Thesis: In a few years, more companies will be building their own in-house creators

I think the current influencer/creator model is broken.

Companies pay a creator for individual social posts to promote their product or service, hoping for a bump in sales or traffic to a landing page.

But the issue is there’s no depth in the relationship.

Creators got bills to pay so they’re often working with several brands at once.

And because there’s no loyalty, you end up seeing low engagement from the audience, resulting in a poor use of marketing spend.

Especially when you look over longer time periods.

Audiences have gotten so used to being shilled different brands that they completely tune them out entirely whenever they see a sponsored post in the feed (at least this is what I find myself doing).

I think a better model is one of two options:

1) Building your own in-house creator(s)

or

2) Setting up a long-term creator partnership

Here’s a breakdown of each:

Building Your Own In-house Creator

The title is self-explanatory but it essentially boils down to… building up the social presence from one of your employees (or hiring someone who has the potential to grow an online presence).

A great example here would be what Morning Brew is doing with Dan Toomey.

Dan has 788k subs on Youtube, 150k on TikTok, 210k on IG, and 62k on X.

I’m not sure exactly what their engagement is but I’d be willing to bet that he has either an extended partnership/contract (or was hired on full time, but focused on building his brand while promoting Morning Brew on his socials).

Honestly, what a great gig.

Get paid to build your personal brand??! Incredible.

Whatever the case is, he’s driving a ton of distribution & awareness for Morning Brew through his content.

After checking out his accounts, it looks like he’s regularly getting hundreds of thousands, and sometimes even millions of views on individual videos.

And whenever I see him pop up in the feed, I always think of Morning Brew (even if he doesn’t mention them in the copy or creative).

That’s the power of associating a personal brand to a company brand.

Plus, the content he’s creating can be repurposed and shared by the brand accounts.

So they get the initial distribution, brand recognition, & engagement when Dan Shares, plus UGC-style content that they can use on their own feeds down the line.

So how you can you build your own in-house creator(s)?

Here are a few thoughts:

1) Get your founder(s) on a regular posting schedule. They should already be doing this but if they’re not, they need to start — today. See below for resources on building a founder social presence.

2) Identify niche creators within the company — these are usually people who have been posting regularly but have a very niche following. This is great because those audiences could scale nicely if you provide more support from the company brand. Build up their presence, amplify from the brand account, and spotlight them whenever you can in events or conferences.

3) Encourage all employees to build their online presence. Provide branding, comms, social, & legal trainings so that they feel confident when sharing content. Give them access to X Premium, LinkedIn Premium, and publishing tools like Typefully. Build a culture of being online — Beehiiv does this best but I’ll break that down in another post.

A few more resources that should help here:

Long Term Creator Partnerships

The perfect example that comes to mind for this one is what Ridge did with MKBHD.

Ridge’s CEO, Sean posted this thread last year:

Then came the announcement from Sean & MKBHD about their partnership:

I also thought it was cool to see some of the products they’re working on together too (not just leveraging him for his audience).

A+ work, Sean & MKBHD.

Ok so what’s the TLDR here on long-term creator partnerships?

Well, if I was a founder looking to work with a creator, I’d do exactly what Sean did.

A 12+ month partnership where compensation is tied to cash and equity (or performance bonuses).

This model makes a ton of sense.

Both parties are incentivized in the long run (vs short term bursts of promo for cash).

Plus, the long time period allows you to build trust with the creator’s audience.

You don’t need to shoot for the biggest creators either.

Identify the top creators in your specific niche. (Note, “Top” can also mean relatively small, like 10k-20k followers, but highly engaged)

Then, vet their social presence to ensure they didn’t buy their followers (you can easily tell if they have tens of thousands of followers and no likes/replies).

Next, reach out to the ones who you think might be a fit with your brand.

Then structure a deal with the top candidate. Remember to keep incentives aligned.

I’d be sure to outline a JD like Sean did — where the creator is expected to share a certain amount of posts per month, but also partner on launch campaigns, events, etc.

In case you are still not convinced by everything I shared above, here’s another data point:

From Dan McCormick’s tweet:

“Get paid to: build your personal social following

“The job is to basically live the the life of NYC fitness/wellness influencer, but you get stability, funding, and benefits”

I think this is a growing trend.

More companies will hire creators.

More companies will build their own creators.

Get ahead of the game by starting today.

I hope you found this edition helpful.

If you did — or if you have questions, shoot me a tweet @ishverduzco.

Also hope you liked the slight newsletter re-brand to “The Creator Blueprint”.

I found myself dragging my feet on some editions because they didn’t exactly fit into the social strategy theme, but since I’m a creator myself, I figured I could always share things everything I’m learning, observing, or testing.

Feedback is always welcomed!

In closing, I’d like to leave you with one of my favorite quotes

"First time founders focus on product, second time founders focus on distribution." - @justinkan

Something I loved this week:

(this technically dropped last month but I re-listened to t for the 4th time this week so thought I’d share)

Pieter Levels is the goat.

I aspire to be the non-technical version of him.

Works hard, gets results, has fun, and doesn’t take himself too seriously.