By Mike Heller, CEO of Talent Resources — a guest column for Everything-PR
Twenty years I’ve been putting talent in campaigns. The mechanics never really changed. A brand calls, a brief lands, the conversation starts with names — names from agents, names from the trades, names from a long mental shortlist built over years of pitches and parties and rooms. The shortlist was a phone call. The phone call was the job.
The phone call still happens. But it isn’t the first conversation anymore. The first conversation is happening inside the chatbox, before anyone in the talent business knows the brief exists.
By the time we get the call, the names are already in the room.
That’s the finding we just published with 5W AI Communications in the second volume of the AI Casting Index. Volume one ran 75 casting prompts across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews and found 24 of the 25 most-recommended campaign faces were actors and athletes. Exactly one creator made the list. Volume two measured the cause, name by name. The result is direct: the chatbox doesn’t count followers. It checks a public, machine-retrievable record — brand-deal history, tracked endorsements, tier-one press — and the figures that have one are the ones it recommends. The figures that don’t aren’t in the answer at all.
This is a different game than the one creators have been playing.
The creator economy was built on reach. Reach is what platforms reward, what advertisers historically paid for, what investors valued companies on. Reach is the visible asset. But reach is what your audience sees. The chatbox sees something else entirely — the documented trail. And when the brand walks into the chatbox before walking into our office, the trail is what wins.
Two creators in our study broke through into the documented top tier. MrBeast at a Documentation Score of 90. Alix Earle at 81. They’re inside the top ten of an index that’s otherwise wall-to-wall A-list athletes and actors. They got there the same way an athlete does — by accumulating a record the world can find. Twenty-eight tracked brand deals for MrBeast. A Salesforce Super Bowl spot. Feastables on Charlotte Hornets jerseys. Founder of a real holding company. Fifty-nine endorsements for Earle. The Times. Fortune. The Hollywood Reporter. A Frame collab. A Poppi co-development. Her own skincare brand. The chatbox has more retrievable material on either of them than on most working actors. So when a brand asks the chatbox who to cast, the chatbox can answer.
Other creators — enormous, household-name creators — sit much lower in the index. The chatbox didn’t penalize them. It just couldn’t find them. Their deals exist; they live mostly in inboxes and short captions and platforms the chatbox can’t retrieve. Their press exists; it’s mostly old. The record didn’t get built.
Here is the part of this that I think the talent industry needs to internalize quickly:
The record is the most fixable thing about a creator’s career. We can’t reverse-engineer talent. We can’t buy decades of cultural relevance. But we can build a documented, structured, machine-readable trail in eighteen months for any creator who decides their public record matters. We have done it. The blueprint exists. MrBeast and Earle aren’t outliers — they’re early.
For our roster and for the brands we work with, this is a different operating reality than the one that defined the last decade. The first read on a name happens before the brief, before the call, before any of us are in the room. The names with documented records make the chatbox shortlist. The names without them are invisible at exactly the moment the casting decision begins.
Reach got you the audience. The record gets you cast. That’s the whole game now.
Mike Heller is the CEO of Talent Resources, a 360-degree marketing agency specializing in talent, brand, and experiential strategy.
Everything-PR is the intelligence platform for communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era. Publishing since 2009. Original reporting, research, and analysis — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question.
Written by
EPR Editorial Team
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
