All things creator marketing with Mae Karwowski

Mae Karwowski is founder and CEO of influencer marketing agency Obviously. 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 why she’s so bullish on 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? It works! Ads appear where the customer is engaged and with content that they care about from people that they care about. These creators have built their audiences by learning how to get their attention. Also, where else are ads going to be seen? When is the last time you watched a TV commercial? I think my last commercial sighting was at a bar watching March Madness.

What signals do you evaluate to determine whether creator partnerships are successful? There are different signals for different campaigns. Did we sell out of the product? Was there a sales lift? Did we drive traffic to their website? Did we create content that, when turned into an ad, outperformed all other ad content? This last one is very important for most brands. We can provide the best ads from creators that hit the best CPA/CPC/CPM metrics for a fraction of the cost of a creative agency.

Are you spending more on scale or on experimentation? How do you balance those two musts? You need to spend more on scale to drive results, then continue to take a fraction of the budget and keep experimenting.

How are you adjusting internal marketing structures to position creator efforts? The big change is that the influencer team used to be tacked on to the larger account team. There would be a talent manager, an influencer strategist, influencer client success manager, etc., and they would be the only ones who really understood how influencer work happened at a brand. Now, anyone working with the brand needs to have inside-out influencer knowledge and understand the influencer strategy and how it ladders up to the larger strategy. This creates more opportunities to bring in creators to all sorts of marketing opportunities, from event activations to modeling the product on TV or billboards.

Which upcoming platforms, formats, or creator niches are you most excited about? Creator niches—aka going really deep on specific verticals and finding true experts. People who create community around their incredibly narrow niches. For example, Tanner Leatherstein chops up leather luxury handbags and tells you what it’s worth. Or Vanessa Cornell crochets and talks about life lessons. Or XYZ who talks about AI news as an expert in the field. B2B in general is now getting very hot—people who know a lot about their industry or occupation.