What you should know as a CMO who understands Influencer Marketing
For years, Meaningful Brands research has shown that most brands could disappear tomorrow and people wouldn’t really miss them.
Creators are the fastest way brands have ever had to fix that. A creator turns a logo into a person, a voice, a point of view that an audience actually trusts.
That matters more now than ever. Feeds are about to be flooded with AI-made content. In that world, a real relationship with a real creator is one of the few things a competitor can’t copy and a machine can’t fake. Reach has become a commodity.
Every brand can rent the same audience, from the same creators, on the same platforms. What you can’t rent is a creator who genuinely wants to do their best work for you. So the real question is no longer “which creators do we book this quarter.” It’s “who are we actually building with.”
What we do differently
At SAMY, we work with the biggest brands across the world. The easy way would be for each brand to treat creators as placements. Book them, use them, move on. We choose to do the opposite. We treat creators and their agencies as partners and as entrepreneurs running their own business, not just in the creative work, but in how the deals get made too.
Relevance should always come first. A brand-creator partnership works when it feels right for the creator, their audience, and their world. Being a true partner isn’t about sending more deals. It’s about sending the right ones.
That means a creator can build an ongoing relationship across a portfolio of brands, instead of only ever working with one brand at a time. And that feels far more natural to their audience, because it’s a real, ongoing relationship instead of a series of disconnected posts.
One of our agency partners told us it makes the whole collaboration feel more authentic, and builds stronger affinity on both sides.
But they added one condition: only as long as it stays relevant and fits the creator’s profile and audience. That condition is everything. Being a partner doesn’t mean sending a creator more deals. It means sending them the right ones.
The part everyone underestimates
Here’s something you won’t find in a strategy deck: the hardest thing about working across a portfolio of brands isn’t the strategy or the budget. It’s keeping things simple for the creator, while everything on your side is complex.
The same agency partner that told us our approach makes collaboration feel more authentic and builds stronger affinity on both sides, was honest with us about the tradeoff. In the beginning, the biggest challenge wasn’t the work itself. It was simply knowing who to talk to, with so many teams and brands involved.
What fixed it wasn’t a new tool or a new process. It was giving the agency one clear point of contact instead of a maze of teams. That’s a small change on paper, but it’s the difference between a creator feeling handled and a creator feeling known.
Lorealistar is the L’Oréal Group’s creator club, turning one-off collaborations into lasting relationships through training, mentorship, networking and real-world experiences.
If you lead marketing, that’s worth sitting with. Your influence doesn’t travel in a straight line from your brand to your audience. It moves through a chain: from your brand, to your agency, to the talent agency, to the creator, and only then to the people you want to reach.
Every link in that chain is a human relationship. And the chain is only as strong as its coldest handshake. Most leaders manage the two ends and assume the middle takes care of itself. It doesn’t.
Work with the creators you love; invite them to the office; support them beyond a budget; pick up the phone instead of just sending a brief. All of that matters.
Start by treating creators like the small businesses they are. Often one person, or a small team, with a manager working hard to land the campaigns that will define their year. Then do the simple, human things that most brands skip.
- Ask your own teams a simple question: which creators do you love working with? Where’s the vibe good, where is everyone happy? That’s where your best partnerships already are. Build on them.
- Invite creators to your office. Put their photos and videos on the screens. Bring them into your culture, not just your campaigns.
- Free up budget to genuinely support them, not only to pay them.
- Pick up the phone when you have a great trip or a campaign they’ll love, instead of just sending a brief. They remember it. So do their managers, who work even harder for the brands that treat their talent well. You might even be one of their first big clients, the one they never forget.
The brands that win the next decade of influence will be the ones that built the most relationships. With the creators, and with everyone in the chain who brings those creators to life. You can buy reach but you’ll have to earn the rest.
