How to build authentic creator communities with Gen Z consumers

A recent article in Ad Age’s Gen Z Voices series highlighted the “loneliness epidemic” that has had an outsize effect on this particular generation. Perhaps not coincidentally, the latest research confirms the perception that Gen Z craves connection and a sense of community. Viral Nation Enterprise Director of Global Accounts Gabe Feldman and Head of Creative, Content and Experiential Brandon Lentino joined Ad Age Studio 30 Editor John Dioso at the Ad Age Gen Z Summit on March 6 in New York to share leading strategies for how brands can use creator marketing to make authentic personal connections and build communities with Gen Z audiences. “One of the reasons that social is such an incredible marketing channel is it’s one of the few where conversation is happening in real time, at all times, from friends to other friends, from family to friends, from consumers to other consumers, from brands to consumers,” said Lentino. “The chatter is there, and the comments, and the DMs, it’s all there. It’s a wealth of knowledge, just from listening to what your community is saying.” The first step for brands looking to reach Gen Z is to take the time to understand how they are showing up on social, said Lentino. In addition to being “overly promotional,” one of the common mistakes brands make is treating social primarily as a customer-service channel, rather than a valuable opportunity to cultivate community. “The brands that are killing it on social media are going above and beyond just offering their product or their services,” Lentino added. ”They’re figuring out a way to engage and entertain communities through different angles. What is that extra step they’re taking to engage with these communities? It’s about creating value.” “Value means education,” explained Feldman. “Value means entertainment.” In order to create value, he added, brands “not only need to provide a sense of community, but create content that people actually want to watch.” Feldman highlighted educational company Chegg, a Viral Nation award-winning client, as an almost literal example of this value proposition. “When they first approached us, TikTok was very much an acquisition and ad tool,” Feldman said. “We transitioned them from promotional to what we now call ‘edutainment.’ Now, when we’re on TikTok for Chegg, we’re not talking about the platform at all. We’re providing education in the form of bite-sized ads entertainment, and we’ve scaled that to the point where TikTok is now their most productive acquisition channel in their entire mix.” Humanizing brands with ‘rawthentic’ content As the continuing growth of creator marketing is proving, much of the content that Gen Z increasingly wants to watch is created by influencers. The primary reason? The dreaded A-word (the other one): authenticity. “Everybody’s talking about authenticity,” said Feldman. “For a brand, especially as it relates to social and how we connect with Gen Z, what it means is humanization. Why are creators or influencers so incredibly popular and effective today? It’s because they feel like a friend. They don’t feel like a celebrity. They don’t feel unattainable. Brands need to implement that same approach when it comes to humanization.” Humanizing brands, Feldman explained, involves everything in the social media flywheel, from content to community management to the influencers a brand chooses to partner with. Inauthentic influencer and creator partnerships are one of the common hazards to brands new to social marketing, Lentino said. Too many brands default to mega-influencers or celebrities because of their reach and the high profiles not just in social but in all media. According to Lentino, “such brands are “not doing the right discovery and identification to find the right creators to align their brand with and to align with the target demographics that they’re looking to reach.” Just as essential as brand humanization, the content itself must feel more relatable to Gen Z, aid Lentino added. And while it’s important for brands to consider the themes that are most authentic to this audience, “The content on social platforms that is getting the [widest] algorithmic distribution is shot, produced and edited in a more raw way”—or what Lentino described as “rawthentic” content. One of the primary ways a brand can display “rawthenticity” is the voice it adopts on social media. Gen Z expects a level of frankness and purpose from its brands. What’s more, once that personal connection with the community is built, this generation of consumers expects brands to take accountability for their own mistakes when their products, services or campaigns fail, Feldman added. But in an age where brand safety has created a generation of marketers already spooked by the demand to prove performance, those social teams who see what works with Gen Z and want to take more risks are getting pushback from the powers that be. Internal education is key to getting reticent C-suite office holders to understand the benefits of a riskier but more-authentic social strategy. Feldman advised brand social teams to ask themselves, “Why do I want to do this? What’s the purpose of it?” To drive the point home, he recommended the age-old tactic of appealing to executives’ FOMO, asking another question: “What is the business cost of not being a bit more edgy or taking more risks? Our competitors are doing this really well. It’s time for us to catch up.” Lentino credited such brands as Slim Jim and Wendy’s with “adopting a social persona similar to that of a creator by taking a little bit of a risk, being a little bit more pithy in their dialogue and taking a humorous approach when speaking to consumers in a way that feels human-to-human, friend-to-friend.” The experiential generation In addition to authenticity in how brands approach both content creative and the creators they partner with, experience is one of the things that Gen Z values most—more than, say, consuming products. For Gen Z, experience can take different forms. As the first purely digital generation, virtual experiences resonate, for example via entertaining creator- or user-generated viral content that can feature anything from testing beauty products to demonstrating the latest augmented reality/mixed reality tech gadgets, which promise to both expand virtual experiences and blur the line between VR and IRL. Lentino said Viral Nation’s successful campaign with one of the leading VR/AR/MR tech brands, intended to promote a popular game for the company’s high-profile VR headset, exemplified how social and creator marketing can successfully marry virtual and real experiences—and ultimately sell products. The first step in this campaign involved identifying the right influencer and celebrity partners to speak to the target demographic across a variety of niches. For example, after determining which music icons are most important to this demo, Viral Nation worked to get the product into their hands. The idea, Lentino said, was not to “force them to create content, but to create an experience for them and give them something that they can post on social. At the end of the day, it’s still promotional. It’s still for the purpose of selling a product, but it’s done in a much more organic way.” After launching the brand’s first ever creator program, Lentino said Viral Nation has been able to connect the brand with the VR/MR community and find the expert voices who are creating content about the space and the products in it. In turn, the brand is bringing community creators to company events and giving them platforms to share content on the company’s global-reaching social channels. “These are opportunities where you can bring consumers together in a really dynamic, immersive way and give them an experience with your product, not just for the purpose of selling, but really for creating something that’s memorable to them,” he said. “They’re taking a step back from just marketing to the community, and showing that they’re a member of the community. And as a result, they’re seeing really great reception because it’s organic. It’s authentic.” The perfect storm One campaign that epitomized the best practices presented during the panel, Feldman said, was when outdoor apparel brand The North Face turned a viral TikTok customer complaint into a marketing win. Last November a woman hiking in New Zealand during a rainstorm posted a video on TikTok complaining that her North Face raincoat didn’t keep her dry, as advertised. But instead of a refund, she demanded that the company redesign the raincoat to make it truly waterproof and then express-deliver it to her in New Zealand. “What did The North Face’s social team do?” Feldman asked. “They listened. They flew a helicopter to the top of a mountain to deliver this customer a new raincoat. And then what did they also do? They turned that entire experience into a content-capture moment. They killed three birds with one stone to some degree: They created incredible content, they listened to their customer and, frankly speaking, they satisfied the customer.” About Viral Nation Viral Nation is the leader in social-first transformation and commerce, uniting the social ecosystem through our full-service creative agency, a 360° creator representation agency and social-first suite of technology. Named as one of the fastest-growing technology companies in North America for 2023 by Deloitte, Viral Nation is active in eight countries and home to the largest influencer roster. Our multidisciplinary teams are as diverse as our portfolio, proud to fuel growth for global brands including Anheuser-Busch, Baidu, Campbell’s, The Coca-Cola Company, Disney, eOne, Microsoft, Meta Platforms, Tencent, TJX, Uber and Warner Bros. For more information, please visit www.viralnation.com.

How to build authentic creator communities with Gen Z consumers

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