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Folks, we have reached the end of 2024. (Just stating that for those who might not know.) As with all years, there were ups and downs, pluses and minuses. Rather than making any sweeping statements about the year that just passed—I’ll leave that for historians and pop culture commentators—I want to open up this email with gratitude. 

Thank you for reading How to Build Brands and Influence People this year. 2024 has been a period of personal growth and learning for me, and HBBIP has been at the center of that process. Without your support and faithful readership (or at least faithful opening of my emails), I couldn’t have grown as a writer, and dare I even say as a human being? Certainly HBBIP has fueled my most important growth category, “asker for free stuff.” That would have been pretty stagnant without you, so yeah, I appreciate it.

I know you have a million ‘year in review’ emails in your inbox right now, telling you all about your most played songs, your most talked about stories, your most important moments, and your most used words of 2024. If you want a great rendition of that sort of story for CreatorIQ as a whole, I highly recommend checking out all the cool stuff we got up to in our biggest year yet with CreatorIQ Wrapped: Creator Marketing Drives a Record-Breaking Impact in 2024.

I’m not trying to do something quite so expansive or impressive here—I just want to talk about my newsletter. So if you could spare a moment as you iron your tuxedos and gowns and put the champagne on ice, I’d love to walk you through the year in HBBIP.

Look, you’ve made it this far in the year—might as well give this one a read, too. I promise I’ll keep it quick.

The Top Year of All Time (of the Week) (of the Year): 2024

Again, I’m just talking about 2024 as it relates to HBBIP. For the world at large, 2024 might have been a mixed bag, but here in Alexville, things were pretty good. And I have you 🫵 to thank for it.

I took a gander at the year-end numbers for HBBIP, and thanks to you, we boasted some pretty cool stats this year:

50 Newsletters

If it weren’t for the vagaries of how Mondays happened to fall this year, or my one day off around Christmas, we would have gone for a nice clean 52 newsletters for 52 weeks. Oh well: 50 is also a solid number. We can work with that. Rain or sleet or snow, no matter where in the world I happened to be, you received an HBBIP in your inbox each Monday. Except, of course, for right before Christmas. Just know that I wouldn’t have bothered for anyone less than the best newsletter audience in the business.

446.8k Opens

Now we’re cooking. That’s right: 446,821 times this year, someone chose to open an HBBIP email, or at least clicked on it accidentally. That’s pretty wild. Here’s a little fun with numbers:

• Assuming it took one second per open, that means that this year, people spent 7,447 minutes, aka 124 hours, aka five days, just opening these emails, to say nothing of actually reading them. (It’s gotta be, like, at least several more seconds when we factor in the reading time.)
• Neat math fact: 124 hours is almost as much time as that guy from 127 Hours spent trapped in that canyon. I couldn’t say exactly how those two numbers compare, but you know, ballpark figure there.
• Going by 2023 population estimates, if each of those 446,821 opens were a human being, then HBBIP Town would rank as the 45th most populous city in America, ahead of Minneapolis, Tampa, New Orleans, Cleveland, and Orlando. Where’s my professional sports team?
  • Not to turn this into a geography newsletter (though honestly, I’d love that), but did you know that Fresno, Mesa, and Colorado Springs outranked all those other cities I just mentioned? I sure didn’t. Facts like that are why people keep opening these emails!

Thank you for clicking. Be sure to check back in at my final newsletter of 2025, when I’ll post an update showing that I beat 2024’s metrics. If I don’t post that update, then, uh, I didn’t do it, and it would be really cool of y’all if you didn’t bring it up.

The Stories You Loved Clicked On

I know, I know: I promised this wouldn’t be another one of those ‘annual highlight’ emails, showing HBBIP’s most-read stories. So instead, I’m going to offer a hybrid. Here are the key themes I noticed in the creator economy economy, and the stories that fed into these themes. These stories also happened to garner a significant number of opens, so not only do they indicate something important about the creator marketing space at large, they also show where my readers’ heads were at this year.

Also, for your convenience, please note that all stories have been preserved for posterity in a nifty blog post format, in case you want to refresh your memory and click on them all over again.

