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The Future Of Fashion’s Social Strategies · The Interline Podcast

• speaker-0: Hey, welcome back to the Intelligent Podcast. Normally on these shows, I'm talking to someone whose world has some overlap with mine. So, tech founders, brand owners, analysts, CEOs, economists, lawyers, and so on, they all live in the kind of professional space I spend my days in, which is generally populated by people of a certain vintage, i.e., folks in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. Building or talking about products and services and ideas that are designed for other people of a certain vintage who work for other businesses. Now, I'm not implying that I know everything about all of those spaces. If you listen to these shows long enough, you'll know that's demonstrably not true, but I do at least feel comfortable enough holding my own in most of those conversations, because they generally happen in a world I understand. And because in almost all of those cases, I've seen and experienced both sides of the coin. Day though, we're way out of my depth. Not because we're going outside the confines of fashion technology, mind you, but because we're about to talk about social media, influencers, the attention economy, virality, and so on. You know, young people stuff. I'm being a bit glib there, I'm not a dinosaur. You know, I'm in my mid-40s, so I was around for the early days of Facebook when it hit universities. I did that whole phase of oversharing and Testing the frontiers as the first generation to be handed web 2 with basically no guardrails. And then I was part of that cohort that spent the next decade trying to scrub a lot of that content from the internet's collective memory. I had a Twitter account for a little while. I had an Instagram profile, although I never really put much on it. But as I've said on here a few times and on the edit with Grace, I haven't used social media in my personal life for about a decade, I don't think. I've never opened TikTok. I've never unironically spelt Mac. Xing with two or more exes, which means this is the first show in nearly a year's worth of weekly interviews where I understand the business side of the thing we're about to talk about, but I've been divorced purposely or accidentally from the cultural side long enough that the whole thing feels alien to me. I understand the emphasis that fashion's placed on social advertising and influencer creator partnerships from a commercial perspective, but I've never been personally advertised to. On a purely algorithmic platform, except maybe Reddit. Obviously, I see Google search ads and so on, not quite the same thing. Now you might be thinking, but he said he had an Instagram account. True. But that was in the year or two after launch when the home feed was reverse chronological order rather than being algorithmic. I do have some insight into our audience analytics for this show, and I certainly do for the Interline in general. So I know I'm not alone in my age bracket, but I also know that we have a bunch of younger listeners and readers for whom a lot of what I've just said probably sounded like a guy in beige slacks and a button down blowing dust off his LPs. Which is all the more reason to bring in someone who's both a practicing expert and analyst when it comes to creating meaning and results out of social strategy and creative partnerships, and who's also a certified young person, or at least younger than. Briny Barker is that person. She's the incoming global strategy director at Pulse Advertising, which is a big worldwide social and influencer agency that's worked with companies like Selfridges, Beats by Dre, Mini, Mac Cosmetics, and plenty more. I brought her on partly, obviously, to plug a gap in my own knowledge, but primarily I wanted to get her on the show for you folks because our own data tells us that the content that fashion is putting in front of consumers is becoming progressively more synthetic. Read generated over time. And because I want to understand if the tension between AI, live experiences, and the attention economy, which we've written about a few times and had contributors write about, is real. And I want to understand how that all hooks into the kind of authenticity that influencers and creators deal in, and how different that might be from the synthetic side of stuff. I'm also using Brian as a bit of a proxy to have some on tape conversations I've had versions of off the record with people after Can Lyons, which I was invited to but couldn't attend. Because I know I've definitely, in my head, compartmentalized influencer marketing as being much scrappier, much smaller, and much less professional than it actually is. Cause it's clear from people who attended that event and the people I've spoken to afterwards that creators are now bona fide media businesses in a really serious way. And that's gonna have some implications for how fashion thinks about content and marketing and the systems and the technology behind those things. So let's get into my conversation with Briney. Okay. Briny Barker, welcome to the Interline Podcast. speaker-1: Hi, thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here. speaker-0: Yeah, no, I'm looking forward to this one. Now, we start every one of these shows with the same two things. People who listen to the show often will be familiar with this. We do a bit of an investigation into what the guests' day-to-day job consists of, and we ask them to define something that sounds basic, but hopefully ends up being illuminating in the process. Now, your day to day might be a bit in flux, I'm guessing, because you've only recently taken up posts or pulse advertising and you've done that in a a pretty interesting period for social. Where that one word can mean a lot of things from brand positioning, creator economy, paid media, social commerce, and a lot more. And at a time when I think a lot of that probably has an AI heavy twist at the moment as well. So maybe our best starting point is less what do you do at Pulse? Because maybe that's still taking shape. More what are you employed to do today that looks different to the longer-term job or social strategy that you've worked in for years? And how far do you think your clients and the wider market's understanding of the evolutions in in social and advertising and attention has kept pace with what's actually going on? speaker-1: Number one, great question. but I think in my history, and it's something I talk about a lot in terms of social grown from being seen as this almost ugly step sister of the channel mix to now becoming a a sort of language that agencies and brands alike are trying to be native in. It's definitely been a wild ride. There have been ups and downs, arguments, fallouts, ⁓ protests and then ⁓ almost parades for it in some senses. But I don't think that wild ride is necessarily going to change anytime soon. My job within that world, from when I started to where I am now is to give clients, brands, teams, internally, externally, an understanding of that world of social and help to help them guide them through it, translate the behaviors that they might not necessarily understand at first glance, make connections, find patterns, ⁓ and show them ultimately how they can use them. Sometimes that can be bleeding edge in on the very forefront of behaviours and how people are changing their relationships with algorithm. Sometimes it can be more about getting comfortable with it all in the first place. However, what I would say has remained sort of constant, and again, I can't