✍️ don’t hire creators yet

Somewhere in your org right now, someone is asking whether you should be doing creator marketing.

Maybe it came up in a board deck. Maybe a competitor showed up in someone's feed, sponsored by a guy with 60,000 followers and a very confident opinion about your category. Either way, the question lands on your desk, and your first instinct is to go find out what influencers cost. (Prepare for the sticker shock.)

Don't open that tab yet.

Let’s get into it.

We also launched Crowd Work last week, which is what The Standard would sound like after 2 drinks. Catch up on the first issue.

AJ Eckstein's agency, Creator Match, manages 8 figures in creator spend for tech and AI brands. They're the team behind Notion Faces — the campaign that took over LinkedIn last New Year's when about 50 creators swapped their headshots on the same day — as well as most of the campaigns from the largest tech brands in the world.

So when we asked AJ where a B2B team should start a creator program, we assumed the answer involved creators.

He told us to start with employees.

Here's what he sees go wrong: a team gets budget, signs a few influencers, and ships the content. Then someone spots a post doing numbers and asks if it can become an ad.

“They post influencer content and they didn't realize they need to buy usage rights,” AJ says. “They give it to their paid media performance marketing manager. And they're like, ‘What is this? I didn't ask for this.’”

Nobody asked paid what they needed before the creator made it. The two functions, in AJ’s words, “could be each other's best friends.” They just never talk.

His fix is a sequence. It starts at $0.

Play 1: Start with the creators already on payroll. 

Spend a month or two getting founders, execs, and employees posting about the work before you spend on external creators. Creator Match ran a recent hiring cycle this way: an in-house designer made custom graphics, AJ helped review drafts, and roughly half a dozen employees told their own version of the company’s story.

 AJ estimates those posts generated more than 400,000 impressions. The impressions are nice. The bigger win is building the muscle internally and giving the team a chance to see what people respond to before creator fees, contracts, and usage rights enter the picture.

Play 2: Find the customers already talking about you. 

Some customers are already posting about your product. Others are saying great things in Slack, emails, sales calls, and conversations with your team, but have never been encouraged to share any of it publicly. Those are your next creators. 

Resist the urge to turn their enthusiasm into a polished testimonial. Instead, use what you learned from your employee program to help customers and advocates create content around their firsthand experience with your product.

Play 3: Match the creator to the job. 

Now, you can spend. 

AJ doesn't start by asking which influencers a brand wants to work with. He starts with what success looks like. 

Maybe leadership wants to see the brand showing up in the right feeds. Maybe sales wants prospects saying they saw you somewhere. Or maybe you're chasing a number: CPM, clicks, customer acquisition cost, or ROAS. The answer changes who you hire.

The shift most teams miss is what happens when you're buying creative rather than reach. If paid media is doing the distribution, a creator with 5,000 followers and killer creative can be more useful than one with 500,000. Their organic reach isn't what you're paying for.

That also makes usage rights something to settle upfront. If you plan to boost the content, your agreement needs to give you permission to do it.

The full playbook has AJ's rules for what to do once the money's moving: how to price a creator without a rate card, why nobody cares about your feature launch, and the brief that made Notion's offline launch work.

Read it here →

Campaigns that got us talking: Brand marketing has always had a CFO problem: “People will care about us more later” doesn't fit particularly well in a revenue projection. Giant Spoon is trying to put a number on it.

Its new Care Index™, developed by Wpromote x Giant Spoon and tested with Northwestern’s MBA program, measures whether consumers know, like, and care about a brand, then connects that score to revenue.

Across 100+ brands, a 5-point increase in Care Score correlated with roughly a 10% increase in incremental annual revenue.

While you’re poking around, sign up for The Stir, Giant Spoon’s newsletter on media for brands that refuse to blend in.

Stuff that makes us scroll back up: Audible's "Laugh Through It" campaign reminded us what great storytelling in advertising can look like.

Want to see your name in The Standard? We can think of two ways.

You have a brand B2B marketers should know about.

Put it in front of thousands of them through newsletter placements, sponsored editorial, or a custom partnership.

You know something B2B marketers should know about.

We’re always looking for smart people with something useful to say. We’ll help turn your expertise into an editorial feature or thought leadership our readers actually want to spend time with.

So, which one are you?

Not laughing out loud at Crowd Work.

Yep, we said it.

Our new Sunday newsletter makes marketers laugh about what marketing has done to us.

The first issue opens with a marketer cracking open their laptop on a Sunday to “just get ahead for the week.”

Except some of us read that from a laptop we had opened on a Sunday to “just get ahead for the week.”

…

Make sure you’re subscribed.

Everything that used to be expensive about content got cheap. Everything that was always hard is still hard.

You can generate 1,000 words in 9 seconds. You can buy distribution from a creator with 500,000 followers. What you can't buy is a person with an actual point of view, which is why AJ's content flywheel starts with the people already in the building.

Go find out who they are.

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing... 

The press release is 120 years old this October. Ivy Lee wrote the first one for the Pennsylvania Railroad after a fatal crash, and The New York Times printed it more or less as handed over. Turns out the original prompt-and-publish workflow predates the prompt.