How Brands are Winning with Influencer Marketing and Creator Collaborations

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Today we are talking about creativity and the power of influencers, and we have a great guest to help us talk through this today Gabe Gordon.

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Welcome to the show.

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Well, thank you for having me, eric.

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So why don't we start off?

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You have this amazing background.

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Why don't we start off by you just talking for a minute or two, a little bit about who you are and what you and your agency do?

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Appreciate it.

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So I started my career after college, working at the William Morris Agency.

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I originally started in music.

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I had studied marketing in college, quickly learned that I didn't want to do music anymore and found this small group there.

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It was called Corporate Consulting at the time, but what they did was they helped brands tell their story in the world of entertainment.

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So that was everything from making TV shows for the NFL to making sure General Motors car owners were in things like the Transformers movie.

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I spent 10 years there and that was really sort of my introduction to advertising and, frankly, creating content people wanted to watch.

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That also had a brand impact.

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After 10 years, I decided to leave and I started Reach Agency.

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That was in 2011,.

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Around the same time that YouTube was really getting big and YouTube had invested in, ironically, hiring traditional Hollywood creators to create content besides, you know, cats and laser beams and dogs on skateboards to attract advertisers, and I saw this as a fantastic opportunity.

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It was everything I had been doing, you know, but with a new creative class and without the red tape of network ad sales or big Hollywood studios.

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Ironically, I did start the agency.

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My first client was Purina, so, ironically, I was making a lot of content with dogs not always on skateboards, but we did do content of dogs on skateboards and lots of stuff with cats.

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And that was really the beginning of the inspiration for what did become Reach Agency the ability to tell brand stories on new platforms with this new creative class.

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That really had really big business impact.

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Awesome, and you guys just got an award for small agency of the year.

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We did, we did Nice, and so the agency tell me, if I have this right the agency works with influencers and brands to help brands get their creative message out the right way.

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Is that broadly what you guys do?

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Influencer marketing is an interesting market, right.

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There's shops with dual business plans.

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They represent creators and they represent brands.

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There's influencer marketing companies that just represent creators.

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We just represent brands.

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We look at marketing companies that just represent creators.

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We just represent brands.

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We look at ourselves as more of a strategic resource.

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We are the AOR for certain brands and what we do is we help them upstream in their strategy to figure out how to use creators beyond just sponsored posts.

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Right, and this is something that's changed over the years.

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When we first started, we'd get handed a TV campaign and said find some influencers to share this video.

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Right, we're now.

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Influencers really are the core in the beginning of the campaign and and every other piece of creative is derivative from that interesting how the focus has really changed there and we're ready to be inspired.

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So perhaps you could share a story with us about the work that you and your agency have done with some of your brand clients, with influencers, that have had, you know, a remarkable impact.

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We're ready to be inspired.

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I love it.

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I've got a good one for you.

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So one of our clients was Natural Vitality.

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They're a magnesium supplement most popularly known for Calm right, and they had realized that there was a much broader opportunity for the brand, beyond just magnesium and beyond just Calm right.

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We live in a world where mental health is at the top of cultural awareness and it's part of the conversation, at the top of cultural awareness and it's part of the conversation and their product.

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They expand their product portfolio to help with focus, not just sleep, to help you also stay calm and get you throughout your day right, and they needed a big splash to drive that messaging forward.

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About the same time as we were in planning, we thought that the popular Grammy award-winning recording artist, little John, had also been making a shift of his own.

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He moved from shots in the club, coming out of the pandemic, really falling in love with meditation and mental wellbeing, and we heard he was launching a meditation one.

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And we said what better way to help show our change than partnering with him and partnering with him on his journey to do that?

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So we wound up putting him in a full campaign showing how Little John himself turns down to turn up with the help of Natural Vitality's full line of products, but we also put on a meditation retreat that would help support his album release.

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That helped support his album release.

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It was a very immersive experience which had, you know, tomtales, as we call them, with their product, live meditation with him, even had massage beds and sound baths, everything.

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There was a lot of influencers invited to join that, but it really helped raise awareness, not only for the product, but we also, you know, did bring in a mental health expert, dr Patrice, to talk with him about that and talk about the importance of it and made a donation to a local organization Very cool.

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So how many influencers were involved in this and what sort of impact did it have for the brand?

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Yeah, so John was really our hero partner on this and I would say it's a great situation because it was what we always strive for in partnership, where we're not just paying him to support our product.

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We were supporting something he was doing in his career as well.

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So he really was a true partner in that essence.

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But to help amplify it, we did bring about 30 additional influencers in the health and wellbeing space and the mental health space to help bring that story to different.

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You know segments of the internet.

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It was covered on live news.

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I think we got over a billion media impressions.

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You know, I think his organic video launching the partnership got over a million views in 24 hours.

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We saw a significant brand lift, but overall this led to an increase in sales for the brand and tons of earn.

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So that was one of my questions is when people get celebrities as influencers, or well-known people broadly, or well-known people broadly.

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I'm just curious if your experience is that that generally pays off for the brands, is it worth the cost of doing it?

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In most cases, yes.

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It all depends on what your objective is and you know who the person is and what you're paying right and how you're leveraging them across media.

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If you're looking digital only, it gets a lot harder right Versus the TV campaign because you're not reaching as many people.

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That being said, you can reach a broad audience.

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You know, with digital year we partnered with Jessica Simpson and Chicken of the Sea to remake sort of a very pop culture moment you know from her original show Newlyweds, where she didn't know if Chicken of the Sea was chicken or tuna and we finally brought her back with her daughter and that was huge ROI for the brand right.

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Being able to capitalize and bring back a cultural moment that you know their consumer knew and grew up with and really being able to bring it into a brand message and, you know, help launch a new product for Chicken of the Sea.

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And so part of it is how well it's executed on in terms of the creative and the campaign overall too.

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I'm sure that's a variable, and if it pays off for people right.

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Yeah, and celebrities.

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Some of them will only do very large campaigns.

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A lot of them will partner with brands and just do a single post or a couple posts.

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Right, there's a lot of different ways to partner with celebrities now, more than there ever has been, at our lower touch, where you have the right brand fit.

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So what advice do you give brands about working with influencers broadly, like celebrities and otherwise?

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When you take on clients, I know you work with some really big brands but really it seems like a variety of sizes.

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What are some of the common advice you would give about how to make it work with influencers and celebrities?

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Yeah, I mean, look, we're all in on creators.

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We definitely work with a lot of celebrities where it makes sense, but we are all in on creators because they really are revolutioning revolutionizing advertising as we see it right.

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We're seeing huge performance from them, you know, when it comes to paying media on social channels and digital.

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We all know that.

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You know most people still skip ads on social and creator generated content is performing way better than, you know, typical studio producer advertising content.

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Right, they really are disrupting that Again.

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They're solving this larger problem of don't interrupt the experience.

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Become part of the experience right.

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And where brands are allowing creators to really bring that human experience right and bring those emotions whether that's, you know, humor, empathy, inspiration or even entertainment, we're seeing the results correlate to the creativity that we're allowing the creators to have that free will.

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So I think my biggest single piece of advice is, if you're hiring a creator, you know, don't treat them like an agency that you're hiring, or be more like a director.

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Trust their vision, trust what they do and that's what you're paying them to do and they know how to do it best.

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It seems like it wouldn't work to force people to do things that are unnatural to them, right?

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Like if he's trying to force like a certain thing and that's just not their thing, a lot of them wouldn't do it or they wouldn't do it very well is probably the the, the thing like you're saying, that makes a lot of sense.

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I think this is a bit controversial and in the sense that I think back over the last 25 years and there's a lot of brands that have used celebrities and influencers across not just digital channels but also TV, I think back to, like William Shatner with Pricelinecom, right?

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I mean, I could go on and on with all the examples of like wow there shouldn't invest in the influencer channel, it doesn't get the ROI, and I think that some of the conflict or controversy there might be just around what we're talking about in terms of what does it take to make it successful?

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Right, because I'm sure people have used well-known people for their brand and it hasn't has it worked.

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But it maybe wasn't just because I used a well-known person.

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It could be lots of other reasons, right?

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So I'm just curious what do you think about this?

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I'll use the word controversy because I think people have differing opinions on it.

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Yeah, I would challenge it, right, and I'd say, like you know, first of all, if you're targeting younger consumers, the relevance of creators to traditional celebrities is much different.

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You're talking about generations that grew up watching blogs or watching these people in their feeds every day, sometimes three posts a day for years, decades right.

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If you're talking about, like sort of the Gen 1 YouTubers, that is such an intimate experience and relationship that these consumers have built with these people versus, you know, a movie star that they might've seen in one movie a year, or a TV show that they saw for you know 13 episodes, because these people weren't just acting, they were sharing their personal life experiences, they were growing up together.

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So the connection that these creators have with consumers and how that translates to driving purchase decision is is huge.

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Right, I'm not saying an actor can't do the same thing in the right context, but there's a much bigger set of creators.

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Right, there's 200 million creators worldwide right now.

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Right, there's definitely not that many actors.

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So, so the connection to the consumer is one thing, but the ability to scale what you're doing, right, like in example, creators are sort of a one-stop shop.

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Right, if you hire a celebrity, you have to get an agency, a production company, you have to make it and you have to pay for paid media to get it out there.

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Right, creators are the creative director, the producer, the distributor all in one, which is a huge benefit that is often overlooked.

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And then I'd say more trend or like forward thinking when you're looking at things like social commerce right and platforms bringing on the social commerce tools, whether it's things like affiliate marketing, are huge right.

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50% of all affiliate transactions that are driven by creators.

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That's a $10 billion market right.

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That's huge.

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And for creators themselves, affiliate sales are starting to surpass what they're getting in ads, share revenue from the platforms or even brand deals themselves, so their ability to actually drive purchase proving itself to be very high ROI potential where you have the right creators and the right brands together.

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I think that's a really strong case because, even as a Gen X, for the last couple of years I've been following a lot of people that showed up in my TikTok or Instagram reels or LinkedIn or whatever, and I watch a lot of content from those people on a regular basis, more than actors, and I'm like wow when you say that I do feel a much stronger connection to them than just actor.

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I saw them maybe once a year, like that's an amazing argument for the power of like the creator economy.

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And I also agree about the affiliate.

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You know that I think the best affiliates these days are are influencers, and so you think a lot of people talk about the difference between mega influencers and micro influencers.

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What is your view?

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on that, we like to say that influence does not have a follower count, right.

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If you're trying to really drive influence, it's not just going to be micro people, it's not just going to be big people, it's going to be people of every size and every following.

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I think that's the beauty of influencer marketing is having everybody talk about something to different segments and maybe talking about different product benefits right To the segmented audiences that care about that benefit.

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So I think it's an open slate.

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But we do like to push back on when people say, oh, just micro influencers are great, right.

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We do like to push back on when people say, oh, just micro influencers are great, right.

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If something is truly influential, everybody's talking about it to the right people, no matter how big they are.

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Yeah, I think that makes sense.

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And do you think that influencers work in both B2C and B2B, or is it more of a B2C thing?

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No-transcript powerful for b2b too.

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I was gonna say creators are entrepreneurs.

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Right, they just started with video.

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They, they are the epitome of the entrepreneur.

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I think To your point of really what is their impact.

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At the top level, we're seeing creators start their own brands, not just sell other people's brands, because they see the power of what they can do.

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There's upending industries.

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You know Logan Paul and Prime, logan Paul and KSI and Prime is a great one of launching a new beverage brand and driving to a billion dollars within two years, which is incredible when you look at sort of the legacy and the investment that, like a gay rights make, mr Beast is doing the same thing in the confection space, right.

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And then you have traditional celebrities or influencers.

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You know, like the Kardashians.

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You know, skims over taking Spanx.

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You know, rapidly, kylie Cosmetics with Estee Lauder they really are.

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They're not just a creator doing the same thing.

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You know, buying wasn't.

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They're changing the way they're marketing from the tactics and leveraging not just leveraging their circles, right, they're using hype marketing.

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They are bringing their audience around.

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They're even bringing more LTOs, like the product innovation, like.

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So they're influencing every single part of this with their sort of new school entrepreneurial perspective.

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Yeah, I agree.

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I think some of these examples you said are really awesome and creative different approaches.

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So there's a lot of great examples that this does work to bolster your case further for influencers.

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Any final thoughts, recommendations, advice for both brands and influencers about making influencer marketing work, going forward, about making influencer marketing work going forward.

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Yeah, I think, honestly, the biggest thing is trust these creators.

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Right, they have built massive audiences.

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Any brand that works with the creator, the creator likely has a larger social following than what the brand has on their organic social, so why wouldn't you trust them?

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And I think think about creators not like media units.

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Right, we have creators that are being hired in-house at brands.

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You know there was about creators not like media units.

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Right, we have creators that are being hired in house at brands.

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You know, there was a conversation a couple of years ago where someone was like can we put a creator video in a paid ad spot?

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We put them in our TV?

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Can we make them our creative director?

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All these things are happening.

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So, I think, keeping an open eye of what these people can do, because they have become such a powerful creative class, you know, in such a short amount of time, it's hard not to notice their skillset, and I think what else can we apply their skillset to to help our business?

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I think that's great advice.

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I really appreciate you being on the show.

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I'm going to link to your website and your LinkedIn so people can get in touch and chat with you more on this topic if they want to do so.

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Thanks so much for being with us today.

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We appreciate it, yeah.

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Thank you so much, Eric, for having me.