see changing, is clients are always curious and everything comes from that place of curiousness, whether it's sort of I'm not on social, I don't get it, help me understand it to I can have some clients who are sending me WhatsApp with trends. Have you seen this? What algorithm are you on? It's a landscape that changes incredibly quickly and can feel disorientating, like you're on a waltzer. But at the same time, you've you've got to enjoy the ride of it because the ride isn't going to stop and become easier at any point in the near future. speaker-0: I that's a good answer. And I am one of those people who doesn't use social media in their personal life. ⁓ so there might be a bit of I'm gonna have some professional curiosity here for sure. I'm gonna look at this through the lens of the people who listen to the show, who read the interline, global brands and retailers. I'm also gonna potentially show some of my ignorance as we go, I think, ⁓ as somebody who is only a professionally engage with social media as a ⁓ kind of hostage in the sense that I feel like I have in the sense that I feel like I have to. and don't get me wrong, it's it's productive and I've seen I've seen value from it and I understand it. It's not it's not something I engage with on a personal level, but it's something that I know ⁓ occupies an increasingly important part in the channel mix to use ⁓ your your analogy from earlier. And I think we can talk about that a bit now because the definition I wanted to ask you about was at the word is attention. ⁓ and I think that attention has certainly moved across channels. ⁓ and that's probably the catalyst for for some of what we're gonna talk about now. No, I don't mean attention in the sense of like AI model development, but in the sense that everybody in advertising across channels seems to be reaching for the same thing, which is a share of their ICP, so ideal customer profiles, scarce mental space. ⁓ I've heard it I've heard it expressed before where somebody would I think it was Netflix or someone would say. we compete with sleep. So in the most in the most literal sense, people have limited time, they have limited attention, and they have limited mental capacity. Now, I do work I said don't run social media in my personal life. I do work in advertising in a perpendicular way as a provider. The Interline is an ad-supported publication. So I know that traditional metrics like impressions and views don't carry the weight they used to, but then the word that I would have historically fallen back on might be something like engagement. now I don't think that is synonymous with attention. ⁓ so in practical terms for our audience of fashion brands, define attention for me. What is it? How is it different from other metrics like watch time, engagement, conversion and so on? And how do you measure it? speaker-1: God, another great and big question, which I think if you got someone else sitting on this podcast, they might give you a slightly different answer. Because I think there's both an objective and subjective side to how the methodology behind attention works. But I think when we take a step back and think about where social's gone, sort of referencing what we mentioned a few minutes ago, we've been through the follow-up era, we've been through the engagement era, and now we're in the the attention economy. ⁓ and I think social. has changed throughout those eras to now where very much, as you said, you're competing with sleep, you're competing with leisure, you're competing with time with your family, you're competing for any kind of time in general, ⁓ whether that be entertainment, education or shopping. So for me, when we talk about attention and probably a human way that I look at it before we start adding metrics into it is making sure someone's time that's spent with you on that platform is spent well. And what that will look like will differ from brand to brand. So for fashion brand, it could be inspiring someone, helping someone understand how a new cut of a item of clothing fits, how a new line differs. ⁓ could be giving them the confidence to try a different style, or, you know, simply making their brand easier to recall in that shopping moment, for example. ⁓ but I agree with you that it can't, attention itself can't be synonymous or exchanged with. such metrics as watch time, engagement, or conversion, because it almost only represents a part of what we're talking about. Watch time will tell you how long someone stayed. Engagement is obviously like visible way you can see that someone's engaging with you. Conversion tells us how they took a particular action, but attention is something that sits with all three of those things and it can't be isolated. And it sort of asks us whether c content actually registers with a person and creates an effect. It's something at Pulse we talk about quite a lot, particularly as we're in a very excitive and innovative time with our proprietary tool, Pi Metrics. And I think where we're heading with this tool is thinking about how you can look beyond a single platform or a single metric to understand effects across different dimensions, of which we have five, but more importantly, thinking about on social how those effects chart both brand influencer and community. ⁓ we think of them as behaviour signals, how deeply someone watched, saved, shared, searched, clicked, reviewed, interacted, sent it in a group chat for lack of a better phrase. ⁓ everything that happens around that piece of content is is that's the attention that it's garnering, the quality of the conversation that comes out of that con content. ⁓ whether the brand reached a new audience, relevant audiences, ⁓ had the association shifted, and ultimately where it contributed to that consideration or to commercial behaviour after that. I think when we talk about attention, it's quite a lofty concept in so many ways. And my initial answer is probably quite romantic, but attention is only valuable when it changes something or someone remembers something about it or it feels different. and I guess we've always just gotta be constantly thinking about those different levels of interaction within that. speaker-0: Fine. So I prefer the lofty answer to ⁓ what you what I would have defined this as, which is some if somebody asked me as a a as a layperson, which is like the clockwork orange style, pry your eyelids open and force you to pay attention to something. ⁓ so it's good to know there's a there's a more noble aim behind it. speaker-1: I would think so. I think it I mean, as I said, everyone will have a slightly different answer, but for me, with the work and what I do with clients and and within these agents in particular, is the meaningfulness of what we're doing and always deriving something from that. So you speaker-0: You also a short interview a couple of years ago that came up in our research where you talked about the traditional sort of content strategy model, where a company would develop what you might call like cornerstone assets for a hero broadcast. And this is this is the world that I I grew up in. So I was in yes, I'm in media now, but ⁓ straight out of university. I worked for a ⁓ a media company, and this was very much the mindset there, which is you you have something big. And that you figure out how to reduce it and use it in other places afterwards. So specifically for the social era, to me, that means you have like a TV campaign or a digital at home campaign. You shoot it, you edit it, you grade it, you get it ready, then you chop it up and you condense it down into clips for social media. You