11 Branded Content Masterminds Who Are Elevating the Art of Marketing

Whether creating viral videos or bringing the potency of journalism to corporate content, each of the creators honored in this year’s Adweek Creative 100 has elevated the art of branding through passion, craft and seemingly limitless talent. Learn more about their stories and work below:

Karen X. Cheng
Founder, Butterbar

The force behind San Francisco-based viral video agency Butterbar, Cheng has a habit of creating fun and irresistible clips optimized for social media—like this year’s ad featuring a tiny rundown kitchen being beautifully remodeled, a promotion for home renovation loans from financial startup SoFi.

Previously a program manager for Microsoft, a Silicon Valley designer and a startup founder, Cheng stumbled onto her current career path in 2014 when a marketing exec at Beats by Dre contacted her about a “donut selfie” video she had created for fun—and ultimately hired her to help turn the clever roundabout camera technique she invented into a sizzling ad for the headphone brand, in which she also starred alongside celebrities like Kylie and Kendall Jenner, Serena Williams, and Nicki Minaj.

After landing that gig, Cheng incorporated her agency—rebranded Butterbar this January—in 2015. Her other credits include spearheading a clip last year about the dearth of strong female leads in traditional children’s books as a way to promote real-life role model anthology Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls.

Describing the agency’s process, Cheng cites a blend that includes focused brainstorming around client goals, keeping up with viral video trends and rapidly changing social-media algorithms, and employing a methodical, analytics-driven approach to distribution.

“It’s actually not about being the most creative,” she says. “It’s about making something that could be disguised as something people would see in their Facebook feed anyway. Our goal is to make ads that don’t look like ads.”
—Gabriel Beltrone

Jamal Dauda
Global Head of Music, WeTransfer

While transferring files might not seem like the most inspiring or creative part of making a song or a film, Jamal Dauda has spent the last year demonstrating the important role it plays on the file-sharing platform.

Earlier this year, his team debuted a documentary starring musicians Courtney Barnett and Kurt Vile, discussing their friendship and their creative process that resulted in their 2017 album, Lotta Sea Lice. Dauda describes the documentary video as a “time capsule.” After that came a video series starring Björk and others exploring the many parts of creative collaboration.

So why sponsor all this creative content rather than focus on showcasing the cloud-based business’s services? It often goes hand-in-hand.

“I think the series is to show that creativity is much more than this big bang,” he says.

WeTransfer, located in L.A.’s Venice neighborhood, resides at the intersection of tech and culture. Last fall, the company debuted a new mobile app to complement the desktop website’s tools for sharing projects. Currently, Dauda is working on a podcast that will debut this month, featuring conversations about the “nuts and bolts of creativity.”

“What does creativity really look like?” he says. “A lot of other brands and makers of content are talking about creativity in a very general sense. … It’s not always as simple as hopping in the studio and saying, ‘We made magic.’”
—Marty Swant

Devin Friedman
Founder, Wealthsimple Magazine

After many years as an editor for GQ, Devin Friedman parlayed his storytelling talent into a job where he could further his ever-expanding creativity: multimedia journalism.

In college, Friedman studied fiction but didn’t want to stay home writing alone. He became an award-winning journalist, writing for magazines such as Esquire, Rolling Stone and The New Yorker. At GQ, he wrote an Iraq war book and led the magazine’s video channel, where he developed Most Expensivest Shit with 2 Chainz, now a TV show.

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This story first appeared in the June 11, 2018, issue of Adweek magazine. Click here to subscribe.