A series on marketing leadership and innovation.
Hey marketers, it's OK if a creator shakes up your carefully crafted messaging in their sponsored content. That actually may be the only way to get people to pay attention.
That was the key advice coming out of a Tuesday fireside chat between YouTuber Adam Waheed, better known as Adam W, and Google ad executive Sean Downey. The pair dove deep into the brand-creator relationship during a discussion at Business Insider's annual CMO Insider Breakfast, hosted with support from founding sponsor BCG, supporting sponsor PayPal, and contributing sponsor LinkedIn.
Creator ad spend is projected to hit $44 billion this year and is growing faster than the broader advertising industry, according to an April report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau. As creators become the new Mad Men of the ad world, savvy brands are giving them more room to run with their most creative ideas.
Ideally, a brand will start the conversation by providing an open-ended campaign brief, said Downey, who oversees Google and YouTube advertising in the Americas.
"The creator process is much different than it was four or five years ago," Downey said. People now run a lot of experiments, rather than just handing influencers a script, he said.
For Waheed, his creative process usually starts with dreaming up the funniest, most relatable video he can think of and finding a way to "backdoor" a brand into the content, he said.
"The biggest thing, at least from my end, is the brand understanding that it's a two-way street," Waheed said. "It's a collaboration, and obviously, there's always going to be pushback. I'm not going to get to do exactly what I want to do, and I'm not going to do exactly what the brand wants to do. It's meeting in the middle."
Giving creators a lot of input into ad messaging doesn't mean that you shouldn't educate them on your products or marketing goals, the pair said. Some marketers are inviting creators to "brand school" to train them up on their positioning, for example.
At the end of the day, though — even for those who prize brand safety — the path to strong performance is having the courage to let a creator come up with something original, Downey said.
"It's really hard for a brand to show up on YouTube or anywhere in this day and age and be the sole voice of their product," he said. "When they stop trying to control the message so overtly, they get really good magic."