refer to that as being tired, quote unquote. And you suggested as a better a better alternative where ⁓ you build a again, quote unquote, cultural ecosystem where a brand can tell its story through a million moments. Now, from my vantage point as somebody who spends a lot of time writing, speaking, and so on, ⁓ that that seems right. Because it seems like the prevailing consumption behavior today is looking at clips, right? ⁓ it just shouldn't take long for smart companies to recognize that if everybody's consuming short slices of your big content, then maybe the short slices should be the content. And then you mix upwards and combine afterwards. And this seems like the same force behind the vertical video microdramas. Like why why make a traditional film that gets cut up and remixed and aggregated and distributed across TikTok or what have you? If you could skip the middleman and go straight to making that vertical slice content yourself and then put together a supercut afterwards if there is an audience for it. as much as I understand why it's happening, I'm not sure I like it. ⁓ like for me, I'm a I'm a big long-form attention guy. and speaker-1: Someone's gotta be. speaker-0: You would find and I'm glad to be that person. ⁓ but let me tell you why. And the concern I have is that set let's say you have a million moments, you have all of these individual slices. How do you get cohesion across those in the way that you would get like brand cohesion and expression if you if you have everybody working around one big deliverable, one big asset, and then afterwards you figure out how to chop it up? Explain to me how you can get the benefits here of this kind of like upward strategy instead of top down without some of that brand risk. speaker-1: Yeah. No, I think cohesion is a really fair point to to be considered here and something in the fractitious rabbit hole landscape o of social is ⁓ a a massive point. And I guess when I use the phrase a million moments, it doesn't mean being unruly or sprawling or everything everywhere to to everyone, ⁓ but more reflective of all the different ways someone can arrive at your brand armed with social in this day and age. And when I make the comparison between that sort of Hero piece of content, that top down approach. The point is more to challenge how brand story might be delivered. So not necessarily in that fixed audio or beginning with a definitive hero message that's been through every round of approval and and every ⁓ person within an agency or within a brand. ⁓ I think the bigger thing here is how consumer journeys have changed. They're not linear anymore. And and part of me kind of sits in the camp of can they have they ever really been linear? One person might discover a brand through a creator today, another might find it through a product review on Trustpilot, another through a cultural moment, another through search or their friends sharing something in the group chat. All of those encounters build an impression ⁓ and ⁓ should build a coherent impression, but they don't need to look identical. They don't need to be splinters or chopped up from one big thing just to be repetitive or frequent in that sense. It's all about the source of that cohesion and where that purpose of cohesion is coming from. So if we go into sort of the top-down model, we have a message that goes from wide-ranging hero asset into appearing in several other moments almost identically. But in a cultural ecosystem, it all comes from a consistent point of view. And the work there has been done to have a clear broad role for the brand, recognizing sort of the creative codes, building out those shared principles. sort of thinking about how every expression can connect on and spur on from those different moments. Now within that, I'm not saying it's easy. ⁓ if anything, strategy has to work really, really hard to become tight and very directional. But what that way of working offers us is how executions then can then be flexible against it. Brands still have to to this day be very, very clear about what they believe, the world that they want to build, the associations they want to create. It's not about throwing any kind of thinking like that out of the window, but thinking more about with that thinking, how creators, communities, different formats, whether it is the short form, long form of it all, kind of coming back into it, but ways that feel natural to those purposes and specialties that we've identified. Not at all suggesting that brands should abandon hero content, if anything. We all love that content very much still. We've got major films showing us how marketing can be done. We've got runway shows still appearing and and campaigns can still be those very powerful cultural focal points. The shift, I think, from that interview and something I still believe is that it needs to be a moment within a wider system rather than a massive asset that is just left for everything else to be derived from. speaker-0: I think that's a good answer. And I'm a systems guy. So from a pure systems point of view, that to me puts me in mind of like reusable components, all of all of these things that you would set down at the strategic level. ⁓ and you can do you can do it, you can slice that as literal buttons and graphics and things like that. Or you can slice it as principles and beliefs and relationships. ⁓ and provided that framework is there, people and/or agents, which we'll get to. then have the ability to go and execute on that, knowing that they will be doing so within like pre approved governed frameworks. speaker-1: I mean, have you have heard of a creator called ⁓ Kat GBT who's sort of been leading the way with she's invented she's basically brought back lam landline phones, but she talks quite openly about how she still has that creative hero asset, but she does hand it over to Claude to think about how it can get spliced up and have those millions of moments. But it's not necessarily top down, it's how it can appear in those different places and formats. speaker-0: Not and you've just made me feel a million years old because I grew up with landline phones. I grew up with landline phones and I also grew up with like big, big wide jeans and all this other stuff that's now coming back. So I have reached the stage of my life Yes, my childhood is getting remixed in front of me as we as we speak. Now ⁓ I was invited to Can Lions this year to speak on a panel. Couldn't make it in the end for personal reasons, but I have kept up with what came out of the event. speaker-1: Signetal. speaker-0: I've talked some people who were there and it seems like there's couple of watchwords from it that I would like to pick up and talk to you about. AI, we've just hinted at, but I'm gonna come back to it in a minute. And ⁓ creators. So let's pick up the first one of those, because you just mentioned a creator there. I did listen to an interview that Verge did with the CEO of Digitas where she was talking about the increasing crossover between creators and marketers. That was done at Can Lions. ⁓ and I've got a show lined up for later this year with someone who is ⁓ Creator themselves. They're very candid about the fact that being a creator means being a pretty ruthless and fairly traditional media business now, as well as a savvy marketing professional or forecaster. It's not just a matter of making cool videos. Give me the rundown on what you think is going on here. Because fashion seems to have understood the value of influencer relationships for a long time. But I think those relationships were quite narrowly scoped. ⁓ and they were