All things creator marketing with Becky Owen

Becky Owen is CMO at the creator agency Billion Dollar Boy, which has partnered with brands including Heineken, Nike, Unilever, PepsiCo, L’Oréal, Crocs, Burberry, Microsoft and Sephora. She’s set to speak at Marketing Brew’s upcoming event, The Next Phase of Social & Creator Marketing, on May 12.

Ahead of the event, we caught up with her to hear how her team is advising brands on their creator strategies.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

US creator ad spend is growing four times faster than the rest of the media industry. What do you think is the biggest reason for this growth? Creators have shown that maybe we haven’t understood how advertising really works…We are seeing increasingly that [creators are] outperforming, and I think it’s because creators do things differently from how traditional adverts would engage or sell…What creators have shown us is that there are different rules to engaging and building relationships with audiences and shifting the needle for brands. We’re seeing that brand growth is increasingly just being built via social and creator channels. The shift is performance-based…because creators do things differently to how traditional marketers do, and it is based off of community, lived experience, and things that feel more honest.

Increasingly, we’re seeing brands are able to grow entirely in social spaces and not require other types of mediums. They are dominating their spend on social spaces, which are owned and marketed by creators, far more readily than it’s owned and marketed by people from traditional spaces and traditional disciplines.

What signals do you and your clients evaluate to determine whether creator partnerships are successful? Is it brand-dependent? It is absolutely brand-dependent. Some are so focused on ROI. It’s like, if this isn’t materially shifting sales, and I can’t [identify] ROI, we have failed. Others are very much focused on advocacy, and advocacy is a really interesting play. We’re seeing, very interestingly, the concept of community turn up more and more as a commercial engine, which I think is very interesting because we’re seeing brands [that would] traditionally plan bottom-of-funnel …say, “I need to fill that funnel with community led by creators.” And so they’re bringing in much more top-of-funnel metrics when they’re looking at the ROI…Almost hand in hand with the ROI, measurement, economics, all of that stuff is so central and so critical, and if we can’t offer that to our clients, we are not delivering what they’re asking. The deal sizes are so significant now that there has to be a resilient and robust measurement framework that even gets the CFOs that are signing off on those deal sizes comfortable. It puts a lot of pressure on us to ensure that our measurement stack is the most resilient and robust out there.

Are the brands that you’re working with spending more on scale or on experimentation? How do you balance those two for them? Scale, for sure…I think we’re in a current status where people want guarantees and they want to feel scale. We’ve had a lot of experimentation in this industry that hasn’t always panned out for the brave ones that have done it, and I feel like we are definitely in an era where people want guarantees [and] scale, and they want to know that their marketing is delivering…There is a lot of economic pressure on CMOs at the moment.

I wish we had more people experimenting. The ones that choose to experiment, it’s their identity to experiment. They’re always the first out of the gate…But I would say right now, it’s scale, and it just feels like people need to ensure marketing is working, marketing is effective, and it’s delivering.

How are your clients adjusting internal marketing structures to position creator efforts most effectively? Increasingly, we are being called in to talk to brands to help them work that piece out. As the deal size grows, the pressure grows. Mainly legacy big businesses are realizing that their system is breaking and snapping because it has not been designed for creative marketing...[which is] fast and sometimes peculiar. But if you get it right, you win.

And now we have these big budgets. You have to go through all these different teams that might not even understand creative marketing, and you’ve got to make sure they’re happy with it. [You can] have the best idea in the world, and then, because the structure doesn’t support it, you either miss your window for the idea or the idea dwindles and dies into almost nothing.

I’ve actually spoken to a lot of major legacy brands about how they need to start rethinking their internal structures to ensure their investment is best delivered to what creative marketing actually is, and to ensure that they’re not creating systems that are squashing the idea.

Which upcoming platforms, formats, or creator niches are you most excited about? I’m most excited about the reversal of linear programming. The tides are shifting, and you can see the future of traditional entertainment is going to be born on these platforms. I’ve interviewed quite a few talent. No one wants to go through the old processes, because it’s who you know, not what you know…In the next 10 years, the majority of formats that we’ll be watching and consuming on TV and film will have some sort of eminence from a creator on social…I think the people that are going to be shaping it are going to be sourced from the most unique avenues.