HubSpot’s VP of Media Jonathan Hunt is urging brands to stop scripting creators and instead give them the freedom to make content in the voice that made them valuable in the first place.
Speaking to B&T in Boston during HubSpot UNBOUND, the New York-based leader said marketers should be choosing creators because of their relationship with an audience, their distinctive voice and their genuine connection to a product — then resisting the urge to micromanage what comes next.
“They really need to get out of the way. We never tell our creators what to say,” Hunt said. “We just give them an outline of things that are important to us and we say go wild.”
Hunt said HubSpot uses whether someone actually uses its product as one of the filters when selecting creators, alongside whether they genuinely resonate with the audience it is trying to reach.
“It’s always quality over quantity,” he said.
That means a creator with a huge following is not necessarily the right fit if their audience has little connection to the product or brand. And once the right person has been found, Hunt said brands should resist the instinct to turn them into an extension of the marketing team.
“Don’t try to do the thing that’s instinctive, which is just like micromanage the creator,” he said. “Why are you working with them in the first place if you just want them to be like the mouthpiece for your script?”
Hunt compared it to the difference between a genuinely good podcast host-read and an obvious advertisement.
The most effective reads, he said, are often where a host tells a personal story or anecdote and naturally weaves the brand into it — rather than simply delivering a pre-written line such as “this episode is presented by…”
“As a listener, you just skip through it,” Hunt said.
For marketers, the lesson is not simply to put more money into creators, but to reconsider what they are asking those creators to do once they have signed the deal.
Hunt said creator partnerships can sometimes convert “40 to 50 per cent better” than direct-response advertising, adding that creators should not simply be parked into an “awareness” line of the marketing plan.
“It’s much bigger than that,” he said.
He also highlighted the growing role creator content can play in discovery, saying it is increasingly being surfaced and cited by AI platforms including Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity.
The commercial value of giving creators room to develop their own voice was also illustrated in a conversation during the interview around Eugene Healy, a former micro-creator for Australian brand-tracking platform Tracksuit.
Healy was discussed as an example of a creator relationship evolving well beyond a traditional paid partnership, with his content developing a highly engaged audience among brand strategists and marketers and eventually leading to him taking a stake in the business.
For Hunt, that kind of creator relationship reflects the broader opportunity for brands: creators do not necessarily need to sit neatly inside a single campaign or awareness bucket.
They can become a much more integrated part of how a brand communicates with its market — provided brands are willing to let them remain creators.
‘The Best Marketing Is Getting Weirder’
That philosophy of giving people room to create also feeds into Hunt’s broader view of where marketing needs to go next.
Quite simply, he thinks it needs to get weirder.
“I think the best marketing is getting weirder,” Hunt said. “I think it needs to.”
But weird, in Hunt’s view, does not mean marketers should throw strategy out the window.
When asked how marketing teams could convince CMOs to let them pursue more unconventional ideas, Hunt was clear that “going weird” does not mean “going rogue”.
“I don’t think going weird means going rogue or not doing the things that are the foundational aspects of marketing that allow you to actually convert people into customers,” he said.
Instead, it is about creating enough room around those fundamentals to experiment — and accepting that not every idea is going to work.
“Today, especially when everyone has access to the same LLMs, playing it safe means that oftentimes you’re not playing at all,” Hunt said.
The message follows one heard at Cairns Crocodiles earlier this year, where Amy Kean – creative sociologist, bestselling author and CEO and creative director of Good Shout – urged marketers to embrace “weirdness”, arguing that originality lives on the other side of “normal”.
Speaking with B&T, Hunt pointed to Liquid Death as one brand that has repeatedly embraced “unconventional creative”.
Just last month, Liquid Death and Garage Beer teamed up with former NFL player Jason Kelce for a satirical ad campaign urging people to collect their urine and send it to AI data centers to protest their massive water usage.
To take things to the next level, the brands even sold a limited-edition ‘Data Center Coolant Collector’ mason jar on their website for $18.
Another example Hunt pointed to was fintech platform Ramp, which is taking the concept of “bill pay” all the way to Broadway.
The company is staging Bill Pay The Musical for one night at New York’s Broadhurst Theatre on September 25, with Tony Award winner Billy Porter, Titanic actor Billy Zane and Jessica Vosk among the cast.
It’s a musical about bills, starring actors named Bill-y.
The production features original music, choreography and jokes around Ramp’s AI-powered bill-pay product, deliberately styled after the industrial musicals that major American companies staged in the 1950s and ’60s to promote everything from cars to appliances and soft drinks.
It is an objectively bizarre thing for a fintech company to do — which is precisely why Hunt thinks it works.
“Ramp is competing against established financial brands, but has been willing to create ideas that are provocative, headline-generating and — importantly — fun,” he told B&T. “Marketing doesn’t have to be over-calculated and boring.”
That does not mean every Australian brand needs to start producing Broadway shows or deliberately trying to shock its audience. But it does mean marketers should be asking whether their work is distinctive enough to earn attention in the first place.
And, when they find an idea that is a little strange, Hunt’s advice is not to immediately sand off the edges – and instead “give it a few swings” to see if it works.
B&T travelled to Boston as a guest of HubSpot.
