Beyond vibes: Creator strategies to drive real effectiveness

0:09Welcome back to The Walk Podcast. I'm Anna Hamill. Moving the conversation on from can creators build a brand to how can creators build my brand is easier said than done. New research from System 1, WPP Media and TikTok uncovers what drives attention, emotion and brand recognition across creative content, and how different creator types perform against different marketing objectives. This work is foundational for brands who want to level up in this area. These findings offer insights into how to make smarter creator choices, deliver better briefings and strengthen execution. I'm joined today by a new generation of advertising effectiveness experts.

0:51Andrew Tindall, Global Chief Advertising Officer at System One, who led this research, and Eugene Healy, a brand strategist, educator and highly successful content creator. You're probably already familiar with Eugene's viral videos on TikTok and Instagram, where he analyzes culture through the lens of brand strategy. Eugene is also one of South by Southwest's 33 visionary thinkers for 2026. And together, their presentation at Cannes Lions recently was one of the most popular we have seen in years. But before I chat to them, here's a quick message from today's sponsor. If you're listening to this podcast, you'll know that WALK is the home of leading effectiveness thinking.

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2:08Andrew, Eugene, welcome back to The Walk Podcast. I have to say I'm loving this next generation duo in advertising effectiveness. Thank you. Thank you. There's been a lot of talk over the last 12 months about creative measurement with new research coming out in the space. It's something that we've covered a lot at Walk. We're seeing that brands now really want to apply the rigor of marketing science to creators and move away from, you know, the vibes based strategy in the space. Andrew, can you walk us through some of the methodology of this study? What content did the study examine? Which platforms and what were you looking to prove at this point?

2:43Of course. So the research obviously is with System 1, but with our partners at WPP Media and TikTok. So all the data, this is all TikTok advertising from TikTok. And also all the brand lift and engagement stuff is TikTok data as well. So what we've done is I've been squirreling data, you know, like a squirrel with nuts over the past few years, building this kind of database on social effectiveness. So we've been testing a few thousand ads with System 1 to test your ad to really understand the emotional response to the advertising, how well branded it is, the creative features used, the memories built, ETC.

3:18And then we've connected that to what I'm now going to be calling Brand Memory Lift. Brand memory lift is a simplified brand lift metric where we've actually weighted brand awareness to add recall two to one. I guess method, why have we done that? Brand awareness is twice as hard to move as add recall and we should care about brand awareness growth more than add recall. So we've connected all the creative data from system one to that platform data and also for the first time engagement data as well to understand whether engagement or creativity really explains that memory lift on platform. And yeah, we've done that and had a look at what are the common themes with the creator campaigns versus the brand made ads in the study that lead to them growing more brand memories.

4:08really interesting stuff so which specific data points stood out to you is the most important oh there's a lot in here one there's no relationship between engagement rates and brand memory lift which i'm very excited i'm surprised anyone's allowing me to share that data normally platforms are like like doing that but yeah and there's no relationship between engagement rate and brand memory lift um however there's a small relationship between what i'll call deep engagement which is the ratio of comments to likes and brand memory lift it It explains about 10 % of the effects in this database, but creativity is five times better at explaining it.

4:45So whether the actual content, the creator content is emotional and well-branded. I also think what's really cool in this research is how we've really proven that brand fit, so whether the creator has an authentic role to play with that brand, is about twice as useful as creator fame, so how recognizable the creator is. So we really need to move away from our creator briefs. most of them start on this, I'm sure Eugene will tell you, you know, how many followers do they have? It's not as important as are they the right creator for my brand and this campaign. And yeah, you can then, what we've built is this framework where you layer creative quality, brand fit, creative fame and platform fit.

5:27And we've shown that you can actually quadruple on average in this data set how many brand memories you create with creator campaigns by following this framework. Eugene, you are obviously a brand strategy expert as well as a content creator. What stood out to you from this data? I think what I really loved about this creator effectiveness playbook in particular is it ratified a lot of the things that I had been thinking and the theories that I've been developing over the two years that I've been making content. So as background, I actually have no background in media. My background is in pure play brand strategy, media agnostic brand strategy.

