Jellysmack’s new production company wants to turn creators into “micro Oprahs”
The future of the creator economy is here—and it looks like a bunch of “micro Oprahs,” according to Sean Atkins, president of the creator growth company Jellysmack.
“The analogy I always use for creators is, ‘Do you think Oprah Winfrey’s a creative genius?’ They’re like, ‘Yeah.’ ‘Do you think she chose the cameras? Do you think she chose the guests?’ She doesn’t pick anything,” Atkins says. “Now, ‘do you think she has total creative control of her vision?’ They’re like, ‘Yeah.’ What I want you to do is the thing you want to do. I don’t want you to worry about, like, payroll.”
Doubling down on that idea is JellySmack’s newest offering, JellySmash, a production studio for creators looking to scale their content.
Jellysmack already partners with major talent including MrBeast, Bailey Sarian, and Nas Daily, providing a suite of growth-aimed services, such as catalog licensing and data-driven distribution. But JellySmash, which officially launched in October after a year of internal development, was created specifically to help creators come up with new content ideas; shoot, produce, edit, and performance test videos; and create more monetizable content strategies for short-form creators.
For example, creator Cameron Walker, better known as SpicyyCam, has a TikTok following of 20 million who watch him test his limits with spicy foods. It’s an impressive following and there’s a proven path toward sponsorship deals and plugging his own products like his hot sauce. But working with JellySmash has helped him develop short-form ideas into longer-form YouTube and Facebook shows that he has even bigger ambitions for.
“I do have connections at Netflix, but having a connection at Netflix means nothing whenever you make shorts because, let’s be honest, they don’t care about that,” Walker says.
There’s Cam Eats It, an Anthony Bourdain-inspired series that has Walker visiting restaurants to learn the chef or owners’s approach to cooking and their relationship to spice. There’s also Spice Hunter, which sends Walker to independent hot sauce manufacturers.
“I’ve always been able to capture 60 seconds of a moment and make it viral. I can do that myself,” Walker says. “I needed Jellysmack to help me create a show.”
Aaron Godfred, VP of JellySmash Studios, says JellySmash was developed in part as a means to supply creators with the infrastructure of a production company without them worrying about sustaining longterm hires.
“There’s a period where people aren’t quite at that point where they can start to hire those professionals,” Godfred says. “Or maybe team building and people management isn’t their strong suit, and they would like to outsource a lot of the nuts and bolts of day-to-day production management.”
JellySmash fronts the production budget for creators and takes a cut of the ad revenue earned from the videos. In addition to Walker, JellySmash has signed already signed multi-year production partnerships with creators Charles & Alyssa (14.5 million followers across platforms), Karina Garcia (14.6 million), and Nadia Caterina Munno, aka Pasta Queen (5 million), producing more than 500 million minutes of watch time across YouTube, Snapchat, Pinterest, and Facebook.
Godfred also notes that JellySmash is a white-label service both in the sense that they don’t take any production credit and that the overall creative should blend seamlessly with what the creator has already been doing on their platforms.
“Our goal is when someone watches a SpicyyCam video, they’re like, ‘man, SpicyyCam has stepped up his game. SpicyyCam has come up with some fire concepts,’” Godfred says.
For Walker, the goal has been to grow his audience on longer-form platforms.
Walker signed a two-year deal with Jellysmack where his initial request was to gain 1 million followers on YouTube. “They guaranteed me two [million],” he says. “We’re at 1.5 million subscribers gained since joining with Jellysmack [six months ago].”
JellySmash is certainly a welcome option for creators looking to level up. However, it’s worth considering where those creators are leveling up from. Someone like Walker was already an established creator before linking up with Jellysmack. Going from millions of followers to a potential Netflix show is great. But what about the creators looking to just get to those millions of followers?
“You really hit on our 2023 strategy,” Godfred says, “which is to leverage our tech to identify up-and-coming creators and help them through that awkward phase where they’re getting the attention of the algorithm, their followings are growing, but they’re not prepared to operationalize what comes next.”
To Atkins, JellySmash eases the burden—and some would say expectation—of creators doing everything by themselves, particularly smaller creators.
“Somehow, in the birth of the creator industry, the belief is, if you are not the means of production, you are not an artist. That’s just absolutely untrue,” he says. “I think the more that we can help creators offload the things that are not their superpower, the more valuable they can be.”
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