The creator marketing playbook for brands

0:00Hey everyone, welcome back to the Express Checkout podcast. We're doing something a little bit different today. This episode won't contain any news, so please go check out our newsletter. Today's is a lot more operational in nature, geared towards all of the brands listening. We are interviewing Arthur Leopold, CEO and co-founder of Agentio, to talk about creator marketing and the creator economy, and specifically about how all of that involves brands. So please enjoy and welcome, Arthur. It's so great to be here. We're so excited to have you. We've been circling each other for a while now on social media.

0:36We're doing some stuff with Agentio very soon. So we'd love to start with what is Agentio? What do you do there? And we'll get moving. Amazing. Great to be on with you both. Agentio is the buying platform for creator media. What that means is we've solved one of the hardest problems that brands have faced for so long, which is how do you actually build trust at scale and how do you reach audiences through the most trusted voices? Creators are the highest trust avenues for brands to get in front of current existing audiences and new audiences, but historically it's been too hard to buy creator content, certainly in a scalable way.

1:10The belief was that if you could automate and standardize the buying of creator content, you could actually shift paid media spend to creators. Prior to starting Agentio, I helped start Cameo, whereas the first employee, first investor, was president there saw the ups and the downs and saw how technology could enable this frictionless buying between fans and their favorite people. And then, of course, brands started reaching out. And the current ways of working, I'm sure so many founders and marketers who listen to the pod will appreciate this, is this very archaic, friction-laden process that, outside of creator marketing, really doesn't exist in typical work streams.

1:46The ad-buying ecosystem has solved for all the friction in the past. Double click with buying ads on the internet or meta with buying ads on social. But creator today is still hand-to-hand combat. I teamed up with my co-founder Jonathan. Jonathan ran Spotify's growth and innovation engineering org, automating their internal content marketing. And LMs had just become publicly available. And we realized we could build an end-to-end platform that eliminates the friction and gives brands so much more opportunity to shift their spend to the highest trust storytellers in the world. And that's exactly what we've built.

2:22We've been around for three years now. We have many of the very best brands in the country from Olipop and Uber and DoorDash to Quinns and Graza and Bombas and you name it who are now spending with us on a continuous basis. They're able to clear six, seven-figure budgets in a matter of hours, something that historically would take many months. So it's been amazing solving this problem. And our belief is that creators and creator marketing are the future of advertising and Agentio is a platform to enable it.

2:54Arthur Leopold:Love that. Thank you for that overview. We're going to go back to the basic basics. And I'm going to ask you to answer a question that you probably haven't had to answer in a really long time, which is what is creator marketing? Creator marketing is leveraging some of the most creative storytellers and not only leveraging them for content, but also for distribution and the trust and equity that they've built with their audiences. For a long time, people were buying influencer content, right? Your hashtag ad, sugar bear care type content. And the influencers were essentially enabling brands just to rent their reach.

3:29It wasn't measurable. It wasn't scalable. and as the algorithms changed and brands needed to actually partner with people who were providing more value to the algorithms, they realized that they need to partner actually even with people like yourselves, right, where you might not have the largest audience but your audience really cares about who you are and what you provide your audience on a weekly basis through the pod, through the newsletter, through social and you are the experts within your domain. This is exactly how creator has evolved. where brands want to tap voices who have actually built trust and equity with their niches and their audiences.

4:09And within those audiences, you might be or that creator might be just as important as some uber celebrity. This monoculture that used to bring everybody together has really dissipated. And because of that, creators are now more important than ever because they can tap into these micro audiences and help build resonance and trust because that's exactly how they've been able to build their audience over time. It's definitely a shift in the way that brands should now partner with creators. We very much view influencers. This was something that was popular years ago. Creator is now a form of media.

4:44It's a line item within a media plan, and creators become the creative and content velocity for a brand across both paid and earned.