6:03but what I've learned effectively applying my brand strategy frameworks to media were very very similar lessons about the importance of brand fit but even the conversations that you have with brands I found it quite extraordinary types of people a lot of AI companies for instance approaching my platform and I often have to send them videos going you know I directly criticized not just artificial intelligence because I do work with AI companies I directly criticized your type of AI slop company. And they'll say, that's fine. You can have$20 ,000, but the whole point is that this is going to degrade both your brand and mine.

6:39So I think the fit stuff was really important. I also think the engagement rate headline stat about no correlation between engagement rate and memory lift is really important. What I have always considered in my creator partnerships in particular is that my role is to build, and this is another system one stat, actually, that I function better as long-term demand generation brand building rather than short-term demand capture. I'm better at encoding associations that are positive, mental and emotional of a particular brand, introducing them to a new audience or consideration, which is taking a brand into a context that it hasn't been before.

7:14An example would be something like my brand relationship with Tracksuit, the brand tracking platform, where I've helped them move into much more cultural conversations than perhaps the tracking platform itself may have had access to. They've provided me a lot of rigor for the theories that I test. And we don't actually measure engagement rates or viewership or anything. We go straight to P &L. So we track attributed pipeline, and we do that over the course of 12 months rather than just over a course of a couple of videos. And that has been a test case that has allowed us to expand the partnership quite significantly over time.

7:47Yeah, that's really interesting kind of foundational case study for other creators to learn from as well as to what's possible. Yeah, absolutely. So for years, brands have optimized creator campaigns around those engagement metrics, like likes, views, follow account, but your research shows that these metrics aren't actually that helpful at all. Andrew, why has the industry been using the wrong scoreboard and what should marketers be measuring instead? There's an increasing demand from people outside of marketing in the business to go, your advertising's live that week, is it working? So we're reaching for just what's kind of convenient and close.

8:24There's a brilliant correlation between the amount of money spent on meta and the amount of short-term objectives reported in the Global FA case library. Obviously, that's just a coincidence because correlation doesn't prove causation, of course. But it is interesting, hey? So we're reaching towards this kind of short-term metrics because they're easy. and even like ROI, which is really a short term metric unless you're very good at it because it's looking at efficiency, even that kind of stuff. And if you're relying on that, it can be leading you down the wrong direction, which we've shown again in this research.

9:01What should you be relying on instead? Well, you should be working on creating emotional, distinctive content and paying for it to reach more people, i.e. good ads and reach, which sounds a lot like what marketing was like five or ten years ago. Right. Good ads, you know, creative quality plus reach. That's how advertising works. So I think we need to get back to trusting creativity and building relationships within the business that don't require me to tell you whether something's working that day. Yeah, if I can add to that as well. I always say never underestimate the motivational power of a person with a 500k mortgage that's afraid of getting fired.

9:48And I feel like that's social media marketing and management as well, which is, it's so immediate, it's visceral, but also it feels quite different in substance from a lot of traditional brand communications that even if, you know, who can measure the ROI on a billboard, it's present. This is, there's this, this fucking hilarious story, actually. the most expensive billboard in australia are the bus shelters coming out of the clues which are where all the cmos live really so the most expensive the most expensive media are the marketers that are trying to make sure their brands are seen by the mod by the cmos on their drive on the way i used to i used to do this when i was brand side you'd you'd know how the cmo gets to work and you'd buy specific out of home sites.

10:33So there's, I think this is really, there's this combination of this, like what we would call an extreme rationality, like an irrational rationality with ROI metrics that we're now seeing are relatively ineffective, I think, but they provide us access in the short term. As I said, like if the creator, if their role is actually more strongly awareness and consideration oriented, you may have UGC that has more demand capture oriented. then actually we should be tracking long-term upper funnel metrics like i would look at it as i look at it in terms of brand associations you're working with 50 creators you're trying to encode a new association that you are the smart choice for dog food or some bullshit like that right you should be looking at your brand tracking over three to six months to understand whether that campaign has lifted those particular associations you would come at it from the lens of creativity and advertising effectiveness i'm a strategist obviously i cover did we encode the right associations in the head.

