\n
Kay Hsu is global head of Spotify\u2019s creative lab. She\u2019s set to speak at Marketing Brew\u2019s upcoming event, The Next Phase of Social & Creator Marketing, on May 12.<\/p>\n
Ahead of the event, we caught up with her to hear what she believes are the biggest growth drivers of creator marketing.<\/p>\n
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.<\/em><\/p>\nUS 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?<\/strong> People have gotten really good at tuning out advertising that doesn\u2019t feel relevant to them. They\u2019ll flip through a 6- or 15-second ad as they scroll with only milliseconds of attention, but when it comes to a creator they love, they\u2019ll sit with them for hours and actually listen. We\u2019re seeing a different pattern of attention, adoration, and action with creators that haven\u2019t been seen in traditional media.<\/p>\nPodcasting is the clearest example of this playing out. This year, podcasts made their Golden Globes debut with a brand-new category, and Good Hang with Amy Poehler<\/em> from Spotify\u2019s The Ringer won that inaugural award. That\u2019s not a small thing. That\u2019s the cultural establishment saying, \u201cOkay, this is a legitimate art form now.\u201d And for advertisers and brands who have seen diminishing returns with reach and mass media, they\u2019re starting to realize that cultural legitimacy is the way to achieve relevance. It signals what brands are missing: the audience is serious, the creators are serious, and the medium, even now, is underinvested in as a brand-building platform.<\/p>\nWhat signals do you evaluate to determine whether creator partnerships are successful?<\/strong> For me, it always starts with, Did it feel right? That sounds fuzzy, but I mean it seriously. If you put a brand next to a creator and it feels forced, if the audience can tell it\u2019s transactional, that\u2019s a failure regardless of what the numbers say in the short term.<\/p>\nA partnership I think about a lot is the Audemars Piguet work with Mark Ronson and RAYE. What made that work wasn\u2019t just the reach. It was that the creative actually made sense together; the worlds connected. Audemars Piguet is about craft and precision and artistry, and so is what Mark and RAYE do. When you get that alignment right, audiences feel it and brands feel it too.<\/p>\n
Beyond that, we\u2019re obviously looking at brand lift, engagement, and whether it drove real downstream action for the partner. But I always want to start with the qualitative gut check before I get into the data.<\/p>\n
Another thing we look at is if we\u2019ve leveraged the power of the creator. Did we use their creative and storytelling abilities to connect their fans with brands? Or did we merely treat the creator like a mouthpiece for the brand without using the magic dust creators bring to the table? For podcast host reads, Amy Poehler always makes sure to use her silly and lighthearted sense of humor to make connections on behalf of the brand she\u2019s working with.<\/p>\n
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Are you spending more on scale or on experimentation? How do you balance those two musts?<\/strong> Both, and I\u2019d push back a little on the idea that they\u2019re opposites. The things we\u2019re scaling today were experiments not that long ago, so if we\u2019d only funded what was already proven, we wouldn\u2019t have those bets to scale now.<\/p>\nWhat I try to be really honest about internally is, are we giving experiments real resources, or are we just calling something an experiment because we\u2019re not sure about it yet? Those are very different things. True experimentation means you\u2019re willing to learn something you didn\u2019t expect, including that it didn\u2019t work. That takes actual investment and actual conviction.<\/p>\n
So practically, yes. There\u2019s a core set of formats and partnerships where we know the playbook and we\u2019re running it hard. And separately, there are things we\u2019re trying that don\u2019t have a playbook yet. The discipline is keeping both genuinely funded and not letting the pressure to hit short-term numbers cannibalize the stuff that\u2019s going to matter in two or three years.<\/p>\n
How are you adjusting internal marketing structures to position creator efforts?<\/strong> The biggest shift is that creators can\u2019t be a silo anymore. For a long time in a lot of organizations, creator or influencer work lived in its own corner, separate from brand, separate from partnerships, separate from content strategy. And that just doesn\u2019t reflect how this stuff actually works.<\/p>\nWhat we\u2019re moving toward is having creator thinking embedded earlier, at the brief stage, not the execution stage\u2014because if you bring a creator in at the end to amplify something that was already built without them, you\u2019re leaving so much on the table. The best work happens when the creator\u2019s perspective shapes the idea itself.<\/p>\n
That also means building teams and hiring people who genuinely live in creator culture, not people who study it from a distance, but people who are in it.<\/p>\n
Which upcoming platforms, formats, or creator niches are you most excited about?<\/strong> Video podcasting, full stop. I say that specifically thinking about what\u2019s best for advertisers right now.<\/p>\nPodcast listeners are already one of the most intentional, leaned-in audiences anywhere in media. They chose to press play. They\u2019re not scrolling past something, they\u2019re committed to that host for 30, 60, sometimes 90 minutes. Add video to that, and you\u2019re not just reaching someone, you\u2019re in the room with them.<\/p>\n
We know that 36% of listeners are more likely to trust podcast or music ads than social media ads. Video podcasts take that further because the host delivers an ad read on camera, in the flow of the episode, in their own voice. It doesn\u2019t feel like an interruption; it feels like a recommendation from someone the audience already trusts. That\u2019s genuinely hard to replicate anywhere else, and I think brands are only just starting to understand what that\u2019s worth.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Read the full article here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kay Hsu is global head of Spotify\u2019s creative lab. She\u2019s set to speak at Marketing Brew\u2019s upcoming event, The Next Phase of Social & Creator Marketing, on May 12. Ahead of the event, we caught up with her to hear what she believes are the biggest growth drivers of creator marketing. This interview has been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23275,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[78],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-23274","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-marketing"},"yoast_head":"\n
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