Why this marketer thinks brands should leave platform-specific social strategies behind

Natalie Silverstein, chief innovation officer at Collectively, is set to speak at our upcoming Marketing Brew Summit on September 30. Ahead of the event, we caught up with her to hear what brands that have a best-in-class creator strategy are doing well, and what most brands still get wrong.

What do you think most marketers get wrong in their creator strategy today? A lot of brands are still thinking in creator campaigns instead of adopting a fully embedded creator-first strategy. Campaign thinking has brands assembling a roster, activating for a moment, then doing it again six months later. Creator-first means creators are baked into how you go to market continuously, across every tier from flagship partnerships down to affiliates. It’s always-on by default. Very few brands are actually there yet.

Where do you see the biggest gap between how marketers think audiences behave and how they actually behave? Marketers still think in platforms. They build a “TikTok strategy” or an “Instagram strategy,” as if there’s a coherent audience sitting on that platform, waiting. But there’s no such thing as the TikTok audience. There are hundreds of millions of people, each with a completely different algorithmic experience, shaped by their own behavior, their own niche obsessions, and their own watch history. Content enters thousands of individually constructed feeds simultaneously, most of which have nothing in common with each other.

The platform-hopping reality makes this worse. People don’t live anywhere. They discover something on TikTok, look it up on Reddit, check the reviews on YouTube, buy on Amazon, and tell their friends on iMessage. The journey is fragmented, and it’s not going to un-fragment. But most marketing plans still draw a clean line from awareness to consideration to purchase as if that sequence happens inside one app.

The brands that understand this build for resonance and trust the distribution. Everyone else is trying to game feeds that no two people share.

Five years from now, what’s the marketing “best practice” of today that we’ll all look back on and cringe at? Becoming overly focused on running all content through optimization tools before it ships. Pre-testing, attention scoring, [and] engagement benchmarks all measure what’s already worked, which means they may filter out anything that’s never been done before. The work that scores highest is almost always the most familiar, but getting someone to feel something or change their mind in the endless scroll of social platforms requires more creative risk.

Name one brand or organization that’s putting out advertising you’re regularly jealous of. What makes it so good? I’m really impressed with brands that are able to create true customer love and advocacy. This is usually a result of both killer products and relentless creativity in how they communicate with customers. Rhode comes to mind because, while there is a celebrity founder in the mix, the brand’s growth and momentum is being sustained by so much creator content and UGC. They’re getting product into the right hands to spread the word for them.

The summit’s themes are “insights, intuition, and integration.” Which of those three is the most underrated right now, and which one are marketers leaning on too much? Intuition is wildly underrated. We’ve spent a decade telling marketers to be data-driven, which is right, but the pendulum has swung so far that people are afraid to make a call without a dashboard to back them up. The best creative and strategic decisions I’ve seen in this industry came from someone who understood the culture and the audience deeply enough to know what would land, often before any data confirmed it. You need the data to pressure-test and optimize. You don’t need it to have an idea.

Integration is the one we’re leaning on too much—or at least we’re mislabeling things as integrated when we really just mean “we did a lot of things at once.” Most of what gets called integrated is just a media plan with more line items.