All things creator marketing with Katie Gohman

Katie Gohman is CMO of hair-care company Olaplex. 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 the brand is scaling its creator partnership work.

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? Social media has fundamentally transformed into interest-based media, with algorithms prioritizing what people care about over who they follow. With paid, we are no longer just buying impressions but earning relevance, and creators are the primary engine for this. While still an important part of your content mix, you can’t win with static, highly produced brand content alone. Creator content builds trusted advocacy beyond what a traditional brand ad can do, especially in the messy middle of the funnel. Someone showing their personal hair health transformation using Olaplex products will have much more impact than the brand telling the same story with a shiny studio-shot campaign.

What signals do you evaluate to determine whether creator partnerships are successful? We evaluate success through a multilayered measurement framework that balances immediate engagement with long-term brand health. While creator partnerships have typically been measured on upper-mid metrics such as reach and engagement, we’re now able to layer in lower-funnel metrics too, thanks to our recent launches on TikTok Shop and ShopMy.

We will set the objectives of our creator partnerships up front, which will drive how we determine success. This could be direct views and engagement, or search lift on key platforms such as YouTube or TikTok. We also look at nCPA (new-customer acquisition cost) and direct ROI for lower-funnel objectives.

Are you spending more on scale or on experimentation? How do you balance those two musts? We lean heavily into data-driven scaling. Our MMM (media mix modeling) helps identify possible investment headroom where we can scale spend in high-return channels while maintaining efficiency. However, we keep around 2% of our budget for new-platform testing to ensure we are always finding the next growth channel without compromising our core ROAS.

How are you adjusting internal marketing structures to position creator efforts? To position creator efforts at the center, we are moving away from a “function mentality” toward a “platform mentality.” This includes removing silos between creative, media, and organic social teams so our content strategy can be developed as an ecosystem, rather than separate vertices. This way, our paid media amplifies proven organic creative, making every dollar work harder. We try to enable our team to be a high-volume, centralized content-production engine with an output to match the speed of culture.

Which upcoming platforms, formats, or creator niches are you most excited about? The creator space is evolving rapidly, so keeping a finger on the pulse is imperative for our success today and tomorrow. We still see further opportunity with TikTok from an organic, paid, and social commerce perspective, with livestreaming being a big part of how we show up. We’ve seen the full-funnel power of TikTok Lives and the chance they provide to educate and demonstrate our products with a live audience. This direct line of communication with our consumers is incredibly powerful.

Similarly, with CTV playing a large role in our new-to-brand path to purchase, we see further opportunity with creator content in this channel. We’re currently working to find synergies across platforms to amplify creator assets and maximize their ROI.

As for upcoming platforms, who knows? I’m sure there are opportunities coming we haven’t even heard of!