supposed to kind of cover engagements with individual people who sold Reach, Trust, Cultural Cachet, and so on. Right now it seems like creators are building empires and that feels like a different type of transaction for the brand. speaker-1: Yeah, massively. I think this is a really prominent topic in how agencies and brands are s are catching up with creators because being a creator is a serious business. It's it can look really easy on the internet and it can look really comfortable, but built around filming parts of your life, sort of in that traditional, not traditional, but original way of looking at it with exchanging content for exposure, et cetera, et cetera. But Successful creators, as you've sort of said, are are building those empires because they're simultaneously build talking to audience, they're running a content operation, they're managing commercial relationships, they're anticipating what people will care about next and how they can make sure that they're continuing to offer that. There are some creators who handle all of that themselves as as complete entities and they've become solo sort of Swiss Army lies, but other people are now entire businesses with managers, strategists, production teams, editors, production lines, IP, everything under the sun. ⁓ and we can see this emerging in different ways. Lena Dunham herself ⁓ has a strategist which all came out ⁓ with her Substack launch and Dolly Meckler as her strategist, thinking about how she could integrate Substack in the best way possible and the content there. that's one end of this spectrum, but at the other you do also have the UGC creators who don't necessarily have a large audience because that's not their purpose, but they offer brands a highly effective production capability. and I think it's keeping everyone up with the understanding of what a creator is within that spectrum that needs to refresh. ⁓ how it is now enormous between people and businesses and and smaller entities. Well to speaker-0: The point before about landline phones and big jeans and things. Like I've ⁓ as somebody who runs as somebody who runs a media business, ⁓ I've or I've seen the creator economy as something fundamentally different to what we've done. You know, the inside is a fairly, fairly traditional magazine operation in a lot of ways. now it seems less different. Now it seems like the creator economy is coming much closer to the traditional media ecosystem. ⁓ and that's that's fascinating to me. And from that point of view, How should brands approach the way they work with creators in terms of the briefs that they give them? ⁓ so if I'm a fashion brand listening to this and I'm thinking about putting a brief out to a creator, how tightly managed should it be? How on rails? Because I feel like the previous kind of influencer relationship is fairly straightforward. You bought into somebody's audience and their authenticity and you gave them relatively free reign to be themselves, I think. ⁓ they seem that seemed like the thing that worked most successfully. If you're working with someone who seems more like traditional media, I feel like maybe you give a narrower brief that doesn't lean as much on their voice, maybe minimizes some brand risk. and also the closer creators get to traditional media, the more they need to deal in proper disclosures and so on. Like I recorded a podcast yesterday With some the CEO of a company that we use for some generative AI stuff. And I have to disclose that as part of it because it's it's just how you keep things above board. So put it another way, how should you as a brand be trying to balance this idea of either buying an asset replacement or kind of leasing somebody's authenticity? Because everything you've just said about the way creators are changing, the creator economy is changing, also feels like it should change the procurement process here. speaker-1: Yeah. and I think again that's the still bit that we're catching up with. th the creator economy has expanded at a rate in rate in which the advertising world might not have or is only just getting up to speed with. But I it doesn't mean that how we work with these creators needs to be as templated or cookie cutter as it has been previously. And that's not to say that the funnel approach is completely outdated or doesn't work. It definitely has its time and a place. It's an it's an easy system way. We love systems. ⁓ and formulate way of thinking about how you can achieve certain things in certain ways. But the biggest and most important aspect for a brand to be thinking about in this day and age is how open they can be to working with the creator, not just giving them work to do. It is a collaboration at the end of the day, an audience's consent when that collaboration has value exchange on both sides. ⁓ and that by no means is sort of give up the reins completely, don't get involved, although that is a strategy. in its own right, if you fancy it being that out there. ⁓ but it does mean being rigorous, again, going by the million moments thing, with the role that you're trying to play and what you need the creator to play within your brand role. ⁓ as well as once you have that role clearly defined, you are aware then of the freedoms that they've got to play within in a way that their audience will believe. I think sometimes when we dig into brands as agencies and as strategists, what an objective is on a brief will end up being something completely different when you start having a conversation and how the objective audience and product truth fall out of that all need necessary boundaries, but that shouldn't mean that we're dictating every word, every shot, every creative decision, because that removes the value exchange and judgment of why you've chosen to work with that creator in the first place. So I think I've always sort of struggled with leasing or buying authenticity because it almost feels a little bit Oxymoronic, but I definitely think you can step in the light of someone's authenticity when you're given the correct con conditions for a credible partnership. So thinking, stepping out of like it's not just a trending name. Are they the right fit? Do our values align? Is there a genuine experience with the product for the influencer to have enough freedom to do what they want to do with it, for their their point of view to survive the rounds of approvals? Because if you do want that influence or that, authenticity, let's call it, then you've got to leave room for the things that made that as authentic or as influential as it was in the first place. speaker-0: Think that's a good answer. And weirdly, the thing it puts me in mind of is the increasingly high hoops that people on YouTube had to jump through to justify why they were talking about VPNs in all of the ⁓ kind of advertising placements and things that they did there. it's it that's that sounds glib, but it I I found it increasingly funny for a couple of years where ⁓ people across a bunch of different kind of lifestyle segments, technology segments and so on would have to come up with natural segues to why you very much had to have a VPN to protect your personal data and everything else. ⁓ so yeah, I think it's right. Like ⁓ partnership, collaboration, and having identified the right audience to go after in the first place where the placement is sufficiently organic and the partnership is sufficiently organic. How do you think about the relationship between creator content and AI? So I think my position here is not a secret, and it's come up in this episode already. So we do long form expert human-authored content. ⁓ and now that seems more important to me now than ever because we're surrounded by snackable synthetic media. Do you see that same sentiment playing out in social and creator content? Are people now flocking to longer and more detailed videos from ⁓ from creators? And then there's the other side of the AI coin, which is the content that brands collaborate on with creators then becomes training, either training data for future AI runs or it becomes part of inference time search for LLMs. And that then shapes the answers that they give. I had an interview book with somebody in the C-suite at Trustpilot a couple of months ago. They pulled out at the last minute because I was asking too many uncomfortable questions about the weight that LLMs place on reviewers and similar content. Given that content is funded by advertising. This this whole space is very strange because you're competing against AI, but then you're also fueling AI. speaker-1: Yes. ⁓ I guess if we if my remit obviously is social and so when I think about this relationship in particular is how what any audience member wants from social is their personal prerogative. It's my for you would look very different to yours if you were on on TikTok, let's just say. Like some of us love long form video and I don't think long form has ever necessarily disappeared. Some of us love the AI fruit dramas that are dominating some social feeds, which for speaker-0: I have heard about these, yes. I have not experienced them but I've heard about them. speaker-1: ⁓ I mean they take all the cues from the dramas and the Netflix shows that we love, but they put them into these weirdly addictive and sort of uncanny worlds. And people love them. They know that they're AI and they still respond to them. ⁓ but some people are on the other side, and like yourself, maybe in more long form, they're sticking to more traditional memes. That's why Substack's also blowing up, ⁓ and the sort of intimacies of personal diarisation, etc. ⁓ but some people also. It's not that deep. They want a quick laugh with content and and they move on. And and I think the most interesting thing about it is that the whole paragraph I've just said out loud is social is full of contradictions. Humans are full of contradictive behaviors everywhere all at once. And I think while AI is on one side, you've got people arguing something different, you've got you've got people for and against it, but the the biggest thing you can see is how it is giving us new types of content, new types of creators, new types of methods. And it has a time and place for all audience of all types in all ways. To me, the problem isn't the, let's call it, artificiality of AI. It's the ambiguity of where it potentially might be being used or where it might not be declared, right? There's a difference between knowingly choosing to love and interact with a fruit drama, which is very clearly using AI, versus being led to believe a synthetic person's event or endorsement is real. And it was the same thing when influence first came around. That's why we had to have the clarifications. That's why we have the declarations. And and audiences should be able to and have the right to to know what they're giving their attention to, whether that's AI, a real human, or anything in between. speaker-0: And do you in your suite of metrics that you use to measure success on social, is share of kind of LLM search, share of ChatGPT answers, is that becoming a more important metric? Is there a f is there a kind of through line from one to the other there? speaker-1: It's definitely a recurring conversation to understand how you can best optimize your content for appearing in LLM answers depending on what type of brand it is. Not always in an overt way, because we've never been able to control the the reviews in certain environments at any time, but it's a massively ongoing conversation, but it doesn't outweigh the conversation of how you also use AI in your other realms of content, from your organic social to your adverts, to your website, d everything. It it's kind of touching all points. I wouldn't say it's isolated at all. speaker-0: Perfect. Now, for any listeners who might be thinking a lot of this social stuff is kind of a sideshow to traditional advertising, you mentioned this in your ⁓ in your opening answer. I want to point to a story from this May, which is when the parent company of OnlyFans, Phoenix, sold a decent stake to architect capital evaluation of more than $3 billion. One of the purposes of that deal, that's interesting in its own right. Like OnlyFans is an interesting platform, but ⁓ one of the purposes of the deal, weirdly, was to start offering financial services and related. product to creators. So the the value opportunity here is not just a distribution and a share of this growing ⁓ creator economy. It's being able to sell business software and banking to creators, in other words. ⁓ And one of Europe's largest banks, BMP Peribus, also has specialist advisors these days for creators. ⁓ And OnlyFans is famous for a couple of things. One is adult content, obviously, the other is the relatively low cut of fan payments it takes with creators receiving 80%. Long story short, there's it seems like there's a lot of unstructured money sloshing around the creator economy. And when we think about everything that we talked about so far, creators becoming empires, these the the nature of these engagements shifting, that all carries with it the idea that these are people who need capital employees and tools and services and systems and software, which is, as we've said, my world and your world as well. How are you seeing this like formalization? of the creator economy. Is is social content becoming more operationally sophisticated as well as more strategically aware? I'm literally thinking here, like what platforms do creators use when they're working with brands on these engagements? speaker-1: Yeah, I mean, I said it before, but the business of creators is a serious business. there's definitely an emergence of third party platforms and you're even seeing, for example, there's like an influencer who in the UK is representative of best giving HMRC advice to English creators in terms of what they can disclose, ⁓ what actually is tax deductible. If they get given a gift, they actually need to declare that as income, et cetera, for a brand. So there's there's there's layers and and intricacies that on first glance don't look like they would be there. but it kind of goes back to when we all first started emerging with influence. It was a wild west. One influencer could quote a price that'd be very different from another because they they were considering it in different ways. But I think what we're seeing now is the infrastructure starting to reflect the scale of the value that Influence marketing and creators have been building for the past few years. We don't necessarily want to add more infrastructure in, but it does need to be supported it with the codes and systems in the best way possible. Because we don't want to not be able to have that relationship or create more walls or processes to jump through. I think the power of creators has always been the direct personal agileness of them. ⁓ the challenge is how we can. professionalize the business without like professionalizing away the intimacy that made it valuable. And I think that's where the role of agencies becomes ever more important. We we ultimately act as that bridge and we shouldn't be another barrier. We handle the operational complexity, the contracts, the rights, the disclosure, the