4:53Arthur Leopold:Yeah, I want to double-click on that a little bit. How are people working with these creators, and why is it that they're able to provide trust in a way that influencers are not beyond them, like you mentioned, them being experts in certain domains, but they are still doing a hashtag ad, right? What are other ways that brands are partnering with creators in ways that are not similar to historic influencer marketing? The real difference is the ability to create content that resonates with a specific audience. Creators are more subject matter experts within a specific audience, they are monetizing not just on an image or not just on a quick selfie video, but on building content that is more thoughtful, that resonates within a specific niche the same way that the two of you are, right?

5:41Are you both influencers or are you more creators? I believe that you are creators. You're creating something that is uniquely different and also really powerful and impactful for those that are listening. If you were to look at the influencers of yesteryear, their views have fallen off a cliff, their engagement has fallen off a cliff, because they haven't been able to keep up with the demand of constantly making new creative, because that's exactly what the platforms need from somebody. And that's what the platforms expect to give you as you're consuming content. Influencers have really tapped out in that sense.

6:13Yeah, I mean, as creators, like you've been saying, it's like, we've noticed this too, just from the growth of our content on the different platforms and even myself watching a lot of different creators and been following i've been following creators for so long i haven't really followed too many influencers maybe some lifestyle ones here or there and they can sort of maintain their relevancy but like edutainment has become a big thing i think we fall into that have you found that brands are excited to work with that kind of creator in the entertainment space because you can incorporate the brands that get really interesting ways and not just have it be like just a boring ad read in the middle of a 20-minute YouTube video.

6:58Because creators are so much more at the whim, their success is more at the whim of the algorithm. It's really important for them to make content that doesn't feel necessarily like ad load, right? Because the platforms are going to ensure that there's less viewership and less eyeballs on content that feels like an ad if the platform itself is not making money. So the creators are incentivized to make really original content and make content that's going to be resonant with their audience, that their audience that they've built for so long, the audience where they're essentially like the CMO of that audience, as I say, I know that that creator loves that brand, or I know there's a reason for that creator partnering with this brand because it's so well aligned with all the content that the creator has made before because of that the incentives are really well aligned and audiences of course like they will just push creators aside or unfollow creator or an influencer who's just like constantly pitching products that aren't well aligned that's where building the right system to ensure creators match with the right brands is also so critical because it puts a creator in an advantageous position where they can properly incorporate great products that they might use regularly or an offering that is really resonant to themselves and their audience on a more consistent basis.

8:13Arthur Leopold:I'm interested in hearing more about this specifically in the realm of CPG, because obviously that's our audience, but also you've worked with really incredible CPG brands. I'm interested if we could kind of get a little bit more like tactical and some examples here of you listed a bunch of the amazing CPG brands you work with. What brands have done creator partnerships really well, Or what's like an example of a creator campaign that just like knocked it out of the park on Argentio? Great question. So as we look at the overall brand ecosystem on Argentio, I mean, a few brands come to mind in the CPG space, Olipop, David Protein, Groons, Graza.

8:50And I'll give you an example specific to Groons. They joined Argentio two and a half years ago. And initially they were very focused on identifying health and wellness creators. And of course, the platform surface all these creators that would be a great potential fit for them but it also understood that there was this new creator audience that they hadn't explored that had performed well for other types of cpg brands and ddc brands the age demo is very well aligned with what grills was looking for and had the the semantic understanding of creators through all the content to know that there's actually like a lobster fisherman as an example who's a great potential fit for them because he's on a boat 12 hours a day this guy jacob novels he he literally has talked about like getting sick all the time so there might be a level of vitamin deficiency.

9:35A typical marketer would have looked at that and said like we've never worked with that type of creator before therefore like we're gonna decline that creator but their team is very forward-looking. They understood that all the signal and all this disparate data could lead to a better outcome so of course they sent a bid out that that creator ended up being the top performer for them. What then ended up happening and this is really the power of AI and LLMs is that Agentio then surfaces new strategies that are similar to that individual. So they might end up working with a crab fisherman or a rancher in Montana or a farmer in Iowa and all of a sudden you're exploring this entirely new subset of creators that previously likely nobody within the team would have said this is an audience that we want to tap into.

