business networking community. “After stepping back from Culture Kings, I kept helping founders inside One Life Club, and the pattern smacked me in the face: great products, starving for content. If I could wave a wand and 10x their content output, their growth would unlock,” he told Inside Retail.  “I’d been ‘air-dropping’ trained killers from my Culture Kings playbook to brands as contractors, and it kept working. The obvious next step was to industrialise it: train and deploy thousands of full-stack content creators, arm them with an AI brief builder that encodes my marketing brain, and pay them per outcome. Creator Army was born.” There are two key compontents to the platform: the Creator Army Bootcamp, which trains creators on video production, editing, strategy and the use of AI tools to product content faster and smarter; and a mobile app that enables businesses and individuals to hire trained creators for projects.  The venture is self-funded, with no outside investment. Alongside Beard, who described his role in the business as “hands on day to day”, the team includes ex-Culture Kings leadership across content, growth and operations and an “A-level” product and AI engineering team.  The platform officially launched in a livestream on October 14.  “One ad won’t cut it” Few people are as well-versed in the mechanics of leveraging social media to acquire customers and drive sales as Beard.  At Culture Kings, he was an early adopter of influencer marketing, working with leading musicians and athletes to connect with his core audience. As the demand for authenticity grew, he was quick to embrace user-generated content, empowering store staff to become content creators in their own right.  Today, in the age of TikTok, where memes and trends rise and fall at the speed of swipe, the challenge for retailers looking to grow their presence on social media is keeping up with the insatiable demand for content.  “The creative does the targeting now. Feeds are personalised. One ad won’t cut it. You need creative diversity at scale to find pockets of demand the algorithm will surface,” Beard said.  Beard pointed to a direct-to-consumer hoodie brand he advised, which went from approximately $100 million in sales to approximately $500 million by building a content machine that outputs thousands of assets weekly.  “The lever was volume and iteration, not a single ‘genius’ ad,” he said.  Most retailers don’t have the resources in-house to support this level of volume creation, and agencies can be slow and expensive to work with.  This has left a gap in the market for a platform like Creator Army, which promises to deliver “more variants, more first-frame hooks that bite, more auctions you win at sane CPMs, more learnings per dollar [leading to a] compounding advantage.” Beard summed up this tight feedback loop in five words: “iterate winners, kill losers, repeat.” “AI is a co-pilot” The launch of Creator Army comes at a time of significant disruption in digital advertising, with rapid advances in generative AI making it possible for brands and retailers to create hyperrealistic images and videos in hours or even minutes. While Beard acknowledged the benefits of being able to quickly turn storyboards into testable ads, he also highlighted the risks of deepfakes, brand safety and churning out average content.  With Creator Army, “AI is a co-pilot,” he said. “Humans lead on concept, pacing, humour and cultural timing. We train creators to use Sora 2 and friends, we watermark provenance and we keep the creative bar high. The variable that wins is still taste.” From a retail perspective, he remains bullish on the power of theatre and community, and believes retailers need to double down on experiences, services, creator collaborations and events to survive in the future.  “Brands that don’t treat content like oxygen will suffocate. Brands that do will sprint,” he said.