measurement, long-term thinking. We're the ones that are constantly consulting with either our clients or our influencer partners to make the most fruitful work possible, both from the impact that it has on the audience and the relationship between the brand and the influencers themselves, all whilst creating enough trust and direct dialogue for the brand and creator to build something meaningful together. Where it there's not it's thinking about less about being a middleman and passing to and fro, but thinking how those relationships can be nurtured with infrastructure in the best way possible. So structure without distance, I would say. speaker-0: And do you know off the top of your head what proportion of kind of creators above a certain threshold are represented by agencies? Like what share what share of them go down that route and what share of them do this all themselves? speaker-1: I mean, I wouldn't be able to call that stuff in my head. You have you've seen different platforms emerge where you like ⁓ there are various end to end platforms where you can basically manage your influencer outreach as long as you're as well as your influencer deliverables contracting all within one system. ⁓ some creators like doing that, some creators don't because they have a manager and their manager's the one in the system, not them. So again, it it's not a one size fits all approach. And I don't think I mean I wouldn't know. any numbers attached to that. But it would be a really interesting understanding to see if that's more of a potential for tech to start emerging in that way. There's definitely some incredible tools that I've worked with out there. but sometimes it's proximity and picking up the phone is always easier. speaker-0: No, I mean that happens in fashion across the board and when it comes to designing and making garments as well. There's still ⁓ plenty of occasions where it's a WhatsApp message or it's a phone call that ends up determining something. tied to what you just said, so ⁓ if I think about kind of influencer platforms and things, we we just think we use so we use a short link ⁓ platform which it has a whole kind of creator influencer ⁓ referral system built into it. We don't use that because we're not we're not partners with anybody, but it was interesting to me to see how well-rounded that feature was when I took a look at it, even if it's not something that we would use. And the the thing I took away from it was this idea that influencer and creator revenue or return, however you want to quantify it, should be judged over a longer horizon than people might think. So if you think about some of the partnerships and the collaborations and things that we've talked about here. Yes, I imagine the the short-term logical, kind of instinctive way to measure the value of those is how well they convert and what share of attention as a metric you you mentioned that they capitalize. But I'm also guessing that there's a longer tail to these things as well. So tell me what the balance between those kind of like short horizon metrics and longer horizon metrics are when it comes to judging the return on influencer investment. speaker-1: I mean the IPA kind of backed all of this back up ⁓ with their creator effectiveness study where it said sort of the influences does have that longer tail impact more than you would necessarily ever give it. ⁓ but I don't again, there's not a one-size-fits-all cook-a-cutter approach of like use these metrics in this way, use this metrics in this way. there is a both an art and science to how you you attribute that that revenue. But ROI is one of the biggest. Tailor's all as times questions within influencer marketing. And I think that's because where we've historically measured it is only through like the easiest parts to see. So we have UTM tracking, we have creator codes, there's TikTok shop, but they're all sort of like immediate, gratifying results that tell you, yay, we did it. that's only one part of how people shop. So I could see a creator wearing a pair of shoes four times before I even start Googling the brand name or taking a screenshot and putting it into Google Lens, for example. I could save the post, encounter it again. The creator could then actually end up working with that brand. So my relationship to where they might then attribute my sale is quite is quite a hard thing to determine. But what you have to be doing there is showing up in all of those right ways, going back to those million moments, right? and revenue is only one way and a very important way of measuring ROI. But there's several different avenues. So you can think about has my brand become more visible? amongst the people that I'm trying to have conversations with? ⁓ is there a return in intention? Am I people spending meaningful time with me and rather than it going somewhere else, are they spending more time with me versus their competitors? Is there a return in perception? that one is sort of the associations, how are the c topics and conversations around the brand changing? Participation is obviously another one. Thinking about the behaviors more around that wishlist behavior, particularly within the realm of fashion, sharing, searching, recommendations, what's in my basket. ⁓ all of those effects do contribute to acquisition, sales, and and longer-term customer value, is about building a system that makes sure that you're looking at both the immediate and the long-term effects of it, depending on what your objective is. Sometimes it is just get it out there, get it sold, and you can do that through all the modern means. But I think where social has changed our lives and is much more permeated through everything we do, there's much more attention now being given to the longer term effects and thinking more cleverly about how you can use metrics and attributes metrics there. speaker-0: Good answer. Now, we've talked a bunch about social strategy, social palmists at the creator and the brand level so far, right? I think it's important to acknowledge the biggest force in the room here, which is the platform holders and platform owners. So you you mentioned success on TikTok Shop. Great. So you y as you said, yay, you did it, yay, we did it on TikTok Shop might be determined by good strategy, careful relationship management, good content, and so on. It also happens thanks to the good graces of the parent company of TikTok, which is bite bite dance over here, but some weird US fork of it with Oracle in the US. the same is true for every closed graph social network. I don't want to pick on ⁓ TikTok, especially ⁓ it's everything except Blue Sky in the Fediverse. To some extent, you can't avoid that sort of dependence, right? They th these are the channels where these are the places where people are. But non-owned channels, i.e., things that are not the brand's own email subscriber database and the brand's own direct-to-consumer web shop or what have you. They're definitionally places where the relationship between that brand and the consumer, or the brand and the creator and the consumer, is mediated by an algorithmic force that can change on a whim. ⁓ And given what we're seeing the minute with AI discovery, referrals, transactions and so on becoming a bigger part of the puzzle. This also feels like an opportunity to maybe interrogate the reliance on third-party channels and asking like what which parts of that relationship should the brand or the retailer try and own? now I know you're remit social strategy and social commerce. So what happens when the social channels decide not to play ball? Or if the user base decides to