Your Weekly Creator Marketing Update🚀
08/07/2025
✅‘Creators are their own brand’: Oatly on using influencers as ‘creative directors’
📌 TL;DR
This article describes how Oatly treats content creators as creative directors versus influencers - with a third of their content being produced through this route. They prioritise smaller, local creators over mega-influencers and use minimal briefs to preserve authenticity. In addition, Oatly are slowly shifting towards longer-term creator relationships.
🔍 MY THOUGHTS
📋 "Rather than a separate entity, influencers are seen as 'an extension' of the in-house creative team, bringing in 'fresh ideas', 'irreverent thinking' and an in-built audience. Instead of creators, Sutton prefers to describe Oatly's influencers as 'creative directors'."
➡️We have had a lot of conversations recently around influencer advertising versus influencer marketing, and that the prevailing thinking even in 2025 is that creators provide access to large audiences, and showing that audience a sales message should and will benefit your brand instantly. Creators are treated (typically) as a means to drive more eyeballs through the funnel.
And I absolutely love when a brand opts to reframe this outdated way of thinking. Oatly tapping is tapping into the slightly slept-on idea that content creators are in fact best at (drumroll) creating content.
📋"Day-to-day, the focus tends to be on smaller creators who have 'more of a strong, local following'. That really helps us tap into communities and activities that are happening at a market level."
➡️I really appreciate the mindset and approach focusing around the understanding that smaller content creators (typically, depending on the algorithm, of course) tap into more local audiences and tend to provide a more personal experience that makes audiences feel more connected to the creator and their partnerships, an in theory this would lead to a higher likelihood of the audience taking some sort of action.
Allowing space in their strategy for content to really work for smaller audiences also aligns with the idea that we are in a transitional period where algorithms are starting to focus on rewarding/pushing quality content that does well with smaller audiences first as opposed to feeds being dominated by content creators that have large existing audiences.
📋"There's no expectation for people to hold said product to camera, but we do want them to incorporate the brand in there and highlight it somehow. That's usually as tight as the brief goes."
➡️👏👏 I don’t have too much to add here without sounding like a broken record. In a nutshell: tight briefs kill creativity ⏩bad content kills performance.
📋“We tend to flit around and just bring more and more in. And actually, we’re now starting to think about how we could potentially have more longer-term relationships with some of the smaller creators,” she explains.
➡️I like the honesty here. We always talk about longer-term relationships and the ability to build trust, but without a proper strategy in place you will likely burn out audiences quickly without building any type of relationship. They will have to balance audience saturation, creativity & narrative power - but I’m looking forward to seeing some of these longer-term relationships come to life.
💡 Bottom line
Oatly’s is clearly attempting to move away from transactional influencer marketing toward creator-led storytelling. By positioning influencers as creative directors, prioritising smaller and more localised voices, minimizing briefs to protect originality & and investing in longer-term relationships, they’re focusing on creativity and great content as the baseline.
It’s a reminder that brands can work together with creators beyond using them as amplification. I’m all aboard the idea that that trust, community, and quality content should be at the core of any influencer marketing strategy.
🏭Industry Headlines
📖Unilever’s personal care CMO on upskilling marketing for ‘social-first’ future
Probably the biggest challenge for a company like Unilever, because of our size [is] changing the whole ecosystem on how we partner with our agencies, how we use technology, and how scale up on AI and other tools.
📖Best Buy, Lowe’s chief marketing officers explain why they launched new influencer programs
CMOs at Best Buy and Lowe’s told Modern Retail they launched these new programs in response to the growing importance of influencers in recommending products to shoppers. The new programs exhibit an evolution beyond affiliate links and toward more personalized shoppable content, measurability and new ways to compensate creators.
📖Creators as Strategists: Beyond Influence and What Comes Next
“The smartest strategists I’ve met didn’t sit in a planning team – they built YouTube audiences from scratch and knew exactly how to hold their attention,”