The role of creators in brand marketing was a big topic during Advertising Week, as the booming creator economy has advertisers questioning how they can harness influencers to connect with consumers—especially ahead of the all-important holiday season. 

“One of the biggest questions that we keep getting asked by clients is, ‘What is happening in the creator economy?’” Meta vice president Nada Stirratt said during a session last Monday. More and more brands are incorporating creators into their marketing strategies—Insider Intelligence estimates that 75% of marketers currently work with influencers, and projects that number will jump to 86% by 2025. 

Read on for five themes from this week’s event around the creator economy and how influencers can help brands engage with consumers. 

Do your (audience) homework

Perhaps more important than finding the right creator, is finding out who their audience is. 

Part of that process can include looking at data around a creator’s engagement, according to Ricky Ray Butler, CEO of BEN. Although an influencer may have millions of followers, many of those accounts could be bots or “fake engagement” rather than people genuinely interested in the creator and their content, he said. Butler gave the example of fashion influencer Arii, who in 2019 launched a clothing line that she assumed her 2.6 million Instagram followers would enthusiastically receive. However, she ultimately sold fewer than 36 shirts, largely because fewer than half of her followers were “real people” and nearly a third were bots. 

When choosing a creator to partner with, brands should research that creator’s audience demographics—and even potentially investigate that audience’s “psychographics,” or their attitudes and beliefs, Butler added. Selecting an influencer who has a high follower count but whose audience is wildly different from the consumers a brand is trying to reach will ultimately be ineffective; for example, a popular creator with “an army of fourteen-year-olds” following them wouldn’t make sense for a luxury fashion brand like Gucci to partner with, Canadian model and influencer Coco Rocha said in a panel. 

Related: How brands should navigate the creator economy

Brands should familiarize themselves with the content a creator produces before reaching out about a partnership. Rocha has avoided working with brands who simply know her as a model without looking into the other interests and causes she incorporates into her content.

Knowing a creator’s audience and how your brand could resonate with them can make the creative process easier and the collaboration more rewarding for both the brand and influencer. 

“When you do build collaborative content, build it knowing the person who’s actually going to take your brand and run with it in a unique way that you never thought about doing before,” said futurist David “Shingy” Shing. ”That’s the key to this.” 

Embrace individuality 

Almost every discussion about influencer marketing involves copious use of the word “authenticity,” and the conversations at Advertising Week were no exception. However, some panel discussions offered a meaningful definition of what an “authentic” brand-creator partnership looks like: offering creators the freedom to speak and act how they normally would in any of their other content and leaning into their unique identity rather than trying to stifle their individuality.

Content creator and author Tabitha Brown, who has collaborated with Target on social media videos and a clothing line, shared during a panel that she’s worked with several brands in the past that told her to mask her southern accent or reduce the amount of slang she used in videos she created for them. After submitting her first video to Target, she was stunned when the company didn’t require her to make any edits to the content she submitted to them. 

“They love me just for me, and they’re not trying to change me,” Brown said. “In this space of doing collaborations and partnerships with brands, people ask you to change or shrink or become what they want you to be for their company all the time … My authenticity, my true me, is not negotiable.” 

During the same panel, Pamela Brown, Target’s head of talent partnerships and influence marketing, emphasized the importance of having trust in the creator that a brand chooses to partner with and allowing them to deliver brand messages in a way consistent with their personality and existing style of content. When a brand over-regulates how a creator speaks or behaves in a piece of content, their fans will instantly pick up on it and may disapprove of their favorite creator effectively being censored, she said. And according to Shing, consumers—especially those who are members of Gen Z—have a “built-in bullshit meter” that enables them to instantly recognize instances when influencers don’t truly believe in the brand they’re promoting or when their content has been altered and feels stiff or artificial. 

Micromanagers beware

A huge part of tapping into that authenticity is allowing creators to have control over their content production. Creators often understand platforms and what kind of content works on them better than brands, and they will often take content in creative ways brands may not have considered.

“A pet peeve of mind is brands being stubborn,” said Loey Lane, a YouTuber and podcast host. “I just worked on a project where they wanted the product right next to my face and they were adamant. The photo did not perform as well as I thought. It shouldn’t seem cheesy.”

A better tactic is for the brand to almost be a “patron” to a creator, and sponsor the great content creators are already making, said Gabe Gordon, co-founder and managing partner at Reach Agency, a digital marketing agency. However, he also noted that traditional advertisers should be able to pass along tips and tricks of the trade to help the creator, pointing to an example of the cheese pizza pull, which is known to make viewers hungry.

Posting the same content across multiple platforms is no longer an effective social media strategy, Shing said, and because influencers often specialize in one or two specific social platforms and tend to better understand the types of content that perform well on them, listening to their insights can result in content that fits in more organically on a given site. 

Give the relationship time to grow

Across multiple sessions, creators, marketers and TikTok employees agreed that forming long-term partnerships with influencers is more beneficial for brands than one-time collaborations. 

In one panel, artist and creative director Pablo Rochat likened forming a brand partnership to attending a dinner party: A brand simply working with an influencer once is the same as knocking on the door to the party and immediately leaving, rather than entering and engaging with the guests behind the door, he said. Partnering with a creator over several months or even years allows for that creator’s audience to become more familiar with the brand, and that repeated exposure can lead to greater interest in the brand, he said. 

Integrating creators more deeply into brand campaigns and “giving them a seat at the table” also tends to be more successful for brands, said Sam Kimmel, who leads creator partnerships at TikTok. Rather than bringing in creators in the last phase of a campaign, TikTok is seeing more brands collaborating with influencers on the creation of the campaigns and even developing products alongside the brand, such as Sephora’s partnership with influencer Addison Rae to launch a line makeup and skincare products.

“You shouldn't be using creators as one-off tactics for the most part,” Kimmel said. “If you, as a brand, bring the creator into your brand, they'll be able to tell your brand story in a much more meaningful way.”

Longer relationships also give brands an opportunity to experiment with content styles or several pieces of content to see what resonates, which can help inform future content.

Gamers are creators, too

Gaming creators seem to get lumped in with talk of the metaverse and can be overlooked when it comes to traditional influencer marketing. And yet many marketers agreed that the definition of a “gamer” has expanded. 

Josh Glodoveza, vice president of talent at Fanjoy, used the massive popularity of “Wordle” earlier this year as an example of how gaming has entered many people’s lifestyles, even if they don’t consider themselves gamers. And people often look up to gaming influencers for guidance or advice in the same way they do beauty or lifestyle creators, he added.

“There are ways to reach your consumers who are gamers in easier ways than esports,” said Mae Wen, the Amazon acceleration manager for The Vita Coco Company, and pointed to the brand’s activation in the game “Animal Crossing.” 

Brett Bales and Allison McDuffee of Twitch offered several examples of how brands have partnered with gaming creators on past campaigns. Adobe sponsored a series of livestreams from Shroud, a YouTuber and Twitch streamer, in which he worked with an art director to design a set of armor and weapons that were later released as items players could collect in the online game “New World.” Viewers of the livestream were able to participate in the design of these objects via the chat, allowing Adobe to immerse itself in Shroud’s community. 

There is a range of options for engaging a brand’s gaming audience, said Tommy Huthansel, VP and director of partnerships at Denstu Gaming. On one end of the spectrum is running digital ads on gaming sites or pre-roll on a Twitch stream, and on the other is creating an original game (which he does not recommend for first-timers.) But between those extremes is the ability to engage with a creator, work with a certain platform or support a specific gaming community, as long as it’s done authentically. 

“You just don’t want to seem like the Steve Buscemi ‘How do you do fellow kids?’ meme,” he said.