drafts of videos to Google Drive, made sure two influencers had the info they needed to get to an event the next day, and coordinated revisions on a makeup tutorial featuring an Armani Beauty foundation.“They just wanted more focus on the actual foundation rather than the entire makeup routine,” she said. That is what a lot of advertising looks like in 2026. Not a huge endorsement deal with a major celebrity and a TV commercial, but a makeup tutorial, posted by an influencer, backed by a creator agency.Perez is 26 years old and began working in this industry after finishing an MBA and leaving a full-time job at a bank. “My parents thought I was crazy,” she said. Uploading revisions of makeup tutorials might seem like a step down from working in finance, but the creator economy is growing. And big companies are investing in creator management, too. The Hollywood talent agency CAA recently formed a $250 million holding company to focus on creators. This year Accenture, a global professional services firm, announced it was acquiring Whalar, another creator marketing agency, for an undisclosed sum.“People still think that this is like, oh, 20-year-olds just having fun and posting videos,” said Carolin Suarez, TSS vice president of finance and operations. “It's not — it's a full business model.”Suarez’s team is responsible for collecting payments on behalf of creators. She said they send out an average of 2,000 invoices a month, which can range from a few thousand dollars to a hundred thousand or more for bigger campaigns. Each invoice is connected to a contract, which gets reviewed by the agency's legal team. “We have six lawyers on board, which is pretty heavy,” she said. Like most agencies, TSS is a commission-based business. The more contracts their creators sign, the more money they make. Balancing the interests of brands with those of the creators on her roster is part of Jess Golden’s job as director of creator management at TSS.“In some of our contracts, there're 12-hour blackout periods where they can't post any other sponsor content for a certain period of time,” she said. “Yesterday was a lot of just juggling that and trying to make sure that everyone ended up happy and that we were still, you know, meeting our contractual obligations, but also that the creators weren't going insane.”“The biggest challenge that the space has now is the volume of business that is coming to the creator's way,” said TSS CEO Jay Kent-Hume, who co-founded the company with Emily Fonda more than a decade ago. “It’s really the back-end inside that nobody really sees, or you don't, the non-sexy stuff.”He said that non-sexy stuff, like legal contracts, and invoices, and posting schedules, has put TSS on pace to grow 40% and hire another eight people this year.