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As the chief content officer of a publishing business, I’m often asked to predict the trends that will impact advertising in the year ahead.
Let me offer one here: While ChatGPT and ad measurement get most of the attention these days, one trend that’s altering the advertising world dramatically and irreversibly is the rise of creators. When you look at the soaring popularity of TikTok, Gen Z and Gen Alpha’s growing disinterest—and distrust—in traditional advertising, and the success of several big brand partnerships with creators, it’s undeniable that 2023 will be a breakthrough year for creator marketing.
Yet whenever I give talks and appear at Adweek events, people always seem to pose the same question: “How should brands begin to work with creators?” While some marketing organizations are committing small portions of their ad spend to creator campaigns, many others are waiting for the creator economy to mature and for KPIs and industry best practices to emerge. Many also still conflate the creator economy with influencer marketing.
The question of how to get started and scale a creator marketing program comes up so often that we at Adweek decided to make the theme of this year’s Social Media Week the “Creatorverse.” We wanted the program to focus on how marketers and ad agencies can collaborate with creators to drive next-level engagement. We felt both a responsibility and an urgency to use our platform to do the deepest dive yet into the democratization of creativity and what lies ahead. The benefits of getting this right are too great.
Take the case of Marriott International. I had the chance to talk with Brian Povinelli, Marriott’s senior vice president of brand, loyalty and portfolio marketing, at last year’s Brandweek. Povinelli told me that working with creators did two important things for the company. First, it gave Marriott the ability to be quicker to market with creative. Second, it allowed the hotel giant to become more relevant to its audiences in a more organic way. At the time of our interview, Marriott had produced about 700 pieces of content with creators in that year. With performance marketing, the company typically only does 50 pieces of content annually.
Reflecting on the power of creators, Povinelli added, “It’s us trying to think about who’s the most important demographic that we want to reach with the little funds we have.”