Keeping it real

For Elfried Samba, chief executive at creator agency Butterfly 3ffect and chief community officer startup incubator Ioconic venture studio, the key to cutting through the noise online was to let creators’ authenticity shine through.

Drawing on his previous role in social media at fitness brand Gymshark, he said creator content should never feel too polished.  

“The thing that GymShark did early and natively was making their followers feel like friends” through user-generated social posts, he said.

BuzzFeed Inc’s commercial director, Caroline Fenner, claimed that even legacy social-first brands, including BuzzFeed-owned food video platform Tasty, were having to evolve in a new social landscape dominated by creators.

“Tasty’s videos used to be shot top-down, hands-on-hands style, there was very little sense of who was behind it,” she said. “That’s changed, and we’ve had to work with creators to give that brand more personality, bringing in authentic voices and original stories where we can.”

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