Alright, enough scene-setting! When I think about the creator economy in 2024, this is what comes to mind:

Creators Drive Signature Business Moments

The year started with a bang, when Unilever acquired K18 Hair, which had become one of the hottest brands in beauty largely thanks to its robust creator program. (Granted, this technically took place shortly before Christmas 2023, and this blog post came out December 27, 2023, but we didn’t cover it in HBBIP until the new year, so it still counts!) When one of the world’s largest conglomerates singles out a brand that’s surged due to its DTC program and social media hype, it makes for a real “we’ve arrived” moment amongst creator marketers everywhere. And that validation set the stage for more to come.

One of those things to come? A creator-headlined collaboration between unlikely partners H&M and Rabanne. This collab was a two-fer, and not just in the way that all collaborations are by definition two-fers: not only did it demonstrate the increased importance of creators, but it also underscored another trend that defined creator marketing in 2024—the pairing between two unconventional brands, often in different verticals, that both benefit from a viral boost surrounding the partnership.

The world of acquisitions and big-money deals continued to be a popular theme throughout the year, with an April newsletter about beauty’s top acquisition targets, and how these targets have grown thanks to their creator marketing programs. A little more recently—in fact, just the other week—we covered the role that creators have played in Black Friday advertising over the years, and how they’ve fueled increasingly large-scale holiday initiatives for major retailers over the past several years.

Creators Leave Us Hungry for More

If it felt like I wrote about food and beverage brands a lot in 2024, well, that’s because I did. Now, I would never claim that any particular vertical is my favorite, but I do consume food and/or beverages every day, so I might be a little biased.

At any rate, F&B might just be creators’ favorite vertical, so naturally I’ve learned to love it too. And why not? After all, the vertical provided so many delicious stories in 2024.

One winner from F&B’s creator bonanza has been the energy drink space. As a fan of low-energy drinks, this came as a surprise to me. But it didn’t surprise anybody who regularly consumes Red Bull or Celsius, both of which have cornered the market on podcast audiences across all social media platforms, particularly YouTube.

Or we could look to our venerable quick-service restaurants, which have also gotten in on the game as of late. Jersey Mike’s and Blue Bottle both made notable gains, making for another unexpected pair (don’t knock it till you try it). Similarly, former mall mainstays Pizza Hut and Taco Bell teamed back up—not in reality, mind you, but at least in this newsletter, which discussed both brand’s creator strategies and social media traction. But we’d be remiss to mention F&B traction without paying homage to Trader Joe’s, which has one of the most dedicated creator fanbases, and distinctive social media subcultures, that I’ve ever encountered.

Across all corners of the food and beverage industry, creators are taking on a central role in brand activity. One scales both large (Red Bull’s creator-centric campaigns at luxe Formula 1 events) and small (the emergence of ‘Trader Joe’s-centric recipe aggregator’ as a viable social media identity), F&B has emerged as a creator force to be reckoned with, and one of my top verticals to watch in 2025.

Based on the numbers, my readers seem to agree. Or maybe it’s just that these emails tend to hit your inbox around breakfast.

Creators Take Center Stage in The Culture

It wasn’t just big business or big food and beverages brands that made for an unprecedented year in creator marketing. More than ever before, creators were driving culture forward—and you, the people, were here for it.

Take the Super Bowl. This year’s action was probably more notable for the role that creators mixed with traditional celebrities on one of the world’s biggest stages for advertising than it was for the football (ho-hum, the Chiefs win another one-score game…who would have thought?). Creator-driven brands like E.L.F. and CeraVe broke onto the scene with splashy commercials, while social media conversation buoyed powerhouse brands to new heights.

Or take the launch of Cécred, the signature haircare brand from musician and Super Bowl commercial-appearer Beyoncé. Unlike her fashion brand Ivy Park, which favored a social media blitz from Beyoncé’s fellow superstars when it launched years ago, social media surrounding Cécred put creators front and center, with Beyoncé inviting haircare experts and tutorialists into the fold. To quote the Beyoncé of the Sixties, the times they are a-changin’.

And of course, if that wasn’t enough proof for you, CreatorIQ had two big events in London and Los Angeles, where panel after panel of starry speakers talked about how creators inform all aspects of their world-shaping industries, from Hollywood to Big Tech to Social Impact more broadly.

Do I need to tell you that creators’ cultural dominance will continue in 2025? Or that CreatorIQ will be right there to help shape that dominance? I don’t. You’re smart, you know this already. But I’ll slip it in there all the same: 2025 promises to be bigger and better than ever, and I couldn’t ask for a better audience with which to share this wildest of rides.

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