How Can Gen Z Break Into the Influencer Marketing Industry? Braden Blacker Explains It to a Teenager

Influencer marketing has become one of the most dynamic corners of the media industry, creating new opportunities for a generation that grew up on social platforms.

In the latest episode of Explain It to a Teenager, Blake Richards sits down with Braden Blacker, CEO and Founder of The Content Code, for a conversation about breaking into influencer marketing, building creator audiences, and turning a passion for social media into a career at just 19 years old.

Blake Richards (BR): Who am I here with today and what exactly is it that you do?

Braden Blacker (BB): My name is Braden Blacker and I'm the CEO and Founder of The Content Code, which is a social media marketing and influencer marketing agency where we also do talent management and manage some of the biggest US and Latin American content creators.

BR: You're only 19 yourself. But, before we get into any of the things that you're doing now, can you talk a little bit about your origin story? How did you start? How do you know that this was the road you wanted to take?

BB: I started working with a creator named Asher Lara when I was 16 years old and I had no prior experience with management. I jumped right into it with Asher and helped him go from having around 1.2 million followers to well over 16 million followers. In that process, I started working with a company called Fixated when they were starting out. I was one of the first employees there, and I was there from the time of being around 15 until 17, and that has now become one of the largest creator management companies. They just acquired Studio 71 which was one of the largest MCNs, and a ton of other agencies and are doing incredibly well. 

From 17 until now started my own agency called The Content Code where we manage some of the biggest talent both US and Latam and have gone to help brands like Sports Illustrated launch their prediction market: doing the Anthony Joshua Polymarket activation across the Anthony Joshua Jake Paul fight and some several other fun activations like that.

BR: So you essentially took someone as one example and took their following base almost eight times as much as it was originally. What was your plan in doing that? How did you execute that? How did you yourself make that happen?

BB: The biggest thing I'd say is that it was not just me obviously doing it. Me and Asher partnered together and worked together over years. He's extremely driven and hardworking. And you need that mixture of someone that is super driven, super hardworking and constantly making content. Still to this point, well over 16 million followers, he's still posting multiple times a day on each platform. 

For him, the secret sauce that we're able to work on together was really building these storylines, right? And these almost like TV shows or movieesque-type of narratives and arcs across YouTube and TikTok were something that worked really well for Asher. His secret sauce was that we found out that his viewers watched a lot of dating channels, and this was before we even started making couples content. We saw that correlation of his audience was watching other dating content and other couples kind of audience content. 

So we started focusing more and more on his relationship that he was already in. He was dating a girl named Nevada who also happens to have over 22 million followers at this point. They together over the last few years really made a bunch of couples content together and for both of them had exponential growth by doing that, and both from a monetary aspect, Asher's gotten to work with brands such as Google and Disney which have been extremely phenomenal campaigns.

Recently we did Pacsun and their activation with the Met of the New York and it's it's been phenomenal, but I really think for him the secret sauce was finding out that we already knew his audience was watching, having that data, and then by working with Ash and really building out a content team, we're able to both monetize from a brand perspective on that data and that viewership. 

We also built out a series that when we started working together, his YouTube channel was pulling under 100,000 views per video. With me, him, and the team, we put together, and we were able to get to a point where at one of the peaks of the channel, we were doing over a million views per video on YouTube, which was phenomenal growth. Now we've gotten back to a consistent point of getting well over a hundred to a few hundred thousand views per video, and are consistently doing a few hundred million views a month right now across just his channel as one of our careers.

BR: How does someone my age or in the teenage, young Gen Z group do what you did?

BB: I'm 19 just to reiterate that because I feel like that's important. I think the big thing for me was two things. One was right friend groups: becoming friends with influencers naturally, I think that whether you're in college or whether you're working, I feel like at this point there's so many people that are influencers, right? You probably have a friend of a friend or you have a cousin or you have someone in your working environment or someone in your college environment that's an influencer, or starting-out influencer. 

I think one way is obviously gravitating towards those people and asking the same way you would a CMO here at Cannes, right? You're going to them and asking them, "Hey, can I pick your brain? Can I talk to you for a few minutes?" Another way that I think is really prominent is to start making content. If you start making content yourself, even if you want to be on the back end and do the business piece, if you start making content, you're going to attract other influencers to follow you.