Every talent manager in New York knows the honeymoon phase. Four twenty-something friends with day jobs in media, sales, and finance launch a shared TikTok account in April called The 4 in the 5. Sixteen weeks later, they have 430,000 followers, Kate Spade and Coach campaigns, and an activation for hair-care brand K18 that required them to shepherd a giant ball of hair rolling through Manhattan.
Then came the inbound flood. The group closed more than 30 brand partnerships in four months, including ten deals in the past month alone. That is an ad clearing every three days.
When agents first got them on the phone, the reps floated the standard roster milestone: "So what do you want, Sephora Squad?"
Gabriela Harris had other plans. "No. We want three businesses, we want a show, we want this." Harris is already laying out the next tier of representation: "We eventually want to get to a point where we’re at roundtables with these brands, talking about how to roll out their campaigns, and that’s how we’re getting our income."
You have to respect the audacity. Four months into running a group handle, the talent wants to swap thirty-second integrations for boardroom consulting retainers.
Corporate marketing departments did not run ten campaigns through The 4 in the 5 last month because they needed agency-level media planning from four people who just hired their first freelance video editor. Brands booked them because four distinct characters on one handle is the steepest volume discount in digital media. Drew Townsel notes that viewers tell them, "I’m a Gabby, I’m a Drew, I’m an Yvanna, I’m a Maddie." For Walmart and DoorDash, that means buying four demographic entry points, an ensemble cast, and built-in organic banter on a single invoice.
To keep up with the calendar, the four founders now operate like a boutique production house under constant deadline pressure. One acts as campaign director, another handles producer duties, and their personal lives are cataloged into four distinct asset classes: "episodes," "supplementals," "concepts," and "side quests." They are running an agency grind internally just to fulfill the obligations of ten separate legal sign-offs every four weeks.
The roster reps listening to pitch calls about equity stakes and advisory roundtables know how that trade usually resolves. Brands will happily let four charismatic twenty-somethings direct their own commercial shoots, right up until the tenth invoice clears and the calendar resets for next month's sponsored posts.
This is now the standard opening bid on both sides of the table: creators ask for equity, brands counter with volume. The 4 in the 5 just said the quiet part out loud.