All things creator marketing with Kay Hsu

Kay Hsu is global head of Spotify’s creative lab. 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 what she believes are the biggest growth drivers of creator marketing.

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? People have gotten really good at tuning out advertising that doesn’t feel relevant to them. They’ll flip through a 6- or 15-second ad as they scroll with only milliseconds of attention, but when it comes to a creator they love, they’ll sit with them for hours and actually listen. We’re seeing a different pattern of attention, adoration, and action with creators that haven’t been seen in traditional media.

Podcasting is the clearest example of this playing out. This year, podcasts made their Golden Globes debut with a brand-new category, and Good Hang with Amy Poehler from Spotify’s The Ringer won that inaugural award. That’s not a small thing. That’s the cultural establishment saying, “Okay, this is a legitimate art form now.” And for advertisers and brands who have seen diminishing returns with reach and mass media, they’re starting to realize that cultural legitimacy is the way to achieve relevance. It signals what brands are missing: the audience is serious, the creators are serious, and the medium, even now, is underinvested in as a brand-building platform.

What signals do you evaluate to determine whether creator partnerships are successful? For me, it always starts with, Did it feel right? That sounds fuzzy, but I mean it seriously. If you put a brand next to a creator and it feels forced, if the audience can tell it’s transactional, that’s a failure regardless of what the numbers say in the short term.

A partnership I think about a lot is the Audemars Piguet work with Mark Ronson and RAYE. What made that work wasn’t just the reach. It was that the creative actually made sense together; the worlds connected. Audemars Piguet is about craft and precision and artistry, and so is what Mark and RAYE do. When you get that alignment right, audiences feel it and brands feel it too.

Beyond that, we’re obviously looking at brand lift, engagement, and whether it drove real downstream action for the partner. But I always want to start with the qualitative gut check before I get into the data.

Another thing we look at is if we’ve leveraged the power of the creator. Did we use their creative and storytelling abilities to connect their fans with brands? Or did we merely treat the creator like a mouthpiece for the brand without using the magic dust creators bring to the table? For podcast host reads, Amy Poehler always makes sure to use her silly and lighthearted sense of humor to make connections on behalf of the brand she’s working with.

Are you spending more on scale or on experimentation? How do you balance those two musts? Both, and I’d push back a little on the idea that they’re opposites. The things we’re scaling today were experiments not that long ago, so if we’d only funded what was already proven, we wouldn’t have those bets to scale now.

What I try to be really honest about internally is, are we giving experiments real resources, or are we just calling something an experiment because we’re not sure about it yet? Those are very different things. True experimentation means you’re willing to learn something you didn’t expect, including that it didn’t work. That takes actual investment and actual conviction.

So practically, yes. There’s a core set of formats and partnerships where we know the playbook and we’re running it hard. And separately, there are things we’re trying that don’t have a playbook yet. The discipline is keeping both genuinely funded and not letting the pressure to hit short-term numbers cannibalize the stuff that’s going to matter in two or three years.

How are you adjusting internal marketing structures to position creator efforts? The biggest shift is that creators can’t be a silo anymore. For a long time in a lot of organizations, creator or influencer work lived in its own corner, separate from brand, separate from partnerships, separate from content strategy. And that just doesn’t reflect how this stuff actually works.

What we’re moving toward is having creator thinking embedded earlier, at the brief stage, not the execution stage—because if you bring a creator in at the end to amplify something that was already built without them, you’re leaving so much on the table. The best work happens when the creator’s perspective shapes the idea itself.

That also means building teams and hiring people who genuinely live in creator culture, not people who study it from a distance, but people who are in it.

Which upcoming platforms, formats, or creator niches are you most excited about? Video podcasting, full stop. I say that specifically thinking about what’s best for advertisers right now.

Podcast listeners are already one of the most intentional, leaned-in audiences anywhere in media. They chose to press play. They’re not scrolling past something, they’re committed to that host for 30, 60, sometimes 90 minutes. Add video to that, and you’re not just reaching someone, you’re in the room with them.

We know that 36% of listeners are more likely to trust podcast or music ads than social media ads. Video podcasts take that further because the host delivers an ad read on camera, in the flow of the episode, in their own voice. It doesn’t feel like an interruption; it feels like a recommendation from someone the audience already trusts. That’s genuinely hard to replicate anywhere else, and I think brands are only just starting to understand what that’s worth.