Ben Gunn, co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer of Fabulate, and Director of Client Partnerships, Eliza Lewis discuss the opportunities and challenges and the need to think beyond communications alone when considering creator marketing for your brand and business.
While many brands still treat creator marketing as an experimental line item or a subset of social media, the reality is that the creator economy has outgrown the traditional organisational silos of brand, PR, and media. We are moving away from a campaign-by-campaign mindset toward a world where creator-led activity functions as critical business infrastructure – combining production, media, and distribution into a single, unified force.
However, as this discipline scales, so does the potential for “organisational chaos.” Marketers often find themselves buried in fragmented workflows and vanity metrics, struggling to prove true business value while navigating the minefields of brand safety and governance.
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Transcription (Edited):
Darren Woolley: Hi, I’m Darren Woolley, founder and CEO of Trinity P3 Marketing Management Consultancy. Welcome to Managing Marketing, a weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media, and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners. While many brands still treat creator marketing as an experimental line item or a subset of social media, the reality is that the creator economy has outgrown the traditional organisational silos of brand, PR, and media.
We’re moving away from a campaign-by-campaign mindset towards a world where creator-led activity functions as critical business infrastructure—combining production, media, and distribution into a single unified force. However, as this discipline scales, so does the potential for organisational chaos. Marketers often find themselves buried in fragmented workflows and vanity metrics, struggling to prove true business value while navigating the minefields of brand safety and governance.
To help us understand how to scale creator marketing without scaling the chaos, please welcome a co-founder of Fabulate, Ben Gunn, and Director of Client Partnerships, Eliza Lewis.
Ben Gunn: Thanks, Darren. Great to be on the podcast. Excited to be here.
Eliza Lewis: Thanks so much, Darren. Happy to be here.
Darren Woolley: It’s interesting from my perspective because we have seen a real shift. Traditionally, marketers would come to us needing a social media agency. Yet, many of those agencies feel like an extension of the traditional creative agency, where they think of social media simply as creating content to fill up channels. There is a real shift towards asking a bigger question: how do we go beyond that? How do we move into a world where the creators themselves are part of the story and the message? Ben, I imagine the whole idea for starting Fabulate was seeing this shift a long time ago.
Ben Gunn: Yeah, absolutely. That is the part that makes these social platforms so exciting for us and for the brands we work with. My background is in traditional media, but we saw the writing on the wall in terms of just how effective it is when creators talk about your brands. It just made sense to help brands do this in a way that can be scalable and drive results that you just don’t see with your standard brand ads.
Creators as the New Content and Distribution Engine
Darren Woolley: Eliza Lewis, you must also see marketers struggle with this. When they come to us, they’re talking about choosing a supplier, a vendor, or an agency, but you must see that struggle even before they get to that point.
Eliza Lewis: Yeah, absolutely. We’re seeing more and more marketers talk about the creator being their content engine, but also their media and distribution engine as well. Traditionally, creator work was always social media first, and it still is, but we’re seeing creators now across digital content marketing, email marketing, events, traditional podcasts, audio, and affiliate marketing. They are becoming that revenue-generating engine. A lot more of those conversations are now creator-led, focusing on how to use them in best practice across all these different channels to get the best revenue outcomes.
Darren Woolley: And that must create conflict internally because many of those things are often outside of the marketing department. Although marketing has a broad remit, many departments are more about internal promotion rather than areas like sales.
Eliza Lewis: It’s definitely changed. Even a couple of years ago, we were just talking to the brand teams. Then it became the brand paid, earned, and owned teams. Now, e-commerce teams are joining the conversation.
Ben Gunn: It’s the events teams, the PR teams, and even technology teams in terms of how you track it all. It feels like it’s outgrown the org chart. It isn’t a single person’s responsibility anymore; it touches multiple parts of a business that need to have some type of feedback regarding what they should be doing with creators.
Navigating Organisational Chaos and Silos
Darren Woolley: But how do you recognise or solve that problem? Organisations, particularly the larger they are, are built in silos. Suddenly you’re asking them to unify when they start to work with creators.
Eliza Lewis: It’s so funny. Sometimes I talk to big enterprise clients in Australia and I’ve literally talked to seven parts of their business, and they don’t know that they’re all talking different aspects of the same language. I’m like, “Okay, we need to all get into a room and talk about this.” We’re definitely talking about the creator operating model more and more and bringing the right stakeholders in on that, typically CMOs and Sales.
