Dove. United Talent Agency. TelevisaUnivision.
These are just some of the companies that were represented at Marketing Brew’s What’s Next? Navigating the Future Business of Creator Marketing event in New York last week. Executives discussed the evolving creator marketing landscape, which is being shaped by new platforms, trends, and technologies. Below are a few of the juiciest tips given onstage.
LinkedIn is the place to be: LinkedIn is no longer just a job-hunting platform, Aneesh Lal, founder of creator firm The Wishly Group, told attendees. Brands are looking to capitalize on the platform’s audience, which includes “all these influential…people who drive budgets at home and drive budgets at the office.” He pointed to short-form video and carousels as content types that work well on the platform.
Another way to potentially stand out on LinkedIn is to post lifestyle content on the platform, Sara Uy, an influencer who goes by the moniker SellingSara, said onstage. She pointed to a video she made walking through a day in her life attending Cannes this year with the AI brand Luster as an example.
“When you try a little bit less in sales and try to be a little bit less sales-y, it goes a long way,” she said. “I think that’s why the lifestyle piece on LinkedIn is doing so well right now, just because it’s a refresher.”
Stay local: Cultivating relationships with local creators with niche audiences is one way to reach a dedicated audience and signal that a brand is part of the community, Andrew Karson, EVP of marketing at BSE Global, the parent company of the Brooklyn Nets and New York Liberty, said. To that end, in 2023, the Nets partnered with Brooklyn-based creator Kareem Rahma, best known for his viral Instagram account, Subway Takes, on a Subway Takes-style video with Nets players.
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“We try to anchor much of what we do in Brooklyn and the DNA of Brooklyn,” Karson said.
Rethink your brand’s creator partnership criteria: Checking that a potential creator partner’s audience over-indexes with a particular brand is important in addition to considering more standard metrics like engagement rate, Emily Anatole, senior director, UTA IQ, at UTA, said.
“We love to see a creator’s followers over-index with that particular brand, so that presumably, they’d be excited to see a brand that they love partner with a creator that they admire, and it’s well-positioned for both parties that it’s going to succeed and feel authentic,” she said.
Another way brands can use metrics to their advantage is to examine which creators they’ve previously worked with that drove successful results and source similar creators, Samantha Haberl, senior manager of influencer marketing at online learning community Skillshare, said. Brands can also look at metrics from their work with those creators, like CPAs and conversion rates, to “at least try to predict what the ROI is going to look like” with similar creators in the future, too, she said.
Update 7/28/25: This story has been updated with attending brands.