Your Weekly Creator Marketing Update🚀

24.03.2025

Mar 24, 2025

🎨Forget celebrity versus creator — it’s about the hybrid strategy in a $10B creator economy

TL;DR

Brands are moving beyond the celebrity vs. creator debate by embracing a hybrid strategy that blends the mass appeal of celebrities with the authenticity of content creators, maximizing engagement and ROI in the creator economy.

HEADLINE QUOTE

“Even when brands are partnering with celebrities, this should not be a substitute for creator partnerships,” - “The strategies should compliment each other, as they build deep customer connections with scaled local creators for every campaign.”

OUR TAKE

Depending on when you signed up for this newsletter, you know we couldn’t pass on an opportunity to share this article. Hybrid influencer strategy approaches are getting more media attention lately. The narrative - finally - seems to be shifting away from analyses and opinions that drill-down on the efficacy of singular tiers.

We’ve always been of the opinion that a well-rounded multi-tier approach (including celebrities) simply has the most chance of cutting through the (content) noise that’s out there. Reaching 5m followers with one piece of content and one creator simply doesn’t do the trick anymore. We're moving into a new phase (spearheaded by Unilever) where we will be hearing and reading a lot more around the topics of scaling, volume, and frequency.

However, for every article that tries to tell a nuanced story around a “hybrid” or “full funnel approach” we will continue to read less nuanced statements making blanket statements about entire tiers and why people shouldn’t invest. I spotted the below quote through this LinkedIn post.

Nuance is incredibly important when it comes to making these statements, so I’ve added my 0.02 cents below.

1. CPM should function as a guideline, not a hard KPI
CPM or (cost per mille/1000) is often used in the creator economy (mostly by the side that is paying for content) to understand performance on delivered content, as well as a partnership viability tool. I.e. a content creator might charge £20,000 for one piece of IGC, and is predicted (the way this is done varies greatly, but typically you would take a handful of recent sponsored posts and look at the average views) to generate 1,000,000 views. The CPM in this hypothetical situation would be £20.

There will be certain CPM windows that businesses operate in order to justify working with a content creator. In another hypothetical situation where a content creator charges £2000 but only achieves 5,000 views for instance would have a CPM of £400. This indicates that the creator is likely to be on the upper side of any CPM window and provides an indicative signal that the cost-to-views ratio is (too) high.

However, if this £2000 includes a buy-out for paid media and social media usage - the CPM would likely become more efficient (pending quite a few variables).

The challenge with using a CPM as the main KPI for influencer marketing is that it judges content only by its views, and demotes the practice to a performance based play. We have to remain mindful that it remains challenging to measure the (long term) impact that content has outside of metrics that are directly attributable. (CPM, views, clicks, sales, etc) and investing in brand equity measurement is often a costly endeavour.

However, if low CPM is considered the main driver of success, I would advise (slightly sarcastically) steering away from the “risk” of actually putting IGC out there and utilise micro-creators to develop content that will only be used as paid media (versus featuring on their own channel).

I will close with something I’ve repeated frequently over the years: “You can buy reach, but it’s much more challenging to buy great content”.

2. Be transparent
Smaller content creators often are not aware that the paying side judges partnership viability based on CPM metrics. An open and honest conversation around your CPM window might help the creator understand their pricing structure better and might lead to a conversation around cost-reduction.

However, a lot of creators (and agencies) will base costs on metrics that favour them (audience metrics versus viewership metrics) and there will be plenty of brands out there that are happy to pay the “sticker price” for content as quoted.

There is some, but very little standardisation when it comes to an IGC pricing model that is aligned on by all players in the creator industry. Being transparent around your mission/goals around influencer marketing and what you’re trying to achieve will more often than not lead to a better working relationship than simply reaching out and requesting quotes for a singular piece of sponsored IGC without any context.

3. Identify creators and niches that work for you
Calling out entire tiers for being inefficient is too easy. Brands and agencies have the option to say no. People (should) have the capability and tools to identify content creators and verticals with CPM indicators that do work for their brand/client.

We are not doing the industry any favours by making choices that can easily be avoided by a robust identification and vetting system.

read the full article

🏭Industry Headlines

🎞️As platform moderation standards vary, creators eye Twitch as a safe haven

The growing contrast between different creator platforms’ approaches to moderation has made some creators in marginalized groups, such as women, queer creators and creators of color, view Twitch as a digital safe haven.

💻YouTube wants to make it easier for creators to work with brands

Through a new feature called “creator-initiated video linking,” creators in YouTube’s partner program can now send requests to brands to partner on sponsored content videos they’ve made in an effort to streamline partnerships ads. Brands working with multiple creators can also use a video-linking API to streamline partnerships, a feature that was released widely late last year but is just now being publicized, according to Erica Walsh, a YouTube spokesperson.

🎤The voices that matter’: Unilever recruits an army of influencers

Well-known people have been influencing the opinions of others for centuries, but the surge in popularity of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and China’s Weibo in the mid 2010s gave a new generation of influencers huge platforms.

Globally, advertisers spent about $500 million on influencers in 2015, according to the market research firm Statista. That grew to $6.5 billion by 2019 and hit $35 billion last year.