Ben Gunn: It starts with having a central place where all of these communications and all of this reporting can sit. I’m still surprised how many are using spreadsheets and emails. One department goes off and does one thing, then another department contracts the same creator a week later and pays five times the price because they didn’t have a central place where they could see that they’ve already worked with this creator. There has to be a willingness at the top and a recognition across all different departments of the role creators play in the marketing ecosystem.
Darren Woolley: So Ben Gunn, are you recommending that they actually rethink the structure, or at least the reporting lines, so there is a central point of coordination?
Ben Gunn: Well, I think it’s first acknowledging the varied ways in which creators are now being used across the marketing ecosystem. Then, the next step is ensuring the work we’re doing across these areas is consistent and repeatable. Everyone is looking for cost efficiencies and ways of streamlining. If you get bought in on that, the next question is: what systems do we need to embed into our business to scale this properly?
The reality is, it’s not going to sit across just one department. We’ve seen brands appoint a Chief Creator Officer, which is great practice because they think across the business. They are the subject matter expert who can bed in these systems and ensure each division working with creators is doing it in what is considered best practice.
Eliza Lewis: Best practice is when you have the assets to be a big enough business to have a Chief Creator Officer. Other examples I’ve seen are roles like a Performance and Creator Marketing Lead. Those roles are starting to pop up more, and they own the operating system and understand the performance metrics.
Moving from Cost Centres to Revenue Functions
Darren Woolley: My worry is the natural inclination within organisations to build silos within silos—like we saw with digital technology teams and social media teams.
Ben Gunn: I don’t think there are many businesses today that aren’t using some type of matrix structure. That’s the reality of how complicated businesses are. You still need your subject matter expert to have 10 out of 10 knowledge about creators. Their job is to ensure the different business units that touch creator have seven out of 10 knowledge, and know when to pull in the experts for specific parts of the job.
Darren Woolley: Eliza Lewis, as a pitch consultant, I see that marketing departments often come to us about appointing an agency because it’s seen as a marketing function. But what you are suggesting is that you need a cross-functional team in choosing and setting up that relationship.
Eliza Lewis: Yeah, absolutely. Bridging the gap from being a cost marketing function to a revenue-driving operation is where we’re seeing the best results. We’re building these creator operating systems where once you tie the talent into business outcomes and measure them with fast results and quick feedback, we’re able to deliver that as a revenue growth function. That’s the kind of pitch we’re responding to at the moment.
Expanding Categories and the Power of Micros
Darren Woolley: There are some categories that are well advanced—fashion, makeup, food, and travel seem well established. But where are the other opportunities?
Ben Gunn: Even those advanced categories are changing constantly because technology is moving at warp speed. In the past, they were hamstrung by data or measurement from the platforms, based on social metrics like likes and shares. It hasn’t easily been able to tie back to search volume, brand awareness, or product purchases. What’s exciting now is the ability to tie those activities not just to a creator, but down to the specific piece of content.
Eliza Lewis: I’m seeing it work best now for anything with a subscription model, entertainment clients, and tech SaaS. Those results are huge. Anything B2B is also interesting—people are still watching the same platforms and are influenced by the same people. Another one I love is health insurance, because you can really speak to pain points from a creator’s perspective that are true, and that parasocial relationship is strong.
Darren Woolley: When I hear about the creator economy, people often first reference the top echelon, like Mr. Beast or the Kardashians. But they aren’t typical creators anymore; they’ve become celebrities.
Eliza Lewis: We did a campaign last year where Kendall Jenner was the ambassador, and we added 50 micros to the mix. On every metric—brand, conversion, business outcomes—those micro-influencers outperformed her. It’s wild considering how much they would have paid to have Kendall Jenner front the campaign.
Ben Gunn: It’s like Salesforce for the creator economy. Most successful businesses using Salesforce capture thousands of records to make informed decisions. We’re doing the same for creators. In a Fabulate operating system, you have all the details: who the creator is, who their audience is, what brands they’ve worked with, and what categories they and their audiences are interested in.
Eliza Lewis: It goes beyond individual data. We have tools where you can put in a bunch of micros and compare them to having two ambassadors to see what the unduplicated reach is. We’re now at the point of predictive analysis and benchmarking based on a group of creators.
Managing the “Messy Middle” and Brand Safety
Ben Gunn: The best brands have an “always-on” approach. They have creators constantly talking about the brand. Our system has real-time data feeding in; if creators fall below benchmarks, they fall out of the always-on strategy and you fill the funnel with new creators. It’s a constant feedback loop where performance is always improving.
Eliza Lewis: While we have all the fancy tools, we also take care of the really boring stuff—contracts, outreach, having contact details in one place, and having a transparent model where there aren’t hidden fees everywhere.
