Brands are being urged to rethink creator strategies, with senior marketers warning that relying too heavily on a single influencer or creator risks alienating audiences and limiting long-term growth.
Speaking at a TikTok x Influential event in Sydney, marketing leaders from Mars Petcare, Contiki and Omoda Jaecoo Australia agreed that brands must engage with “a diverse mix of creators” across audience sizes, interests and demographics, instead of putting all their eggs in one basket.
The warning came from Jay Kesry, global strategic creative lead and head of marketing at Contiki, who said brands needed “a range of voices that reflected the communities they were trying to reach” over just one.
“You don’t want to just alienate yourself to one voice and one ideal,” Kesry said. “It’s about finding people that you can work with that represent your brand. Some creators are a moment that may be about awareness, and some we’ll build relationships with over time that help us tell a longer story.”
Jules Lau, ANZ content and experience lead at Mars Petcare, said brands should also avoid narrowing their creator strategy to one niche.
“The first rule is a mix of macro, mid and micro creators because that’s the best way to drive engagement with scale,” Lau said. “It’s also a variety of verticals. We don’t just want pet influencers… we’ve started branching into gaming, lifestyle and mummy influencers as well.
“It’s also just testing and learning, figuring out what are the levers that can get you the most value.”
Lau said the creator economy had “evolved significantly” over the past few years, with marketers moving beyond vanity metrics such as follower counts.
“”It’s no longer just about follower count,” she said. “You need a good mix of macro, micro and mid creators, but it’s also about how well they know their audience.”
Is the follower count dead?
Kesry added that marketers should be pushing back against executives who are still fixated on follower numbers.
“I think we still live in a world where our CEOs and marketing directors still look at those follower numbers,” he said. “It’s really up to us to challenge that notion and start looking at engagement and the other levers creators deliver.
“Not every creator is going to do the same job for your brand, and that’s okay.”
That delivery from creators goes both ways.
Nariné Salmasi, general manager of marketing ANZ at Omoda Jaecoo Australia, said authenticity and long-term partnerships were increasingly outweighing reach.
“The worst thing for us is to work with creators who work with 100 brands,” she said.
“We also want longevity of relationship with them… a lot of our creators have actually bought cars and become opinion customers for us.”
The panel also stressed that brands should trust creators to tell stories in their own way rather than over-controlling content.
For Mars Petcare, that approach even led to one of its most successful creator campaigns after an unexpected moment involving a sleeping dog in the background of a creators video sparked conversation online.
“You can’t plan for that kind virality,” Lau said. “It’s just trusting the creators and making sure you have the right levers in your business to really let that happen.”
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Hearing it from the creators themselves
The message from marketers was then responded to by the creators themselves, who argued that brands are still too quick to view creators as media channels rather than long-term creative partners.
Speaking after the panel, creators Bailey McWhinnie and Aicha Robertson highlighted that the most successful partnerships happen when brands invest in a mix of creators and trust them to speak to their audiences authentically, rather than relying on a single face or prescribing every detail of a campaign.
Robertson highlighted creators properly understand of online culture and rapidly shifting trends – due to spending all their time on social media.
“Brands bring amazing research and data to the table, but creators have real-time access to audiences,” she said. “We’re constantly online. We know what’s landing, what’s resonating and we can feel those subtle cultural shifts because we’re seeing them happen every day.”
But perhaps the biggest opportunity for brands, according to the creators, lies in moving beyond transactional campaigns altogether.
McWhinnie pointed to her four-year partnership with Samsung as proof that long-term relationships create stronger brand affinity than one-off paid posts.
“I’ve been with Samsung for four years now. I haven’t used a competitor product in that time, and people associate me with the brand because we’ve grown together,” she said.
“Sometimes it doesn’t even feel like an ad because it’s so genuine.”
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Meanwhile, Robertson said film studios will often send her props with “no expectation of sponsored content”, simply because they know she’s genuinely passionate about movies.
“I end up posting about them anyway because I’m actually excited to receive them,” she told the audience.
Rather than putting all eggs in one basket, the panel highlighted brands are far more likely to see long-term success when they start investing in diverse voices and relationships that grow alongside their audiences.
