The importance and market momentum of creators is growing by the day.
Their ability to engage and create moments with audiences can be used by marketers to leverage these masters of the social space and their unprecedented connections with their followers.
Meta’s vp, Americas, global business group, Nada Stirratt, and Adore Me’s founder and CEO, Morgan Hermand, joined Adweek’s Social Media Week for a fireside chat about how brands can use creators to attract new audiences, break down barriers and engage with their communities in more personal ways.
The emergence of the creator economy
By now, the creator economy has matured — a process that was accelerated by the pandemic. Stirratt said there are more than 100 million creators on Facebook and Instagram today.
“The creator economy, while it’s getting a lot of buzz right now, it’s not entirely new,” she said. “One of our platforms, Instagram, started the influencer movement. What’s different now is it’s become so much easier to have diversity of creators and really be intentional about how they make money.”
Stirratt said that matching creators to brands or rolling out new tools to help them make money and help brands find the right creators, it’s a different lens through which people should be thinking about their entire marketing plans.
The creator value proposition
According to Hermand, it takes some legwork to sort through the growing number of influencers, but finding influencers to work with who share your brand values is what leads to magic moments in marketing.
“For us, the interest of working with creators is to have a more genuine approach than traditional advertising,” he said. “It’s a good in between of what would be direct response marketing on the one hand and what just pure branding would be on the other side. We know that not every influencer is made equal. It’s important to work with influencers that genuinely connect and resonate with the values of your brand. When you find those people, it can be pretty meaningfully genuine.”
Stirratt agrees that the power of the influencer is unmatched.
“For brands, there’s probably no more efficient way to tap into some kind of either cultural zeitgeist or an already existing authentic relationship,” she said. “If you’re a brand, you’re going to look for a creator who either shares the same values that you do or has as large an audience that you need of the people you want to talk to, and it gives you the opportunity to tap into that without having to buy yourself into the relationship — that has been really remarkable to see.”
The future of the creator
The duo agrees that creators are here to stay and have changed the advertising industry forever.
“In many ways, we’re going to have more and more of a fungible space between brands, creators, and platforms,” Hermand said. “So, it’s a matter of embracing the whole ecosystem. We see creators starting their own brands. We see brands working only with creators — these are extremes — but the reality is that the world ahead is going to be made of a real hybrid of all of those. It’s a new way of commerce that’s going to continue for a long while, so we better embrace it all together.”