11:26And I don't even think necessarily they are super long-term metrics because they're set at the course of the brief itself is, did we successfully build, you know, this, this across this mosaic of all the different creators that we're working with, did we encode the right association through the brief? It's actually the starting point of our creative effectiveness care playbook is the consumer need. We've got a load of great graphs that aren't in the research, but you can reach out to me because there's 30 of them for each category. What are the most popular needs? Because we measure the associations that the advertising builds, so like the input into that memory.

12:02How popular the consumer needs are, you know, smart, dog food, and what I think that was, and how effective they are at changing brand memory. And you can actually see a lot of the time people are all chasing the same couple of associations and it's not that powerful. I will also say as well, you know, we both work with brands directly in a creative capacity, I always get a UTM link. And after the work, the next week, it's like, okay, you do sometimes live or die by how many people click that link. Right. If that is your genuine objective, sure. Fair. We've got to be aware of what the objective is for the campaign.

12:36If you want to get more people to your event, sure. However, then you're missing the true power of creators. Because what we've seen in this research and what the IPA has shown before, and with WPP, if you look at creators over years, not weeks. They're one of the strongest channels for long-term return. So sure, you can do that short-term stuff, but you're not getting the full value and capturing the full value of creators because they're incredible brand builders, not just salespeople. That's exactly like what Traxed and I did. We have the UTM links, but we've tracked that over 12 months. And that's what we have that beautiful headline stat that over 12 months, we did 10X my retainer and pipeline, but it didn't happened at the beginning it happened over a really long period of time and actually it was compounding creativity right like the more that i showed up with tracksuit and yes we showed up in slightly different contexts and different conversations and we use the data in different ways but it became a very natural sell-in for the conversation that we were having and of course you're looking from the brand side or the marketer side you're going i want to be in that conversation i want to be in that conversation perhaps that brand data might be useful for me and so then effectively it sends them through to whatever link sends them through to the website but that because it's a five-figure product, it might take six to 12 months to actually convert.

13:49But over that time, we delivered extraordinary value, but none of it was measured in the moment. Yeah. I want to dig into one of the specific data points from the research because the study reveals a brilliant minority problem. Only 29 % of creator ads outperform the average brand ad, while the top 10 % deliver around 4x the lift of the rest. Andrew, based on the research, which specific factors are separating the best creator content from the underperformers. Yeah, I love that headline because it moves the industry on. We've seen in EFI data, IPA data, TikTok data, System 1 data, that creators on average are brilliant at creating these long-term effects, but then you've not got the nuance in there.

14:34We've found this brilliant minority, that top 10%, that is doing all the heavy lifting. and this research is about understanding what they do so we can scale it well it's essentially the whole playbook it's about understanding the right need that works for that category it's about um going with brand fit first the the bigger the brand fit we saw them ending up more in this 10 minority then getting a creator where your audience recognizes recognizes them because there is some lift when you get platform audience recognition and then that's all strategy then you move into your execution the execution is entertaining is emotional is it branded in the first two seconds if you brand in the first two seconds successfully um you see about triple on average the brand memories made by creator ads it's more powerful that lift for um creators versus brand made stuff because creators hold a lot more attention and they're often a lot more emotional so if you just manage to brand if anyone you know reads this whole thing there's 50 pages There's lots of complicated, lots of luxurious chats and data.

15:36If we just do one thing, let's make sure that we brand our creator content properly and early.

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16:27eugene i want to ask you because obviously um over the last few years you've built a sizable following as a content creator yourself but of course you're from a brand strategy background i know that you've worked in advertising before what have you learned in your experience about which videos perform best and has that changed as your audience has grown and as the your partnerships have changed? Yeah. So I think, you know, it's interesting again to compare it against the research from System 1. I think the idea of branding in the first two seconds, it's slightly different in my category because my category is B2B.