10:21And we see that happen all the time, right? Creators are the new, creators are the new targeting. Because of that, it's so important for brands to have a much higher level of creator velocity and content velocity that they've ever had before, because you never know what's going to hit within the algorithm. Brands who take a step away and say, you know what, let's approach this like a channel, rather than let's take a fine tooth comb on every single individual creator, they're going to see the better outcomes because they're going to be able to test and learn and explore new audiences. And through that, understand what messaging is resonating, which types of creators might be resonating, where they want to potentially double down, and even be able to test new offerings or new brand talking points or new CTAs to then explore across different paid channels.

11:06How are you convincing brands to do that? Because not everybody's grooms. Not everybody is gung-ho about testing and trying and doing something unique and out of the box, I guess, other than like case studies, how are you sort of positioning this to get people to buy in to do this lobster fisherman campaign that maybe they wouldn't have done otherwise? It's helpful for brands to understand where we are today as consumers and how the space has fundamentally changed. Today, about 50 % of attention on digital is consumed by creator content. So you have like half the attention. If you look at trust, us as consumers, we trust creators 70 % more than brands when it comes to advertising.

11:49So all of a sudden you have the majority of trust, you have a large and increasingly growing percentage of actual attention on creator content, but then you look at overall ad spend running through creators and typically it's somewhere between two and five percent. So now if you are the VP of growth or the CMO or the CEO of a fast-growing CPG brand, how can you go and tell your board that your either legacy media mix or what has worked historically at other companies but only equates to a few percent or 10 percent of overall spend against creators is the right strategy when the attention and audience and trust is entirely shifted to creator content.

12:26Brands are having this moment constantly. They understand now that creator content and having a real creator strategy, it is business critical. Unilever's CEO came out a year and a half ago and said exactly this, right they're going to shift half their spend to creators now if Unilever one of the top five advertisers in the world one of the largest conglomerates can move towards that how can you as a brand who might be earlier stage or mid stage how can you not move towards that that's like the fundamental business question and risk that every brand I think faces today when brands like root themselves in that and really approach the space from first principles it becomes pretty obvious that oh shit you do need to start shifting your spend now how do you go about doing it of course you need you need the right level of infrastructure to do that.

13:09The last thing I'll share is the power of creators is these are people that have hacked the algorithm, right? They are making content that is just continuously getting surface to large audiences. They understand how to hack distribution and how to show up on the platforms where all the attention is today better than any brand could. So why not leverage the creators as micro creative agencies, as media channels, as distribution sources, and do that in scalable way rather than maybe paying or buying content through legacy avenues what from your experience at cameo really influenced some of the ways that you're working with the creators on the business side because obviously you work with brands it's great for brands they get to connect but there's also the creator side of this that they get to connect with brands they work with you i have to imagine that your cameo days has informed some of the ways that you work with the creator and the talent side of this not just the brand side one of the great learnings from time of cameo is that it's often not the talent of the creator that you expect to do well who's gonna perform best and we we see that happen all the time it's the non-obvious match uh or the non-obvious matches whether it be the lobster fisherman or we just had a brand where where tennis apparel was their tenth most bought SKU.

14:26And they ended up, the system generated a few tennis creators as potential matches. Now, Tennis Apparel is their number one SKU over, that took six weeks to completely change because these creators were making content, their, the brand was putting spend behind partnership ads, and for whatever reason Meta's algorithm said, oh, this is content that we want to put spend behind, and audiences were really resonating with the content itself, because they recognized the creators. The content was so good. So the creators just continued making more content, continued to get more spend. And now this brand has tennis apparel as the number one SKU from about number 10 six weeks ago.

