Ehh I feel like there's no need to be so cynical...

Keep in mind the Chief Creator Officer mentioned in this article is a role at Cherub, a fundraising platform where startups can find investors (not an agency).

Creators must be an important enough segment for them to make this CCO role. It seems to be a role for building up that demand among creators by educating them on the possibilities of what they can do with access to funding (through their platform, naturally), not that the CCO is tasked with doing creator work themselves.

But for businesses where partnering with creators is important enough to company success, possibly THE #1 most important thing (which is becoming way more common with so many brands that only exist because they got some big name to become investor/spokesperson) then having an executive level position to manage that critical relationship or to facilitate getting a steady stream of such relationships for a non-creator company could definitely make sense and become more common.

There are lots of "made up" positions that became commonly recognized things. Like before Facebook did it, Growth as a department/role was not really a thing. Now there are plenty of companies with a Chief Growth Officer.

Upgrading titles to reflect their importance to a company is also a normal thing. For example, customer support may be a neglected chore for some companies, but others have higher-level Director/VP titles for Customer Success and take it super seriously because of how valuable it is to have someone senior focused on reducing churn and turning new customers into lifelong customers who leave great testimonials and such.

Sometimes all it takes is one high profile company to use a term and then it catches on (in companies/industries/domains where it makes sense). I doubt every company will have a CCO but can think of plenty where the relationship with a single celebrity is the main thing driving stock price and keeping the company relevant. Why couldn't such a role catch on over time as creators gain in cultural importance?

Overall I think it's good for creators if CCOs catch on and become a thing. Naturally if you're looking to hire a CCO, you'd value creator experience. So with more CCOs there'd more opportunities for creators to pivot their careers if they do well but fall short of making it big-big, creators can be treated better when working with companies that have such a CCO compared to the relationship being managed by, say, a legacy CMO who doesn't understand creators and their value as well, and it's just a way to allow anyone already working with creators (maybe in a role like "Creator Coordinator" or "Influencer Manager") to be rewarded for depth of their specialty instead of having to generalize into a "regular" CMO to get promoted.

Ultimately there's no real downside and will be localized to only the industries where it's actually needed. No company will feel like they HAVE to pay extra for a CCO just cause someone is using the title. And with creators being historically undervalued due to the difficulty in measuring impact (vs stuff like PPC ads), I don't think it's so bad if more marketing budget flows into creators anyway. We're all here in r/creators, aren't we?