17:00What I have found, how you brand really matters. And I think that's also what the System 1 data has shown, like the importance of a sonic asset or something that feels is distinctive and cues memory, but at the same time it is recessive in the background. The most important thing that I have found over this period is making content that looks like itself. So I am a green screen creator, you know, I have a lecturing background. So I effectively look at the images behind me that I overlay myself onto as lecture slides. And that makes up around 50 to 80 % of the types of content that I produce. And what I found last I uploaded a couple of videos where my face was not in the first frame.

17:4410x drop in views. The difference between 200 ,000 views and 20 ,000 views. This applies to creator marketing as well as a premise. When you are doing brand communications and designing them yourself, you show up as yourself. You set the terms of engagement. You set the way that you want to come to market. You set exactly what that looks like. But when you're doing creator marketing, the creator has entrained a very particular pattern that the audience is able to recognize in this feed, which is you are extremely distracted. You're scrolling really quickly. You need something that makes you go stop.

18:15Oh, wait, I know that motherfucker. And so we have effectively, you know, and this is something that I developed over time is learning how to make brand communications that feel naturally the same as the type of non-brand communications I create, which for me is always the same thing. I have a brand platform, which is culture and society revealed through the lens of brand. And so I still have to deliver that exact thing, but I have to deliver it through a brand lens. So for instance, a video that I did with Tracksuit is I have a theory that I've developed about fragmented media environments that the new path to mass market, in addition to your carpet bombing mass media from long range, is going niche at scale or niche aggregation, building up through the niches into mass market.

18:58And so I used tracksuit data as a natural way of telling that story. Tracksuit was still, I used literally the term tracksuit. I used the dashboard probably in the first 10 seconds. But just, hey, I've got some tracksuit data that's going to show what this idea that I've developed looks like in practice. I have also had creator partnerships where they have asked me, we need you to make this video. You need to show this product in this very particular way. We need to actually see you using this dashboard. Actually, no, you need to go back to the editing board that wasn't designed in the right way.

19:27it needs to look like this. Why didn't you provide me the assets in the first place so I have to go and redo this? Oh, sorry, we actually didn't think that far ahead. And so it ends up feeling like a piece of brand communications. That's fine when it lives on the brand's audiences and platforms and channels, but this is coming to life on mine. The only extent to which people care about your brand is the extent to which I can convince them it's worth caring because it's done through my perspective. Yeah, absolutely. That makes a lot of sense. So I just want to confirm that data point again because I think it's really important.

19:59So early branding in the first two seconds delivers nearly 3x the brand memory lift. Yeah, on average, yeah. Yep, yet almost 40 % of creator ads in the research did not include a brand queue in the opening. So that's really interesting to me given how much the industry talks about how creative marketing is different. We've already gone through it's actually pretty similar to other marketing channels and a lot of those foundational marketing sites ideas still apply. Andrew, why is this gap happening? Is this a conflict between how a brand would normally structure branded content in-house versus handing creative control over to a creator like Eugene was talking about?

20:34Yeah, true. Look, so the contrast is interesting. So eight in 10 brand-made ads in this research had at least one decision to brand asset in the first two seconds, but creators only six in 10. There's a few things here. In the research, as Eugene just alluded to, You actually see that different types of distinctive brand assets cause varying levels of skipping and they're better or worse at getting distinctive recognition. Editing a logo over content at the start is the worst thing you can do from all the stages I've seen. It causes too much skipping. It actually damages brand awareness on average.