say, I don't like algorithmic social media in general anymore and I want a more controllable version of it? ⁓ I've seen Of Instagram did a post at the end of last year saying that the real action on Instagram happens in direct messages and not on the feed. And that just doesn't sound like advertising to me in a way I understand it. ⁓ and as I said at the top, not being a social media user, I I can see the arguments for not wanting to become dependent on social media in the way that it seems like maybe you need to. speaker-1: Yeah. ⁓ we've been through eras, like I said at the beginning, and I interest I think interest-driven algorithms definitely changed things. And there was a clear landmark in our timeline of social where that development massively changed our relationship with these platforms and how we consume content. But we also now can go into the back end of our algorithm and see how we're being defined and what interests it's serving us and chop and change what we do wanna see and what we don't want to see. ⁓ and I think because we now have that power as users, it again is a signal of how social is just ultimately about how close people want to get to what they're actually interested in. For brands, I think that means that distribution with the algorithm and and winning being trending or hopping on a trend isn't always the the end goal. It should be should be to become something people actively choose to remain close to, return to return back to, spend more time with. And you can kind of see why brand broadcast channels, the effective sort of like in in the in the DMs and not in the feed, are successful. Platforms can provide reach, they can't manufacture interest or build affinity that humans have to have in the first place. ⁓ and that's why social isn't simply advertising and there's been a double down in how you have an organic presence that isn't paid for in certain ways, but is all about being creative and It's your customer service, it's your product discovery, entertainment, recommendation, community, conversation, all the all the jargon in the buzzwords. But advertising has a has a job to put a brand in front of someone. Social, on the other hand, gives that person the ability to either pull the brand closer from their own choice or keep it at a distance or remove it entirely. And I think that is sort of the ecosystem again, a million moments. Where can you show up? Where can you be using it to your advantage? and proving your value to spend time well with who you're trying to reach. speaker-0: That's interesting. And I because I I did read a Substack article relatively recently, I think a couple of weeks ago, ⁓ under the title of like Temperature Zero. And the point of it was we've never had more tools at our disposal to have personalized algorithms. We've never we've never we've never it there's never been more diversity potentially out there. What we end up with in the big feed is a regression to the mean. ⁓ what you end up is i is everything starts to look the same, everything starts to ⁓ Just it it's what what in my kind of high school university years you would have called like a monoculture sort of thing. Yeah. ⁓ and that's that's that as a brand is pr probably not what you wanna hop on. Maybe that's the job of advertising is to be part of the monoculture, but then the job of social is to be part of what happens on the periphery of it. speaker-1: Well it's al it's always it's getting back to like basic brand principles, differentiated or distinct. And because monocultures are one thing, they're they're big mono moments. Like the World Cup is one of them, right? Like we all experience it in some way, but we all then have very different relationships to what that monoculture is and different entry points into it. And I think that's where you can start thinking more elaborately, more cleverly. And being a bit more dynamic with where you're trying to reach people and how you want to treat them and deciding whether or not the double down on monoculture or escaping from it is part of your strategy in the first place. speaker-0: we've just a couple of weeks, like two weeks ago, published our AI report for the year. ⁓ and we did a a survey as part of it. The data from that survey suggests that fashion in general is pretty comfortable using AI in content and marketing. And most of the respondents to the survey expect more consumer-facing creative to be either touched by AI or generated by it over the next couple of years. The platforms themselves are also making it easier, although not necessarily better, to generate personalize and distribute creative at industrial scale through programmatic content creation combined with the established platforms for ad ad bidding and auctioning and and and so on and so forth. We've all seen that go wrong. Everybody's seen the kind of REI bike with two handlebars thing. We we did a little a little piece on it. I can see the positive vision for it though, which is that ⁓ on whether you're in the middle of the monoculture or whether you're purposely against it. The idea, I the ideal version in like the platonic sense, is that everybody gets a localized, personalized and relevant ad at the time of peak intent. ⁓ but I can also see the flip side, which is where ad creative, whether it's looks like UGC or whether it looks like more traditional ads, just becomes so ubiquitous that it basically disappears whether it's personalized or not. What's your take on whether AI is helping or hindering long term in social? speaker-1: Mm, very good question. And I think you're right in terms of you can see the utopia of the personalized recommendations and the sort of feeling seeness that that we're we're all wanting. But at the end of the day, our use of AI in any way, shape, or form is still an endeavor of reaching humans. And I think I'll go back to what I said about that transparency from the get-go, that AI offers us these enormous opportunities of innovation, whether it be, as you said, localization, personalization. Faster experimentation, more accessible productions, but it's gonna be most helpful when it amplifies an already strong idea versus becoming the idea itself or the or compensating for the absence of an idea, right? I think within the world of fashion brands is having that really clear point of view, recognizable creative codes, and then an understanding of why someone should care. AI can then help that travel further. adapt more intelligently to those different formats if that works for their audiences and meet people in those different contexts. it's all about hey I does make marketing more accessible, responsive and relevant to to kind of every touch point, whether that be the marketers trying to reach the people or the audiences in the first place. But the and advantage isn't and shouldn't come from just producing more. It will come from using the technology to make The ideas work harder and smarter, all whilst remembering the person receiving them is still human for now. I mean, we could end up having our little own AI agents that go and do all the hard work for us and then bring it back. But I think it's still remembering this is AI, humans using AI to reach other humans and then thinking about how that is still a powerful concept in of itself. speaker-0: Yeah, I interviewed a creative director from Zolando a few weeks ago and he talked about good. So he so he talked about the setting the overall campaign direction, but then which was in that case was a generative campaign. But besides the fact you the power of AI then is to regionalize it, localize it, contextualize it. ⁓ like if the message still resonates centrally, but you as a consumer, the person being advertised to, you want to see the clothes on somebody who looks like you, you want to see them on a relevant location that you're going to, like that kind of stuff. That seems like fairly low stakes ways to do personalization without compromising on the original intent, if you like. speaker-1: Yeah. 