The Creator Factory: Our CEO's New Book on Why Brands Should Stop Renting Influencer Audiences

Published:

15.08.2026

Holy Marketing CEO Kseniia Petrina's new book, The Creator Factory, makes the case — and shows the math — for why brands should own creator infrastructure instead of renting it campaign by campaign.

You're not buying influence. You're renting it — and the lease never ends.

Brands will spend more than $32 billion on influencer marketing this year, and most of it vanishes the moment the invoice is paid. You rent a creator's audience, the campaign ends, the audience goes back to its owner, and next quarter you start from zero again — at a higher price. There's nothing left on the balance sheet but a report.

That's the problem our CEO, Kseniia Petrina, has spent 13+ years and more than 8,000 creator collaborations a year trying to solve. She's put the answer into a book: The Creator Factory: How Brands Stop Renting Audiences and Start Owning Distribution, out now in hardcover and Kindle.

What the book actually argues

The core idea won't surprise anyone who's worked with us: stop renting audiences, start owning distribution. What might surprise you is how far the book goes to prove it with numbers instead of slogans. Inside, Kseniia lays out:

• The three-year math that proves why owning beats renting — and exactly when the break-even hits
• The seven variables that make or break a creator program
• Why AI-generated content drives reach but not sales — and what the data actually shows
• How small creators beat big ones on cost per customer
• The B2B arbitrage almost no one is taking
• A quarter-by-quarter playbook to build owned creator infrastructure from scratch
• The five mistakes that kill creator programs — and when not to build one at all

No theory for theory's sake, no vanity metrics — just the economics, the mechanics, and the field-tested system behind brand-owned distribution, written for the person who controls the budget and is tired of choosing between "reach" and "performance."

Why we wrote it

This isn't a book-length version of a pitch deck. The Creator Factory methodology described in it is the same one behind how we run campaigns at Holy Marketing every day — casting creators for fit rather than follower count, developing a smaller roster into a long-term brand channel instead of re-booking a new list every quarter, and treating creator infrastructure as something a brand builds and owns rather than something it rents each cycle. The book exists because enough clients asked "how do you actually think about this" that the answer was worth writing down properly.

About the author

Kseniia Petrina is the CEO and co-founder of Holy Marketing, a creator-driven growth company that executes more than 8,000 creator collaborations a year and produces over 5,000 pieces of content a month for brands across the United States and Latin America. She is the originator of the Creator Factory methodology — the principle that companies should build proprietary creator infrastructure as a durable distribution channel rather than rent influencer audiences campaign by campaign. With over 13 years in marketing, she has worked with brands including KFC, L'Oréal, inDrive, and Nickelodeon. A columnist for Campaign US and The AI Journal, she also serves as President of the Association of Digital Marketing and Innovation of the Dominican Republic. The Creator Factory is her first book in English.