21:10What we should be doing instead is show it, say it. so in your briefs of creators moving forward get one audio cue in the first few seconds and get one visual cue and drastically good things start happening why are we not seeing that i think we've got terrible advice from some platforms that which is that you have to burn the first few seconds and that was a logo being edited in that was causing skipping so you go to a creator and they're like i don't want i don't want to do that it will cause skipping and i won't reach views more followers because you know as lovely as these creators are they're not marketers and they're trying to grow their own brands right you jim at least they're you jim in which case they're both yeah yeah sure sure sure so you're getting this pushback but in reality we have to grow our brands and also when you look at um you're looking at these other these other metrics and you know things with logos in and stuff get less likes so let's not put our logos you know wrong way around so i think we're chasing the wrong metrics and it's also it's a pushback from creators because it makes the content kind of lame if you make them brand and that's why if you find some good creators maybe like eugene who understands how to brand in such a way that the brand's integrated into the idea doesn't cause skipping that's the ones you need to stick with and i actually love what you've done with chat suit because it's a rare example of actually working consistently over time with a creator normally it's just like hire 500 great next campaign next campaign but after if you find someone that can actually deliver creative quality you should be sticking with them and paying them more yeah absolutely uh eugene i know crap briefs are a particular bugbear of yours i can see you rolling your eyes as i say that how can brands brief creators in a way that protects your creative authenticity while also improving effectiveness it's the important thing to recognize i've you know i've mentioned this already is that on short form video in particular, the role of the creator, it teaches us something that we seem to have forgotten in advertising.

23:08It's not actually a new lesson. It's the oldest lesson. It's the power of compounding creative. The audience is actually not looking for lots of different things for a creator. They go to another creator for that. They're looking for the exact same experience and trying to entrain that. But the role effectively of the brand is to design itself in such a way that it can go up into the creator's world naturally, rather than trying to suck the creator up into their world like a piece of brand communications. And what that requires from briefing is what I call briefing for strategic context, not execution.

23:38You're not actually monitoring the individual execution at the end of it. You are trying to set a system in place and encode a particular pattern that is coherent in the aggregate while very, very divergent in the individual. Because as I said, you're building up through niches and building up through niches means building up through norms, values, beliefs, behaviors, symbols, icons, language. They are very different depending on the niche that you are in, but it must encode a very particular association. You want to know exactly what you are getting yourself into. And so what that actually looks like in practice is a brief that says one key message.

24:14And the reason for that is, as you said, I'm a marketer who spent 10 years interrogating shitty briefs. Most creators are not. When you're presenting your brand wheel with features and benefits and brand archetypes, and here's the essence, and then here is our world. A person who has, you know, the whole problem with those brand frameworks is no one outside the person who designed them could ever fucking understand them in the first place. We had to have a whole infrastructure of agency planners who were like, I don't give a fuck about that. Here's where we're extracting the line. You just need the line now.

24:46Provide me the line. Provide me also. my role within the broader context of the campaign that you're running hey we're going to be doing this with a number of different people and they're all going to be sharing this particular perspective this is what we believe yours should be you can provide if you like the audience the tension if you want to get even a little bit more granular you can provide indicative examples as well we love this particular filming style this editing style when you did this we really like this if you want to go a step further you can say here are some hooks if you're stuck you can try this So you can try that.

25:17But the point is you provide the guardrails within a sandbox and then you let the creator work within that sandbox. And really important part of this, we were talking about branding before. Okay. If you want to be branded in the first couple of seconds, provide me assets that can be deployed in a natural way. So, you know, for myself, sometimes, as I said, five figure brand deals, I have to go onto these companies' websites and screenshot various stuff because they haven't provided me any assets. They know I'm a green screen creator. And I don't know, maybe it's because they're Americans. They don't really like strategy or marketing theory.

25:50They just love spending money. I'm just glad I'm not mentioning any clients in particular here. But I think, you know, I'm really invested. I'm very proud of delivering really high-performing content. I've actually filmed a two-minute video now, which I send to my paid partnerships in advance. I'm saying, this is what I want. You're in safe hands. But please, for God's sake, provide me this because I want to brand you right. Totally. That makes a lot of sense. And you, on the stage in Can, you spoke about, Eugene, the brand is a canvas and the creator is the painter. Can you elaborate a little bit on that?

26:23Is that more what you were just talking about? So with creator marketing, the difference between brand communications, what the creator has built is a very distinct perspective. They actually, I think, creators start with the strategy, whether they say it or not. And then that perspective filters through to content. They've built a relationship with the audience, but then they've also entrained a pattern. This is what the content looks like. And so, as I said, the brand needs to be pulled down into that world rather than the creator getting sucked up into the world of the brand. The brand has to design itself.