Ben Gunn: Marketers shouldn’t be expected to have the same level of knowledge as a specialist who lives and breathes creator marketing. Most of our clients don’t have the internal resources to manage the technology day-to-day. They want to approve the creator list and content and know it’s working, but the “messy middle” is what our system and managed service solve for.
Darren Woolley: What about the risks? Brand safety and compliance are big concerns, especially in regulated industries like health insurance.
Eliza Lewis: Brand safety is my favourite part. Our platform reviews content audio, visual captions, and comments in over 150 languages and dialects. It ensures the talent is brand safe. Because we have boots on the ground in 14 markets, we found out things like how the watermelon emoticon can be offensive in Malaysia.
For compliance, like with a pharma client, we feed the market regulations, brand dos and don’ts, and the red thread into the tech. Every piece of content filters through those before a manager even reviews it. It takes away the worry of things like a shot of alcohol in the background or a child’s seatbelt being on incorrectly in an auto ad.
Ben Gunn: Governments still think through a geographical lens, so our job is to give them reassurance that the creators they are choosing fit the brand safety and compliance guidelines for that specific market. What is compliant in Australia—like swimwear for a sun cancer program—might be offensive in more modest countries. We’ve trained the AI to think through the lens of the specific brand and market.
Eliza Lewis: It’s a mistake to think of Southeast Asia as one thing. You have to think of each market individually. They are socially minded and do so much commerce through creators, so getting it right in each market is important.
Beyond Vanity Metrics to Real Engagement
Darren Woolley: People look at follower counts, but you need to go beyond that to who they are engaging with and the level of engagement.
Ben Gunn: Platforms now prioritise content that is engaging, irrespective of follower count. TikTok pioneered it. Stephen Bartlett, a very sophisticated creator, talked about how the quality of the show has a greater influence over video views than his actual follower count.
Eliza Lewis: We obsess over metrics like video through rate and six-second video through rate, because only 10% of TikTok videos get to six seconds. The longer someone watches, the more influence you have.
Darren Woolley: I’ve seen content creators share their frustration with algorithms. They hit a million followers and then plateau because they start creating for the algorithm and not the consumer.
Eliza Lewis: You’ve got to get the algorithm to like the content and the consumer. If you don’t get the algorithm to like it, you don’t get the advantage. But the relationship with the audience is based on authenticity; if you ruin that, you’re screwed too.
Ben Gunn: Likes, shares, and saves feed the algorithm. These days, sharing content in DMs is something the algorithm really feeds off. But creators also need a dialogue with their audience to understand what’s really resonating.
Best Practice for Brands and Agencies
Darren Woolley: How do agencies and in-house teams need to change to understand how to work with creators? I’ve heard of creative directors trying to give direction to creators, and it doesn’t end well.
Ben Gunn: There’s a role for them as brand custodians, but they have to let the creator deliver the core message in their own words. Nothing looks worse than trying to shove a line into a video that doesn’t belong. Creative directors should create the guardrails, then let the creator be creative. Think of it like the old magazine editor; you wouldn’t tell the editor at Vogue exactly how to talk about your brand in a spread.
If brands are uncomfortable with brand control, we suggest starting with UGC (User Generated Content). We can script and storyboard that so it is signed off before it goes live. But as you move up into higher follower counts, it is very hard to dictate what is said.
Eliza Lewis: Good creators say no to 70% of offers because they know their power is in the relationship with their audience. If it isn’t authentic, it performs badly.
Ben Gunn: This is why ambassadorships are so effective. One-and-done campaigns don’t work as well because audiences want to know the creator really believes in it. Doing multiple pieces of content over an extended period is more effective for everyone.
Darren Woolley: If a marketer is sitting there going, “We’re wasting our time,” what do they need to be clear about before starting this conversation?
Ben Gunn: We generally engage with clients who are doing decent volume but lack the system to do it at scale. If you want to book your first creator, you can just reach out on Instagram. But when CFOs start asking questions because this line item is growing into the millions and needs to deliver an ROI, that’s where Fabulate fits.
Eliza Lewis: Understand your KPIs and objectives. Is it conversion? That’s a different ball game. And please don’t just come to me for an organic campaign. If you don’t put paid behind it, it’s like creating a TVC and not putting it anywhere. What’s the point?
Darren Woolley: Ben Gunn and Eliza Lewis, thank you for sharing the state of play for creator marketing.
And look, a question for both of you, I’m wondering, when you’re doom-scrolling late at night, which platforms do you go to?