15:06So it's so often the non-obvious creators that are going to be the ones who can drive the greatest alpha. And that's why it's important for brands to remove the bias from the equation and trust the system. And none of us know which ads are going to end up as the most performing ads. We can reduce the rate of failure with those ads. But even across meta-partnership ads, we just did a study looking at about$150 million to spend, 65 ,000 partnership ads on the Gentile network. Typically only one in five ads actually emerges as a winner. and when that ad emerges as a winner, the shelf life is usually about 36 days.

15:54So on average, at around a month, your CPA starts to balloon. And that goes to show the importance of constantly having more creative. And the only way to have this creative content engine and this velocity, of course, is through creators themselves. You will create a very low ceiling if you believe you know all the right creators for your brand.

16:19Arthur Leopold:Once you actually are partnered with a creator, what do you do? What are some of the best brands doing with these creators to make for successful content? Because it's one thing to find the right person, but then you have to activate it in the right way. Yeah. Without sounding lame, because everybody's heard this, but let them cook, right? creators at the end of the day, they understand their audience better than any brand. And that means that you have to give them a level of autonomy and creative freedom so that the incentives become really well aligned. No creator likes receiving a brief that is explicit in what the creator should say because a creative strategist or an influencer marketer is like, this is exactly how I think the creator should talk about our brand.

17:15give the creator options, give them a few talking points, give them problems that might be surfaced in AEO or GEO and that you might want the creator to repeat, but then let them make content that's going to be most resonant to their audience because they know their audience better than anybody. And that's super important. Now, once the creator is successful, the goal is for you to continue to renew that creator, right? And one of the challenges in the space has been because it's been so hard to buy for so long, brands are stuck using influencer marketing budgets and using those budgets for one-off campaigns.

17:58Our belief is that creators and creator media needs to be part of your always-on evergreen media spend. So once the creator does perform, then give them longer-term bids. Work with them across different SKUs. Work with them across different channels. start to expand the aperture of how you're working with that creator because they're doing a great job storytelling your brand on your behalf and their audience is starting to learn that the creators align to your brand. And typically we see the best performance for creators that get renewed right around video number six, which goes to show that the audience has been warmed up, right?

18:40and not too different from buying ads on Meta. Usually you need anywhere between six to 10 exposures to convert an audience. And the same thing is true with the creator's audience. I know we've talked a little bit about this, such as sort of the formats that we've just covered, always on spend, but what are some other ways that you think brands should work with creators? Because there's gotta be very unique ways that you've seen some of your brands work with and just generally too, because these creators show up in so many different ways. And even if they're just a YouTuber, they still show up on Instagram.

19:13They show up in person. They can create bespoke content. But I'm curious if there's any other ways that we haven't talked about. One of the highest alpha ways that we'll see brands build like real trust and community over the course of the next few years, as we have a proliferation of AI content, will be more like in-person type events and bringing creators and subject matter experts to those events. It is much less scalable, but we see so many great brands like Bandit, for instance, build strong community through in-person gatherings. Creators are a great avenue to help strengthen those in-person events.

19:48As you think about every potential distribution mechanism, affiliate is a way for brands, obviously, to leverage some level of creator engagement to drive sales through affiliate marketing. It's hard to build a media plan and a marketing plan just around something that essentially is like a cherry on top, but it's certainly another avenue to go much wider and work with creators that might be longer tail for them to be talking about your product. Across the entire funnel, whether it be lower funnel through partnership ads or affiliate or more upper funnel by leveraging creators as the content engine for CTV or even for linear or for in-person or mid funnel your consideration through YouTube and through partnership ads, creators should be part of that entire ecosystem.

20:34And oftentimes brands will pigeonhole creators to one part of the funnel. Maybe it's just upper funnel, maybe it's just lower funnel, but they won't consider that audience engagement has changed and audience trust has changed. And the brands who do it best today have creators at every part of the funnel. They are very much core to their marketing and go-to-market strategy. Oh, we, yeah. Jen and I talk about this all the time. I mean, we obviously also work with various partners. And it is something we run into sometimes where we're like, hey, we can be your top of funnel. We can also be a bottom of funnel.

