Luggage brand Béis owes much of its business growth to TikTok virality gained from partnering with influencers on sponsored content, brand activations and product seeding programs. But Béis is taking its influencer work in a different direction for its latest marketing push, bringing on a content creator to spearhead the campaign’s creative strategy. 

Béis teamed up with creator and brand consultant Robyn DelMonte, better known on social media as “Girlbosstown,” to develop and produce the brand’s first major Father’s Day campaign as it looks to attract a larger male audience.

DelMonte often pitches marketing ideas or social strategies rooted in pop culture to brands from Stanley to Ralph Lauren, and bestows her “GBT stamp of approval” on marketing moves she enjoys, such as Rhode Beauty’s launch of its now-viral phone case with a slot for lip balm. Last June, she proposed a Béis campaign centered around “airport dads”—a teasing term for dads who fit the stereotype of taking charge and being over-prepared when flying somewhere with their families. 

Béis responded to that video in a matter of hours with a comment reading, “Loveeee!! You’re so talented 🤍🤍.” The brand contacted DelMonte about turning her campaign concept into a reality almost immediately—but once Béis decided a few months later to use the “airport dad” concept for its first Father’s Day push, “that’s when things fully started to come into place” DelMonte told Ad Age.

“This type of content has been my bread and butter for the past two years, and it’s what gave me my platform and allowed me to grow this audience,” DelMonte told Ad Age. “However, I feel like there was a missing ingredient, and that was the brand side of things. A partnership like this is exactly what I needed to kind of take the next step in my career … and to show people in the industry the different ways in which brands can work with creators.” 

The Béis campaign, which rolled out earlier this week across both Béis’ and DelMonte’s social media channels, on the brand’s website and in email ads, revolves around improving the online reputation of the “airport dad.” Over the past few years, users have shared videos of their fathers (and later, their friends, romantic partners or even themselves) displaying characteristic “airport dad” behaviors, such as shepherding their family to the airport two hours before their flight or keeping their family’s boarding passes in a manila folder. 

“I was like, ‘Wait, the airport dad needs better PR,’ because these are all really positive traits that people love in any other setting,” DelMonte said. “They needed a makeover.” That overhaul of the “airport dad” image runs throughout the campaign’s imagery and copy, with Instagram captions such as “Meet the hottest man in Hollywood right now. The Airport Dad,” and “From airport dad ... to airport daddy.”

DelMonte has consulted with a handful of brands on their social media strategies, but she did much of that work behind-the-scenes and wasn’t able to discuss it with her online audience, she said. Her collaboration with Béis marks “the first time where [a brand] wanted to also highlight that we were working together and give [me] the credit, and to kind of show the process of what it looks like,” for a brand to tap a creator to shape their campaign from the beginning, she said. 

Watch: GirlBossTown shares influencer advice to brands

“We’ve always said we don’t want our work with [creators] to just be a sponsored ad,” said Liz Money, senior VP of brand & creative at Béis, which was founded by “Pretty Little Liars” actress and influencer Shay Mitchell. “And honestly, if you listen to the creators and influential people in the space that are bringing thoughts and ideas to the table for brands, and you help them bring those to life, you’re just building your community, and the loyalty within it, further. We’re seeing so much excitement from [Robyn’s audience] about the fact that we were able to bring this idea of hers to life.”

DelMonte “worked closely with Béis’ creative team through every step of the process,” the brand wrote in a press release. Several ideas from the TikTok video that drove Béis to reach out to DelMonte made it into the final campaign, including the “‘90s paparazzi vibe” woven throughout the photos and social media content, inspired by paparazzi photos of actors such as Luke Perry and Woody Harrelson taken in airports. “The ‘airport dad’ is the new hottest thing in Hollywood,” DelMonte said. 

“A lot of the time when I talk to brands about these ideas, we have to make them smaller and smaller due to the red tape of the industry,” she said. “That’s obviously a thing you’re going to run into anywhere. But when I started working with Béis, no idea was too big. And when it came to copy and ideas they really just allowed me to have creative control. Not only that—they supported my ideas and helped grow them with me.” 

Also read: Creators are becoming brand social media strategists

DelMonte also introduced the idea of lampshading the intensity associated with the stereotypical “airport dad” by having the four dads in the campaign—food entrepreneur Lawrence Longo; creator and fitness trainer Michael Justin; former NFL defensive end Isaac Rochell; and model Scott Neslage—weight-lifting Béis suitcases or sprinting up staircases. DelMonte oversaw the campaign photoshoot—even hand-picking the photographer, Davis Bates, someone she’s been “wanting to work with for the past two years”—and filming several pieces of social content herself, she said.

DelMonte helped cast the “airport dads” starring in the campaign, too. Rochell, in particular, was the first person who came to mind for DelMonte after she met him and his internet-famous wife, Allison Kuch, at the Super Bowl in February, she said. 
Instacart sponsored her travel and ticket for the Super Bowl after DelMonte created a TikTok series where she pitched brands Super Bowl ad ideas until one of them sent her to the Big Game. 

As of writing, Béis has garnered nearly 830,000 views across the TikTok content from its partnership with DelMonte, bolstered by an additional 630,000 views from DelMonte’s own videos about the campaign.

Working with a creator such as DelMonte to develop a campaign from start to finish was a “totally new experience” for Béis, Money said, “but it’s something that I think we’ll be integrating into the way we think about collaborations.”

“I think this really opened our eyes to how we can collaborate with influencers, especially somewhere like TikTok, which is all about discoverability,” she added. “As we grow, one of the biggest things for us is brand exposure and brand awareness—and this is the quickest way to get to that.”

Expanding beyond sponsorships

A growing number of brands are collaborating with creators outside of typical social media sponsorships after witnessing young consumers' preference for ads produced by creators over content directly from brands. A recent joint study from Kantar and digital media company Doing Things found that three in four people between ages 18 and 24 trust sponsored content from creators more than any other form of advertising. And nearly 80% of people from age 18 to 44 said they “like to try products or brands featured in creator-made content,” per the report. 

Increasingly, that means brands are handing the creative reins over to their creator partners rather than having them merely promote the brand in sponsored content. For instance, in February, wallet and accessories brand Ridge named tech creator Marques Brownlee its “chief creative partner,” and PacSun in April had influencer Anna Sitar to direct the photo and video shoot surrounding PacSun’s swimwear line collaboration with her. 

“I hope that this campaign shows other brands a new way in which brands can work with creators,” DelMonte said. “Obviously, the marketing of the campaign is about the ‘airport dad,’ but then there’s also another subset of marketing within that, which is the storytelling of the collaboration and the journey that my audience and Béis' audience have gone on to get to this point. I think it’s the perfect way to help shift the creator economy going forward.”