There was a time when a nonprofit that wanted to reach young people simply booked Beyoncé and waited for the crowds to form. That time, it seems, has passed.

Global Citizen, the anti-poverty organization whose annual festival in Central Park has long served as a kind of Live Aid for the TikTok era, has named Influential, the influencer marketing company owned by Publicis Groupe, as its global creator partner. The arrangement, announced Friday, represents a tacit acknowledgment that celebrity musicians no longer reliably deliver the audiences they once did — at least not the younger ones.

The partnership will debut in earnest at Saturday's Global Citizen Festival, where roughly 20 creators, including the social media personalities Ling and Lam, will post from the grounds while Lenny Kravitz, Alicia Keys, John Legend, and Shaboozey perform on stage. (Whether the creators will pause their content production long enough to actually watch the performances was not addressed.)

The relationship began in May, when Global Citizen was producing its first World Cup halftime show and sought help from Influential in reaching creators, according to Chris Detert, the company's chief communications officer. That trial run, which included the motivational video producer Dhar Mann and the meme account Pubity, led to the formal arrangement.

Influential, which Publicis acquired in 2024, claims an opt-in network of roughly 18 million creators, up from 5 million at the time of the deal. The company is doing the Global Citizen work pro bono; the two sides have not discussed a commercial arrangement, Mr. Detert said.

Ryan Detert, Influential's chief executive (and, yes, Chris Detert's brother), framed the shift as generational inevitability. "The most powerful medium will be an individual being able to talk about things that otherwise would have been left for old-school mediums," he said.

Which is another way of saying that for some audiences, a creator with a ring light now carries more weight than a rock star with a Grammy. The musicians, at least, still get to perform in Central Park.

Original story published in Adweek: "Global Citizen Taps Influential As Its Official Creator Partner"