21:04It's going to look a little bit different. There's going to be a different medium that we'll use in different language. But we want to be a part of that full picture because the way I think even consumers build relationships with brands, whether that brand is a SaaS platform or an Olipop, a lot of it is longer tail. There has to be a stronger base to it. You have to have all these hit points. One, because there's so many other brands out there that you're trying to, that are trying to compete for attention and eyeballs. And the great way to do that is building relationships at multiple parts of the funnel, because you kind of want to hold their hand through that process.

21:37The nice thing about creators is they can do a lot of that because there's, they're, they're so engaged with the audience. And we experienced this. It's interesting to hear this from more of the consumer brand side, but it also, also aligns with what, with what we do. A hundred percent. And that's why Agenteo partners with creators as well, right? Brands are gentile. We don't sponsor Express Checkout for reach, right? You have a very niche, very passionate audience who trusts you, right? Brands are gentile. We are sponsoring Express Checkout because there's 12 ,000, 15 ,000 operators that really trust you and that trust transfers.

22:17And your whole thesis around this space, I think, is encapsulated by the partnerships that you do with brands, right? Where you are the expert within a very important but smaller community. The same goes for creators in thousands of different micro cultures and micro verticals. Brands need to be able to tap into culture in so many different ways because mainstream monoculture doesn't really exist anymore. No, it does not. And I kind of miss it a little bit, to be honest.

22:48Arthur Leopold:I know we don't, yeah, we can't all bond over the same algorithm anymore, but that's why we have the odyssey and Barb and Heimer. And that's so true. We've talked a lot about a lot of newer forms of marketing, maybe to some people and even to us. What's next? If influencer as traditional influencer is kind of dying right now, and we're looking more towards creator and all the things that you've already named, what are your predictions for how this is going to continue evolving? Most critically, the budget gap closes relatively quickly, right? Because brands understand it is a critical business risk for them not to be shifting a large percentage, if not the majority of their spend, to creator media.

23:31That's where the audience and the trust is today. So number one, the budget gap absolutely closes. Number two, a lot of the manual work that has constrained the space just disappears. Obviously, that's because of a platform like Agentio. But when the manual work disappears, then the teams are able to focus a lot more on strategy and ideation and exploring new ideas, exploring new verticals. They're able to test so much more, right? They can test different brand messaging. They can test new products through creators. That gives them such a leg up on brands that might be much slower going to market.

24:04And then number three, because of AI content, creators and this human trust that creators have built with their audiences over time becomes that much more important. Brands end up starting to pay a real premium for creator content because right now there is very much an arbitrage window. We see across our brands that have an MMM, for instance, creator content is 2x to 5x more efficient than other channels. So it is still very underpriced, very underpriced, all things considered. And because of that, there's an arbitrage window, and inevitably more spend is going to be rushing into the space. It means creators are going to be able to make more money.

24:41There's going to be more creators, but those who have built real equity with their audiences over time, they will see the rewards of that. You're just going to continue to see a concentration of dollars to that trust.

24:51Arthur Leopold:Yeah, that's the one thing that AI content can never beat is audience trust and rapport and the relationships that creators have built with their audience. Even though at some point we'll probably make less aesthetically pleasing content than AI, the trust is still going to be that key element there. The future sounds great for Gentio. It sure does. I think the future is great for every marketer and every nimble brand, every consumer as well, right? We want to support the people whose content we love and we admire. And I'm sure we all feel it when there's a creator that you've been following for a while, that big brand sponsorship.

25:28you're like, fuck yeah, that's unbelievable, right? Oh, yeah. You want to support that way. Yeah, there's creators I've followed for a decade, probably more, maybe 20 years at this point, that seeing them grow year over year has been really cool. And now as creators ourselves, which is very weird to think about, it's fun to see other creators win. And I do think as much as, obviously the future is very bright for Argentio, but I do think what you're saying is very accurate and very correct around the creator economy I think it's just going to get better. And I think we're going to, we'll gain a lot of slop, of course.