Alex Ashton and the Agency Eight Cofounders Are Building Influence That Lasts

In a marketing economy that often mistakes reach for relevance, Alex Ashton has built a career out of measuring the difference. As cofounder and chief operating officer of Agency Eight, the New York creator and community marketing firm he runs alongside founder and chief executive Aurielle Kaminski, Ashton has helped turn the slippery business of influence into something closer to a discipline: repeatable, trackable and, for the consumer brands that hire the agency, accountable.

The approach has drawn notice. Forbes named Ashton and Kaminski to its 2026 30 Under 30 list in Marketing and Advertising, recognising an agency that projected $2.3 million in revenue for 2025, shipped more than 25,000 packages to creators in a single year and grew to a 14-person team serving more than 30 clients. For a firm that began with one founder and one client in 2022, the trajectory is steep. The story behind it is a study in how two complementary skill sets can build a company neither partner could have built alone.

From Amazon's Code to the Culture of Creators

Ashton's route into influencer marketing ran through engineering. A Columbia University alumnus, he spent roughly two years in software engineering and data analytics at Amazon, working directly on consumer-facing systems for Amazon.com. It is a training ground that teaches scale, and the habit of asking how a process behaves when it runs ten thousand times rather than ten.

He then moved closer to the brand side, leading marketing and operations at Basic Space, an e-commerce marketplace. There he built out paid advertising and oversaw dozens of marketing pushes alongside a run of high-production events. The role combined the analytical rigour of his Amazon years with the more instinctive work of getting people to show up and care.

That pairing of data and taste would become the signature of Agency Eight.

A Cofounder Partnership Built on Complementary Strengths

Kaminski founded Agency Eight in June 2022. A graduate of the Ethical Culture Fieldston School and NYU Stern School of Business, where she studied luxury marketing and social entrepreneurship, she explored fashion and sustainable business before finding her footing in creator marketing. Influencer and community roles at fast-growing consumer start-ups Parade and Rosaluna gave her a front-row seat to how word of mouth is actually built, and how quickly it fades when it is merely purchased.

In February 2023, she brought Ashton on as cofounder. The titles tell the story of the partnership. As chief executive, Kaminski sets the agency's creative and community direction and guards the relationships at the heart of the business. As chief operating officer, Ashton builds the systems that allow that work to scale without losing the personal touch that made it effective in the first place.

The combination has proved durable. Under the two cofounders, Agency Eight grew from a one-woman, one-client operation into a full team of marketers working with dozens of consumer packaged goods start-ups.

Influence Is Built, Not Bought

Agency Eight's guiding idea is that lasting influence is built rather than bought, and the agency organises its work around that conviction. It operates across beauty, fashion, food and beverage through four core services: performance seeding, which places products with carefully matched creators to earn authentic content; full-service 360 influencer campaigns covering paid partnerships and user-generated content; community building through ambassador programmes and creator loyalty initiatives; and creator affiliate programming that converts content into sales through platforms such as ShopMy and TikTok Shop.

The distinction matters. Much of the influencer industry still runs on one-off paid posts that spike and vanish. Agency Eight's bet is that the brands that win are the ones creators genuinely like, products that get posted because they earned it rather than because a contract demanded it. Seeding at volume, with precise creator matching, produces a steady drumbeat of organic content. Affiliate programmes then give creators a lasting reason to keep talking long after the first unboxing.

The Operating System Behind the Creativity

This is where Ashton's engineering background becomes visible. The cofounders rely on automated reporting, templated client onboarding and Shopify integrations to keep results consistent across a growing roster. In an industry still notorious for spreadsheets and screenshots, that infrastructure is a genuine competitive edge.

The agency's early days show why. Tracking creator content once meant manually capturing posts, filing them into folders and logging every data point by hand, an exhausting process that grew more error-prone with every new client. Moving to automated content tracking saved the team more than 40 hours a week on tracking and reporting and lifted capacity per client by roughly 20 percent, at a time when its clients were generating more than 1,000 pieces of content each week.

Ashton has been candid about what that shift meant for the business. "We would not be able to have as many clients as we have now," he said of the tooling that made it possible.

The payoff is an agency that can tell a client not only that a campaign felt successful, but precisely what it produced. Agency Eight reports a network of more than 80,000 creators, upward of 150,000 creators engaged across its campaigns, more than three billion social impressions and roughly $300 million in earned media value generated for the brands it represents.

A Client Roster Built on Brands People Love

That rigour has attracted a client list familiar to anyone who follows direct-to-consumer culture. Agency Eight has worked with Seed, Jolie, Vacation, POV Beauty, Masa, Momofuku, Camp, Public Goods and Brodo, a roster that spans beauty, wellness, food and lifestyle. What unites them is less a category than a sensibility: brands with a point of view, products with a story, and audiences that want to feel part of something rather than simply sold to.

That selectivity is deliberate. Kaminski has spoken publicly about turning down a prospective client whose founder's values conflicted with her own, a decision that cost the agency revenue in the short term but reinforced its reputation. For an agency whose product is trust, choosing who it works with is itself part of the strategy.

What Comes Next for Agency Eight

The creator economy is entering a more demanding phase. Brands that once measured influencer success in likes now expect attributable sales, clean data and partnerships that compound over time. Social commerce, affiliate storefronts and creator-led product launches are pulling marketing and revenue ever closer together.

Agency Eight was built for precisely that moment. With Kaminski's instinct for community and Ashton's discipline for systems, the cofounders have assembled something rare in a crowded field: an influencer marketing agency that thinks like an operator and still behaves like a friend of the brand.

For Alex Ashton, the lesson of the past three years is that influence and infrastructure are not opposites. The most authentic word of mouth, it turns out, scales best when someone has quietly engineered the machine behind it. In New York's fiercely competitive marketing landscape, that may be the most persuasive pitch of all.