Social-first creator agency NewGen has expanded its leadership, creative, talent, and artificial intelligence teams as it enters the Nordic market and adds capacity across London and New York.
The agency has appointed Iris Worldwide co-founder Ian Millner as non-executive chairman and former Spark Foundry chief executive Pete Edwards as a non-executive director, strengthening its senior leadership as the business expands internationally.
Millner co-founded Iris Worldwide in 1999 and spent 26 years developing the agency into an international creative network employing more than 1,000 people. His new role will include strategic support for NewGen chief executive and co-founder Mike Craddock.
Edwards brings more than three decades of agency leadership and strategy experience. His previous roles include chief executive of Spark Foundry and Engine Media UK and chief strategy officer at The Engine Group.
NewGen has also appointed Dani Greenwald as creative director. Greenwald previously served as head of creative at Charlotte Tilbury and OK COOL and joins a creative and production operation that also includes production director Madeleine Martinez.
In New York, the agency is expanding its US talent division through the appointment of Joowon Lee as associate talent director and Mark Sharman as senior talent manager.
Lee previously served as vice-president of talent management at The Kinetic Group, while Sharman joins from Bad Moon Talent. Their appointments add further creator representation and brand partnership experience to NewGen’s US operation.
The next geographic expansion will be the Nordics, where Kimie Riis Frengler has been appointed regional lead and will be based in Copenhagen. She will be responsible for building relationships with brands, creators, and commercial partners across the market.
Frengler founded creator talent agency Kollektif and previously held senior client leadership roles at Influencer, including senior account director.
NewGen currently operates across London, Manchester, New York, and Paris, with the Copenhagen appointment establishing a base for further regional growth.
Technology investment is progressing alongside the geographic expansion. Tim Edwards has joined as AI product manager to support NewGen’s AI and innovation team following the development of Multiple, its technology proposition for creator marketing operations.
The agency has also increased its accounts and social team by 28% as part of the broader hiring programme.
Mike Craddock, chief executive and co-founder of NewGen, said: “Ian’s expertise in scaling agencies and building world-class teams is exactly what we need as we expand internationally. Alongside growing our creative, accounts, talent and AI teams, expanding into the Nordics is another important step in NewGen’s international growth. We’re continuing to invest in exceptional people and capabilities that help us better support clients and creators around the world.”
The appointments come as creator marketing agencies take on a broader range of functions than campaign matchmaking between brands and individual influencers. Talent management, production, social strategy, technology, data, and international account management are increasingly being combined within the same agency groups.
International expansion complicates that model because creator markets remain strongly local. Platform use, language, regulation, humour, and audience behaviour vary by region, while multinational brands increasingly expect agencies to deliver campaigns consistently across several countries.
A dedicated Nordic lead gives NewGen local representation rather than relying entirely on teams elsewhere in Europe. Creator relationships depend heavily on knowledge of emerging talent and regional culture, both of which are difficult to centralise without losing relevance.
Behind that local activity, however, agencies need increasingly consistent operating processes as campaign volumes grow. Briefing, creator selection, brand safety checks, contracting, payments, content approval, and measurement can create substantial administrative overhead across international accounts.
Artificial intelligence and workflow technology are being used more heavily in those functions, particularly where agencies need to process large amounts of campaign information or match brands with creators across extensive talent pools.
Human judgement remains difficult to remove from areas such as cultural fit, reputational risk, creative quality, and commercial negotiation. NewGen’s decision to recruit across both AI and creative leadership suggests it is building technology alongside specialist expertise rather than concentrating expansion in one area.
The appointments of Millner and Edwards also bring experience from organisations that operated at significantly greater scale. Founder-led agencies often face additional management demands as they enter more countries, take on larger accounts, and add specialist divisions, particularly when operational systems have to keep pace with commercial growth.
The creator economy itself is becoming more structured. Large advertisers increasingly allocate dedicated budgets to creator campaigns rather than treating influencer activity as an experimental extension of social media, while successful creators are building businesses that require more sophisticated representation, contract negotiation, and intellectual property management.
That development is encouraging both consolidation and specialisation within the agency market. Businesses able to combine talent representation, creative services, international delivery, and technology can capture a wider share of brand spending, although they must also manage potential tensions between representing creators and advising advertisers.
NewGen’s Nordic launch, US talent expansion, and senior governance appointments add management capacity around a business operating across several markets and service lines simultaneously. The commercial test will be whether that structure can support international growth without weakening the local creator relationships on which the model depends.
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