26:51This is a strategic challenge as well. Really, one of the things that I've been talking about, it's kind of one of the things I've actually designed my new course around, is the idea that strategy and distribution must be considered in the same context. The old agency model of research, strategy, creative media, tracking, all being separate things handled by separate people is absolutely absurd. because we exist in environments where we would say all attention has to be earned ergo distribution is a function of strategy itself you must be thinking about what your brand is and the in the context that it's actually going to be deployed and this is one such thing creator marketing a lot of people talk about creator marketing as the future of marketing no creator marketing is representative of what the future of marketing looks like which is more distributed and more activated through third parties creators brand partnerships activations community activations, et cetera, where your brand is refracted through the lens of another third party brand.

27:47And you need to be able to design your brand to show up in such a way that it can remain coherent while it is being distributed by a third party. Yeah. So one of the most provocative findings, since we're talking about briefs and strategy, is that you can't outbrief a bad strategy. A strong strategy with a weak brief outperforms weak strategy with a strong brief. Try saying that 10 times quickly. Andrew, can you explain what strategic clarity means in the context of this research yeah so um this framework we've built um starts obviously with strategy for execution and that includes um basically how you select your creator and what the idea is going to be what consumer need are you briefing in um the brand fit with the um creator and creator uh recognition as well so what we actually found is that if you've if you've not done good with that even if you make you know a killer ad it's difficult to move brand memory so it's really important to align on the strategy up front who you're working with why what bit memories are the building and then move on to let's make some emotional distinctive content so i really do like that headline because i think it's true for all marketing really there's some examples you know I judge the F is quite a bit.

29:00And I love what people wang in the insights box when they submit for F is. It's just a random collection of facts sometimes. But some of those campaigns still go on to deliver. But it's really hard to do that. You're making your job very hard. It's got to be an incredibly creative campaign for them at that point. So it's really important to nail that strategy before you go into, let's make some cute little creator content. Yeah. I just want to do a whistle stop tour through the concept of the social device. We've already heard a little bit about how Eugene is using these. The official definition is place, prop, phrase or behavior that becomes a distinctive brand asset over time.

29:42How can brands identify these social devices during creator selection? Why should brands actively build them into briefs, Andrew? Amazing. So the social device is a repeatable creative framework that is owned by the creator. quite like how brands have distinctive brand assets creators have social devices people skip distinctive brand assets they stick around for social devices their platform fit and they compound over time because they're designed to work within the platform i was at a creator lunch the other day um didn't recognize someone she got her instagram out and i recognized all of a sudden because I saw her social device.

30:22So brands need to find these and ask to be part of them. You need to enter that social device and creators should be really focusing on building, owning a social device. Mine's very boring. I post on LinkedIn. Eugene's content is very sexy. Mine's very boring. I type stuff out. My social devices are the best that I've seen this week. And holding up a sign in the street sometimes. Oh, I do have that as well. You do do a better there. I've had my green suit that is at home and I should have worn today. God, I'm a terrible creator. No, you also have only marketers get bored of ads. Okay, I have a few.

30:56So, okay, we're getting there. That's a random collection. You have iShare Advertising Insights Daily? Yeah, I do. Okay. I need to get you to clear my shit up, clearly. Five-figure partnership deal. Yeah, there you go. There you go. So, what's special about that is that it's a hack to deliver everything we've talked about so far. if you enter into a social device it's platform fit it's going to be entertaining and emotional that's why the creator's probably stuck with it because it it's what people love and it's getting them reach it boosts creator fame and recognition which is important not as important as brand fit but it helps um i don't recognize rob mayhew the that creator unless he's in his red jumper with those sheep you know so it boosts that recognition and because you're entering into that social device that's owned by the creator it obviously helps your brand fit so i genuinely think moving forward i would be looking for as a brand what social devices are relevant for my consumer need and my strategy seeking them out quite like what trax has done with you eugene to be honest um and and the brief is very simple it's almost like beautifully simple like paul feldrick talks about look just the brief is make make me famous you know the brief can be put my brand authentically into your social device.

