Amelia Dimoldenberg Is Ready for a Serious (Media) Commitment

Amelia Dimoldenberg is used to strangers on the street calling her “chicken girl.” For the over 3 million subscribers to her YouTube show, Chicken Shop Date, she’s most recognizable as a woman who goes on first dates with celebrities to fried chicken shops in the U.K., flirting with deadpan humor over a box of nuggets. But today, Dimoldenberg is contemplating her brand beyond chicken. Between business meetings at a plant-filled co-working space in trendy east London, she tells ADWEEK she “doesn’t want to just be seen as the girl from Chicken Shop Date.” “Chicken Shop Date is not going to be around forever," she said. "It’s important for me to have a brand that’s separate." That’s why for the past two years, Dimoldenberg has been showing off her interview chops in a more glamorous setting: the red carpet. Starting with the 2023 GQ Men of the Year Awards—where that encounter with actor Andrew Garfield went viral—she’s served as red carpet correspondent at events including the Golden Globes and the Oscars. Wielding her signature blend of awkward humor and flirtation, she’s subverted the traditional celebrity interview into entertainment for the social media era. The red carpet gigs have broadened Dimoldenberg’s audience in the U.S. and beyond her typically younger crowds, but she’s not stopping there. Like other digital creators who came of age in the nascent days of social media, she’s evolved into a multi-hyphenate entertainer with ambitions bigger than her original platform—and earned her a spot among ADWEEK's 2025 Brand Genius Creators. With her studio, Dimz Inc., Dimoldenberg is quietly building a creative powerhouse that will expand into new content streams, including branded projects and a Hollywood rom-com. How it started A decade ago, it may have seemed unlikely that a lo-fi talk show, filmed against a backdrop of deep fryers and wall menus, would one day attract millions of viewers and guests like Jennifer Lawrence, Ben Stiller, and Cher. But asked whether she always expected Chicken Shop Date to be a hit, Dimoldenberg didn't hesitate: “The honest answer is yes.” “I had this confidence from the very beginning in the idea,” she said. “There was a gap in the market for the kind of thing I was trying to put out there—humorous interviews with musicians who weren’t taking themselves too seriously. I felt like if my friends liked something, it was going to be good—and they did.” Dimoldenberg has let that principle guide her since starting Chicken Shop Date as a column for her London youth club’s magazine when she was 17. Inspired by early 2000s British music show Popworld and online talk show Between Two Ferns with comedian Zach Galifianakis, Dimoldenberg transferred the format to YouTube in 2014. Her first guest was British rapper Ghetts. At that time, forging a path in digital media was “more risky,” Dimoldenberg recalled. She’d worked at Vice during college and dreamed of becoming a Vogue editor, but her career aspirations in traditional media “didn’t work because a lot of people were not interested in my ideas there, or I wasn’t able to successfully pitch in the way I wanted to." Early on, she pitched Chicken Shop Date to traditional media platforms but was rejected. Three years in and cash-strapped, she went out on the pitch circuit again, but “they all wanted the IP,” she said. “I said no, and it was one of the best decisions I ever made.” Those early instincts to maintain creative independence were proven right. After years of hustling to get bigger names on the show, breakthroughs came with Get Out actor Daniel Kaluuya in 2020 and rapper Jack Harlow in 2021, who helped introduce her to a bigger American audience. Now, stars approach her about appearing on Chicken Shop Date, and she turns some down if she’s not a fan or they don’t fit with the show’s ethos. Riding the creator marketing wave Since Chicken Shop Date’s debut, the balance of influence in media has shifted to the point that celebrities are more willing to appear on shows like hers that were previously considered niche. The creator economy, of which Dimoldenberg was an early member, has exploded, and is expected to be worth $500 billion by 2027, according to Goldman Sachs. Amid that growth, the market has become “oversaturated” with humorous content on newer channels like TikTok, Dimoldenberg observed. In this crowded landscape of creator-led media, Chicken Shop Date is in a fortunate position to be profitable. Dimoldenberg reinvests those profits into funding the show, "but it’s not enough to run a business,” she said. Apart from YouTube’s standard ad breaks, she is also firm on not accepting sponsorships or product placements in the show. “I don’t ever want to jeopardize the creative,” she said. “Chicken Shop Date is so personal to me, and I feel protective of it.” Instead, Dimoldenberg makes most of her money by appearing in brand campaigns as herself, not her Chicken Shop Date persona. She’s collaborated with companies including Levi’s, Adidas, and Bumble, for which she offered dating and flirting advice in a video series that premiered in January. With both marketers and celebrities knocking on her door, Dimoldenberg has options when deciding where to go next. One possible route was recently illuminated by a fellow chicken-focused creator: Sean Evans, who’s hosted the YouTube interview show Hot Ones, in which celebrities eat spicy chicken wings, since 2015. In December, BuzzFeed sold First We Feast, the production studio behind Hot Ones, to a group of investors including Evans and Soros Fund Management for $82.5 million. “That deal is extremely pivotal in the digital media landscape. They’ve set a new blueprint,” Dimoldenberg said. “It shows how important an online talk show is, now that it can garner that much attention and profit, and they’ve been able to exploit their IP to the point that they have a franchise [with a range of sauces].” So would Dimoldenberg follow a similar blueprint? “It’s not at the forefront of my mind right now,” she said. While she admits that expanding the Chicken Shop Date brand “has been a conversation,” she’s instead focused on “creating actual entertainment for people to watch. "I’m not so interested in creating a product. I don’t think anyone needs another drink brand from a celebrity.” Beyond the chicken shop In 2018, Dimoldenberg founded her production company, Dimz Inc., with a remit spanning youth culture, comedy, and digital content. The company formalized what she was already doing: “YouTubers were self-producing everything—filming, editing, marketing, doing all these things that multiple agencies would do before. But you were still discredited and seen as not legitimate.” Besides Chicken Shop Date, Dimz Inc. has produced a YouTube cooking show in which Dimoldenberg cooks alongside celebrities. She is also developing scripted formats, including TV series and a romantic comedy movie “set in the Chicken Shop Date world, with me leading it.” Dimoldenberg also plans to grow Dimz Inc.—which she thinks of as a “creative studio more than a production company”—by hiring creatives who can take on work for brands. She says she often receives briefs from brands seeking help reaching viewers online. The fact that brands are approaching someone like Dimoldenberg directly is further proof of the growing power of creators. “People like the creator economy because they feel like [creators] are really connected to what they do,” she said. “And you’re able to get such a wide-reaching variety of perspectives, because the barrier to entry is much smaller. Everyone has a phone, you can start your own TikTok account or YouTube channel, and you don’t have to wait for someone to give you permission to do it.” Yet Dimoldenberg recognizes that with her massive audience, she is in a privileged position. She has long been vocal about her desire to establish a program to help other young people break into digital media, giving them the same access and tools that she once discovered in her London youth club. Her aim is to set up the program by the end of this year. “That’s where I’m putting my focus, rather than creating, like, a brand of frozen nuggets, for example. Which I could do,” she said. Like a scene out of Chicken Shop Date, she pauses for laughter. “Who knows, maybe I’ll just make my own chicken nuggets.”

Creator Economy

Amelia Dimoldenberg Is Ready for a Serious (Media) Commitment

The Chicken Shop Date creator is building a creative empire with her studio Dimz Inc.

Brittaney Kiefer

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