'Cause in that framework you're thinking about what the person receiving your work is gaining. Like I just it's in a person that looks like me, or we hope AI is doing that, or it's in my language, or it's an environment that I expect. And that again, the resonance, the relevance comes through more and you're using it in a in a way that is beneficial to the person you're trying to give it to. speaker-0: One final question for you, which is you work in social. What happens to a generation that never gets on social? So the brands listening to this might not be marketing to under 16s, ⁓ but those people grow up quickly. I've got three kids in that bracket. ⁓ and it feels like they're gonna end up conditioned to value in-person experiences far more than the like parasocial ones in the I know that's used in a pejorative sense, but whatever. I I don't know if the solution is necessarily run more pop-ups and events. Because it seems like maybe those just exist to give people a place to go create content that then gets consumed online. To bring us full circle, if fashion is competing for attention, what does it look like to follow that attention if it goes to places that are nothing like what we think of as social today? So I can predict video games, TV, physical spaces. That seems like a fairly straight shot. If my kids are banned from social media, either because I say so or because ⁓ Andy Burnham says so, they're gonna gravitate towards other channels. But I'm sure there are channels that I can't see. So what's your take on that? And what do you think an agency does in that eventuality? speaker-1: Yeah, really interesting topic and one I spend a lot of time thinking about Gen Alpha and how they're already coming up in briefs and how we're targeting them. and there's lots of news, particularly within this year, about social b social media restrictions, social media bans, the the the platforms being held accountable to the, for lack of a better phrase, addictions they create. ⁓ and whilst the kids, I would hope, aren't being impacted by social just yet. ⁓ and they might not be on there. And there are increasing restrictions, legislation, and we're gonna see clearer limits around when people should have exposure to them. I don't think that means that social or the behaviors that it's created are gonna go away anytime soon. And I think your point of okay, where else are we gonna see it between IRL and URL is is is really important. And I don't think they're necessarily opposing choices, but increasingly a connected journey where you can go from one to the other. And you learn about one in one place, you learn about one in another place, and the connection is there. The opportunities to create experiences people actively value because they provide that access or, as I said, participation, entertainment, a sense of belonging. ⁓ creators within that space are the invitations. They extend or interpret them and and shouldn't be the only reason why events are existing. But I think in terms of where agencies need to go and where my role within agency worlds and and any strategist is sort of the same as what I said us said at the start, effectively. I am here or where I am today because I was was and am still in that world. And an agency's role or strategist role is not to defend the current definition of social media as we have it today or as we know it today, but to stay close to the emerging behaviors that happen, translate it into genuine opportunities, ⁓ ways to connect People with the right expertise behind it, that's gonna evolve because more and more things are gonna happen, more and more platforms are gonna emerge, more and more behaviors are gonna change, technology is gonna have a massive impact on all of that. And it could be a bunch of things that don't even currently touch advertising. But the principle remains the same, is that attention that we do is only attention that we provide is only valuable when the people who spend time with us and with the work that we do is worthwhile. So wherever that attention moves, whether it be in real life spaces, online spaces, into, I don't know, spaces we don't even have the definition of yet, it's not about placing brands in front of them, but helping them earn a meaningful ro meaningful role within all of that. speaker-0: Perfect. And one final question that is not on my script, but I'm gonna ask it anyway, is for a brand listening to this, what's something that you would encourage them to take away and think about their social strategy right now that's maybe not top of mind but should be? speaker-1: I think there's a bit of everything's risk averse, right? You're investing money, you want to see a return, you've got to prove why it works to your higher ups, you're you're we're all between rocks and hard places. But I think it's the brands that are willing to strong opinions Lucy held, have an exploration, ha do your due diligence, but be open to taking the risks that could then lead to bounties beyond what you ever could have thought. And I think because the platforms do change and the rules are changing and they're following audience behaviour, everything is an estimated guess. But as long as you are have done the due diligence to understand that, take a risk. Not risk for risk's sake, but take as take as good of a risk as you can take whilst being comfortable. speaker-0: All right, perfect. Good answer. ⁓ Briani, thanks so much for your time. I really enjoyed this one. I think ⁓ it gave me a bunch of personal and professional insight. And let's let's do this again at some point in the next year or two and see how things have changed. Absolutely. speaker-1: Okay. Been really fun from my side as well. Lots of food for thought. speaker-0: And that's the end of my chat with Briony. Now I'll keep this ending brief because we've gone over time with this one as I am wont to do. Hopefully I didn't come across too clueless today. I feel like I did an okay job. There's definitely a lot more about the creator economy that I need to go out and research, but I think Briony did a pretty decent job there of bringing me and potentially some of you up to speed. To be clear. I'm not about to go sign up for TikTok, but I am signing up for spending some more time understanding how that platform and others fit into media portfolios that are way more heavily operationalized, structured, and industrialized than I lazily let myself believe. Basically, there's a big fashion technology story here that I haven't had my eye on. We're going to be shifting gears next week to something pretty different, although I do have an actual creator in this space, but it's a guest for later in the year, so we'll be coming back around to this topic in a of months time. Which is also your window into what it takes to organize a weekly interview show. I hope what we put out sounds spontaneous and timely and interesting every time, but you really do have to book people a long way out if you're going to put out 52 episodes of an interview a year. Not to mention 52 episodes of another show as well. For now though, thanks for listening. Check out the edit on Tuesdays from me and Grace Robinson, our social editor, and I'll speak to you again really soon.