32:11And I've been talking with a lot of creators this week and I've told them if a brand approaches you for that, you should charge a load of money because these are good, difficult things to find. Yeah, I think like I can add to that as well. I didn't call them social devices because obviously we've been developing our thinking separately. I was just thinking them as distinctive assets. I think we had the conversation a couple of weeks ago. I was like, what's the difference? It's like, unlike a distinctive asset, which just cues memory social devices cue favorable associations and what's coming yeah the design for platform it cues what's worth sticking around exactly exactly because that's the thing like if you can keep someone for more than four seconds all of a sudden like the the number of people that see that particular thing really rockets up as i said before i can't remember if i said before if i don't have my face in the first frame of a video the views go down by 10 times but i also if you're not wearing your shirt so this yeah exactly so this shirt um i had a i had a really funny run-in with someone who they watched a video of me and they said i didn't immediately recognize it was you because you film from this direction but you were being shot from this direction and it was only when i was like oh that's the that's his blue isemiake shirt that he was able to actually recognize it was me and i also think yeah what i the way that i think about my social devices as well is they are partly non-visual too so it's not just the formats of what I wear or the wired Mac headphones that I found left over at a house party.

33:37So I have what I consider to be a number of character traits, which are effectively the associations that I'm trying to encode with each piece of content, which are highbrow thinking, lowbrow execution, institutions, not individuals, intentional ambiguity, and power and playfulness, which I actually stole from Dom Perignon, funnily enough. While each piece of thinking is its own narrative, its own story that I'm trying to tell that really reflects what it is that I'm thinking about each week. What is the one piece of advice that you would give marketers based on this research you think they need to know?

34:08The one piece of advice that marketers should focus on based on this new creator effectiveness playbook is quality over quantity. People have seen in the industry some fantastic research about creators and gone at it from the wrong angle, I think. You know, let's brief 500 creators, spray and pray, and you're getting this mismatch between investment and outcomes. It's completely random. So we should really focus on working with creators consistently, building those memory structures. And when you find a creator that can actually do the things that we talk about in this report, including creating good advertising, good content, you need to stick with them and continue working with them.

34:49Eugene? I think what it's shown, what I have known intuitively for a very long time is, as I said, that there is no correlation between engagement rate and brand memory left. And it's remembering the role of advertising is not always to make people buy stuff. It is to encode positive, favorable, cognitive and emotional associations so that when the consumer is in the market ready to make a purchase, they think of you and they think of you favorably and they're more likely to buy. understanding that for the vast majority of creators particularly the bigger creators that you work with they are much better at long-term brand building than short-term demand capture and they should be assessed as such not on the basis of post-performance yeah that's a really good take okay andrew where can we find this research oh just do people google now ai it if you search the creative effectiveness playbook.

35:45It's on our website. But I'll be going on about it on LinkedIn for the next two years, won't I? So just, I'll find you on LinkedIn. Sounds good. Eugene, where can we find your stuff? And if people are thinking, wow, he sounds really clever and wears dazzling Azimiyaki shirts, how can they partner with you? You can find me on Instagram and TikTok as I believe at hugebrandstrat. Horribly embarrassing names. I never thought I would get this big. So now I'm - What is that? Huh? What is it? Hugebrandstrat. That sounds like an innuendo. Yeah, I know. Well, the problem is now, of course, the handle itself feels like a social device.

36:19But that's right. So, yes, my name is Eugene. Honestly, there is a just Google me, bro. But, yeah, I'm yes or my website, eugenehealy.com. Or you can reach out to my partnerships team, Eugene, at smoothmedia.co. They handle all of the good stuff. Awesome. Thanks, guys. Thank you. Thank you. That's all we have time for on The Walk podcast today. A huge thanks to Andrew and Eugene for joining us. If you haven't already, be sure to follow The Walk podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening.