Brands Are Shaking Up Their Creator Recruiting Strategies

Brands are shaking up the way they source and work with influencers and creators. Gone are the days of companies cherry-picking influencers for one-off campaigns based on their follower counts. Now, marketers are turning to influencers to target niche audiences with the content they produce as a long-term buy to drive both engagement and sales. “We’ve gone from a pyramid of influence to almost a circle of influence,” explained Emma Harman, creator company Whalar’s global chief client officer, outlining the evolution of culture that has driven the development of communities being run by creators. “It used to come from the top down, and now it’s coming from the ground up and there are all of these really dynamic communities happening," Harman said. "Everything’s becoming very people-driven." With that success in engagement and access to audiences, marketers face a complex decision-making process that is evolving as the demand for strategic creator partnerships grows. “It’s something that everybody is going after because it’s a really efficient media line, so everyone wants a piece of the pie,” said Melanie Kentish, managing partner of Dentsu-owned Gleam Futures. “But where many fail is when they see it as a media buy. They literally think they can go out with a brief being very prescriptive, then the influencer will produce something and that’s the job done.” The complexities of creator pitching The number of agencies offering influencer and creator services has exploded. According to Statista, between 2019 and 2021, the market grew by 75%, expanding to 18,900 companies worldwide offering services related to influencer marketing. That includes PR, media, specialist influencer or social media agencies, teams from within the social media platforms such as TikTok and Snap’s Creator Studio as well as the brand’s own in-house teams all vying for ownership of the influencer space. The global market size is expected to reach $22.2 billion by 2025, according to Statista. The World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), which mainly works with multinational companies, said that when it last asked CMOs how they identified which influencers to work with, 19% responded that they worked with an agency and 10% said they did it internally. However, 70% said it was a mix of both, underscoring how marketers are still feeling their way around the space. Thomas Walters, Billion Dollar Boy's founder and CEO, Europe, who was recently appointed to the PIA Council to oversee a focus group on influencer marketing, believes that the U.S. is the most advanced market when it comes to influencer selection, followed by the U.K. and the Nordics. However, each region still offers a different approach and ecosystem. The typical creator pitch process With more agencies claiming expertise, the sector is maturing in terms of how business is awarded to agencies and how talent is brought on board for both campaigns and long-term partnerships. The “typical” selection process for large organizations sees them place a request for information (RFI) to collate information on agencies operating in the market, with procurement teams examining the responses, according to Edward East, Billion Dollar Boy’s global chief executive. Many of those teams, with some exceptions, “still are not asking the questions they should be asking,” said East, due to a lack of understanding of how the sector works. Clients are figuring out if they still need separate agencies.Andrew Bloch, consultant, AAR The next stage sees a long list of agencies drawn up. Sometimes, as many as 50-80 agencies are involved before the number is whittled down against the required criteria. A short list of around five businesses is then agreed upon based on team size, resources and expertise before those agencies pitch against one another to clinch the contract. As with traditional agency pitches, clients tend to be resistant to paying fees. Gleam's Kentish said decision-making should be data-led with “a human lens being overlaid," adding that Gleam uses Creator IQ among the various platforms in the market to help search for creators that will fit a particular brand. And when marketers use data to make appointments, they often have procurement departments by their sides. L'Oréal Hands Over the Creative Reins to Influencers Over 40 Sam Coleman, managing director, EMEA, for agency The Fifth, said there’s no standard process: “It varies depending on the size of the client and the scope of the project. Campaign-based pitches tend to be run by marketing departments and follow a similar structure to the way media owners pitch for partnership budgets.” There has been “a noticeable increase” in procurement-led pitches, said Coleman, due to the lack of skilled talent to keep up with market demands. “In-house teams no longer have the resources to activate, forcing clients to procure agency tenders, equivalent to that of a media or creative pitch in value, where the pass on of efficiencies can be found,” said Crystal Malachias, svp of global growth and innovation for entertainment and culture agency R&C PMK. Enter the intermediaries Given the high level of confusion around the appointment process, intermediaries such as the AAR and R3 have begun to hire experienced consultants such as PCB Partners’ Andrew Bloch to run creator partnership pitches. “Generally, clients are looking to simplify their lives, not necessarily make them more complex by adding more agencies to their roster," Bloch said. "However, what they’re seeing is that potentially their agencies don’t have the level of experience they need to take them to the next level in this space." Last year, the AAR ran a pitch for Nintendo to find influencer agency partners to lead its creator strategy. Bloch said that the process began with a review of the brand's existing agency roster as well as standalone specialists, digital and social media agencies. Billion Dollar Boy ultimately won the business alongside MSL and Taylor Herring, who together handle the PR aspects of influencer work such as events or influencer invitations. Do Consumers Still Care About Brands Backed by Big Names? Meanwhile, Bloch said he is currently working on a pitch with a different format that may run in three stages to find different types of agencies. But he has also considered combining the influencer element to run alongside the media or advertising briefs. “Clients are figuring out if they still need separate agencies,” said Bloch. “Like anything, there are good and bad agencies. There are agencies that are right for some things, not for others, and that’s where people are taking it more seriously because there are now options to work with dedicated specialists in the space." Despite the win, Nintendo is still the only brand that BDB has won through “a broker,” according to global CEO East. But he would welcome more of those opportunities in the future. Understanding of influencer marketing is improving, East said. However, with evolution comes more complexity within the campaigns, which is being accelerated by technological advances such as artificial intelligence tools too. “That means our understanding of the sector is always playing catchup, and there are plenty of new innovations in the creator economy that you might not otherwise know about if you’re not operating in," said East. Intermediary R3 has formed a model on how it sees the influencer buying journey evolving. This involves moving from a top-down approach of marketers hiring an agency to bring on board creators to an emerging one that involves more than one “multichannel network” that oversees a mix of platforms, influencers and the content creation process before targeting audiences. The company has also theorized how the emerging process may develop further with an “Experimental Buying Journey” that would see a brand working with several partners including in-house, consumer recruitment and multichannel network investments. So while the sector is moving toward a familiar agency-selection process, what is likely to differentiate influencer pitches in the long term is the need to understand the creators involved and their own processes for success. It remains a people-driven business, after all. This story is part of Adweek’s The Creatorverse digital features package, which spotlights the creator economy: the people who make up the industry’s new content royalty, and the marketers and agencies that collaborate with them to drive next-level engagement for their brands.