It’s the buzzword combo every CMO wants to crack, but few actually have.

Recorded live at the Brand Advocacy Summit: New York, this chat dives deep into what it really means to blend culture & performance – with two of the sharpest minds in brand today.

Ana Andjelic (Global Chief Brand Officer @ Esprit) and Nathan Jun Poekert (Brand Strategist & CMO Advisor) bring radically different lenses to one big challenge: how do you grow a brand that actually means something and performs?

This is a no-fluff, all-strategy conversation.

Covering:

🧠 Why most marketing is stuck in reactive chaos

⭐️ What the best brands are doing differently
📊 The missing metric: cultural impact as a KPI (& how to track it across teams)
📉 Why influencer marketing fails when measured like performance media
🎯 The rise of the "social franchise”
🧩 How to structure teams that don’t kill creativity or speed in the name of metrics

If you're a brand, a marketer, or a leader trying to build for the next decade – not just the next quarter – then tune in.

 

Chapters

00:00 – Welcome to Culture x Performance (Live from NYC)
01:30 – Marketing in Chaos: What’s Really Going On
04:10 – The Story vs. The Dashboard
06:25 – Why Brand & Performance Still Don’t Work Together
08:00 – Measuring Cultural Impact: A New Index
10:15 – The Age Problem in Media Optimisation
14:30 – Forget Engagement Rates. Track This Instead.
20:40 – Virality, Creators & Brand Control
22:10 – The Social Franchise Model Explained
26:20 – Brand Safety vs. Subculture: The Trade-Off
31:45 – Why Paid & Organic Must Sit Together
36:35 – From Close Friends to Culture Clubs
39:15 – How Stanley Won Facebook Moms

 

Rate & review Building Brand Advocacy:

Apple Podcasts

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Connect with Ana & Nathan:

On Ana’s LinkedIn

On Nathan’s LinkedIn

 

Paul (00:00.556)

We will have Anna Andjelic, who's the global chief brand officer and named one of Forbes most entrepreneurial CMOs and now shaping the brand Transformation S at Esprit. And Nathan Jun Poekert, who's strategist and advisor to leading D2C brands known for his sharp takes on fixing the upper funnel and uniting organic paid and influencer. Sorry, my reading isn't so good after that. So please guys, come on stage, welcome.

 

See you.

 

Let's see ya.

 

Wow. we made it. Great. Well, thank you very much. So, this is going to be quite a fun one because we have kind of two people like Anna, you're coming in this from really all about culture and then Nathan, you're very tactical, like, and just cutting through with some of your LinkedIn posts that I'm loving to see how this is to, is going to interchange there. can I sort of start off with you, Nathan, actually, first of all, like if you had to sum up the state of marketing right now in one sentence, what would you say?

 

I don't know if it's one sentence. state of marketing is chaotic scrambling. That's the reality of it.

 

Paul (01:04.908)

You can have two.

 

Paul (01:18.242)

Why is that? can't- can- one sentence- that's a terrible question, isn't it? Now think about it- Setting you up for failure.

 

Really bet, I mean...

 

The current state of marketing is basically almost a hundred percent responsive at this point. We are as I'm sure most people in this room are social focus marketers or in that realm or you oversee social marketers. Not only are algorithms changing every three months, the prioritization whenever Adam Osiris head pops up, everybody just like gasps and like, what's about to happen. But then we're also just

 

in this really, really polarized aspect in the U S right now, where everything is politicized, brands are completely vulnerable to being canceled. And you basically have to approach every single decision that's being made from the marketing end on, we defended from something combined with, this hit performance metrics combined with, this optimized for the algorithm combined with, is this cost efficient combined with.

 

everything. So what we are being forced to do is we no longer almost have the ability to plan more than three months in advance, which is very, very different. And it's a fast shift and change just in the past, six years, like six years ago, you could sit in a planning meeting for the year and you would plan out your campaigns. Like it just sensically

 

Nathan (02:52.94)

You can't even partner with a celebrity more than two or three months in advance because they could get canceled in the next like six months. And then you have this campaign that was shot five months ago and you're sitting there and you're like, well, what do we do? Because we spent $5 million on this. Do we just completely pull it and it's a bottom dollar operating loss or do we actually run with it and scramble to find a new campaign? So long answer, chaotic.

 

He needs a podcast of his own.

 

This is not one sentence, that's for sure. We'll have to get that one for sure. So what's the of the clearest sign you're seeing there that they're losing the balance as well? because they're not able to plan ahead, like how are they measuring it? What is the solution to that? Because that's mayhem, right? yes, for you. Yeah, we'll continue on there.

 

I was not going to tell you this.

 

Yeah, we'll see on Friday.

 

Nathan (03:47.758)

There's several solutions that exist. One, and Anna can talk about this probably better than anybody that I've ever had, you know, the pleasure of just viewing. I would say she posts on LinkedIn like every three months, but every time it's just incredibly insightful.

 

Nathan (04:09.792)

Anna's fallen out of my algorithm. It's like, but, you know, I say this as kind of the summation of what's happening in marketing is that we've lost the story and the story has become secondary to the dashboard. starting with point A, which Anna can speak to, like we need to remind ourselves that

 

every marketing channel can fall under brand at some point. It's just everybody is currently operating in individual silos across the department, not just in your up. If you're focused on upper funnel, like you're already siloed at most social influencer, paid media, paid social teams are completely separate. We're in situations now where like affiliate is falling under performance. But it's like, so

 

when you have that happen, like, it's almost impossible for everybody to fall under the same story. So I would say the primary fix is, I'm not a fan of brand platforms just because you sometimes have to throw them out after three months. But in the very least, everybody has to be reminded constantly what the mission of our brand is and what our purpose is.

 

I mean, yeah, to unite people around that. think about it. If you're just trying to, if you're trying to get someone to advocate for you or just to follow you or to share, as we were saying there, it's like, first of all, what is the purpose? Is this something that I align with? Because when you share something with someone, like you're putting your personal stamp on it, you're making their story your story. And if you're just obsessed on those kind of micro level, those metrics, it's just about, here's the product and it's conversion. Then you miss that narrative.

 

And I love what you're saying there about the kind of like the crossover and actually Anna is one of the best at talking about this because you came on the podcast a couple of years, two, three years, 2023 I think. Yeah, it was that long ago. I quote, problem is that they're talking about brand and performance. The problem is that they don't work together. Still to this day that they usually sit under different departments. One sits under marketing, the other sits under e-commerce or whatnot, and they compete for a budget and they compete with each other and they don't amplify each other.

 

Paul (06:25.422)

And they have different time horizons, different goals and different, different KPIs. that is a mistake, which is pretty prophetic. like, well done for that. mean, cause that's now something which we're like, oh yeah, this is so real. But in 2023, that wasn't necessarily quite as aware as we kind of gained from that. Like how, how, like, how has, have you seen that evolve since then? Like, do you, are you seeing it differently? You just like doubling down on that. I'd love to get your perspective.

 

I don't think it's changed that much. And as Nathan was saying, it's kind of like, why is affiliate under performance marketing? Because they just can't figure out where it sits. And it's kind of like, but that's under P &L and whatever is under P &L, that must be under performance marketing, under e-commerce, everything that contributes to revenue goes under whatever is...

 

can be measurable and everything does not is under brand, which is obviously a giant mistake. It's just because you can't measure it doesn't mean it's not measurable. Or just because you did not put specific APIs in place. So when you tell your CFO, if you work as a chief brand officer, chief marketing officer, you say, hey, you're not going to see any sales in three months, in six months, even in nine months, just because the

 

Culture doesn't work that way. It's just going to take a minute for people to get the hang that you're doing something differently here. But that is because the brand, the business and the product have to work together. Just putting a marketing campaign out there is not enough. And when you see, for example, Victoria's Secret had a show last week and they're like, my God, this was such a success. It was a giant PR push. Absolutely was a success in terms of PR. But what now?

 

They need to do every day, every week, they need to like change their website, they need to change the retail stores, they need to change their merchandising strategy, they need to change their product pyramid. And that is the content that is happening, the social that is happening every single minute. And even then it's not going to be by the end of this year, by the end of the next year. So we are talking completely new KPIs that have to happen.

 

Paul (08:38.709)

What are those KPI?

 

Those KPIs not necessarily have to be sales. You're going to say at the end of year one, year two, year three, you're going to expect to see sales X times, but in between, we are going to see engagement. We are going to see traffic lift. We are going to see, you're not going to put your product on sales three months later. You're going to put them six months later.

 

You're going to have like bigger traffic in your stores. This is when you look at the metrics, usually you look search separate from social metrics, separate from commercial metrics. You need to put all those metrics together and that's your cultural influence index. And no one on the dashboards have that cultural influence index together. You have sales and then you have social and then you have brand metrics.

 

So as I referred to earlier, mentioned, this kind of gross advocacy metric and kind of combining all the advocate metrics of EMV, plus you've got your revenue, plus you've got your content. If anything, it's just a way that you can measure the costs of what's going on and have a unified language so that the teams can speak together. And actually you are able to create a campaign that works or in fact a strategy that works throughout that entire journey. Cause I think kind of campaigns is another area.

 

The problem is the departments have different metrics. When you go to the CFO, you don't say, you don't expect, we have certain commercial metrics, which is we don't need to put those items on sale the same way we had to put them last year on sale. But it's just not how things were done. And that is the biggest challenge.

 

Nathan (10:17.144)

So all Anna had said earlier, because I work as a consultant on an individual basis. So I'll disperse one aspect, which is the thing that I communicate to every single one of my clients, every CMO that I work with right now. The one measurable data point that I think can go across every marketing department is the average age or the median age of your consumer. Right now.

 

far too much waste, specifically in paid and performance media, is given to optimizations. What happens if you're familiar with paid and performance media, this is what happens when paid and performance media run optimizations based off of age groups. They turn off for the younger age group because they are not interacting with the ads and they are not leading to conversions. And they give prioritization to the older audiences.

 

This is an automatic thing that media agencies do just to be able to protect their efficacy. So I always tell every client, you have to dedicate a certain amount of budget that is not going to immediately result in ROAS for targeting younger audiences, because almost every legacy brand that exists in this country right now is in a crisis because the average age of their consumer is pushing late thirties.

 

And they know that in order for them to be effective, they have to start targeting 24 to 35, but they're turning off those ads, and they're not allowing any of the people that are entering into their funnel actually be hit with high frequencies in order to be able to hit them. I could go into a long rage bait about, like, that they need to update their content as well when they're using this targeting and they can't use high fidelity ads anymore, but I'm gonna digress.

 

love that and I wish you can talk more about it, but you know what I think the solution is not one, a solution is, too often there are no personas and they look down on personas because agencies perceive specifically because they do want to have return on advertising spend that is optimized. But if they actually did optimize per age group, it will be more work for them, but it will be better for the...

 

Ana (12:29.944)

client, if you kind of fragmented the entire audience and you would see who are my most valuable customers in terms of cultural influence, in terms of product sales, in terms of propagation of the message. So you would kind of like assign value to different audiences based on different brand and business goals. But that's not how...

 

Yeah, if it is. Everything is just the bottom dollar at the bottom of the spreadsheet. That's the only line that when you do quarterly reports, that's the line they care about is what's at the bottom. we all have created massive decks that we all know C-levels and board members don't look at. Okay? It's like, and all they care about is were we efficient and did we grow? And we usually scrambled to show that we growed. And then we...

 

typically do a good job saying we were efficient.

 

Right, but efficiencies, yeah. It's not the measure of success. It's not the measure of success. Yes.

 

Why do you think this is the case? a lot of marketers, a lot people probably here sort of came up as, know, DDC first brands came out when suddenly you could measure things if you're kind of a millennial, later millennial, like myself, like you were like, shit, I can measure things. This is such a big thing. And then suddenly it almost seems that there's an entire generation of marketers who forgot that things exist that you can't measure. like, what, that was, I mean, that was,

 

Paul (13:58.286)

five years ago that that was the case. What's happened in the past five years that's kind of led us to get to this point here.

 

What do you mean?

 

This was nice as a response to that was

 

I think what he's asking is like, we have so much measurability now, even in things that used to be not measurable. And so what has changed? Is that the question?

 

Yeah, exactly. And also, what has led us to this state of affairs in 2025 turning into 2026?

 

Ana (14:28.91)

What's measurable is not necessarily what matters in business. Sometimes you're just measuring things in order to prove that you need to be kept as agency of record or just an agency. If the dashboard looks busy, that means you're valuable. Or you're like, look, but that doesn't ladder up to the business and brand goals. That's exactly the problem because what we were just talking about those personas, then you have a marketing mix that is different for different...

 

personas and not single agency can provide the entire marketing mix for all. And that's why they're like, everyone panics when the algorithm changes because everyone is using the same media mix and they're all competing with each other. That's why algorithm is changing and you know, house always wins. That's why Meta is a trillion dollars brand and you're sitting here.

 

I'll like simplify it a lot easier, okay? If you work in social media marketing, whether it's influencer, like organic or paid right now, are mainly organic and an influencer. If you're still measuring engagement rates, I don't know why. Okay, and that's because three months ago they said that the prioritization for algorithms are views past three seconds.

 

So if you work in social media, chances are that you're looking at your dashboards and you're bewildered because you see some posts that are getting significantly higher views, but they have engagement rates that are like 0.95%. And you're like, well, this, is this? And circling back to your question, it's because we're not evolving our measurement as quickly as the industry is evolving their prioritizations. so, and circles back to what I said at the beginning, which is it's just chaos.

 

Okay. Well, I've got to shift gears a little bit. Nathan, you're famous for your LinkedIn posts that have become a bit of a therapy session for many marketers, I think here in the room. So you list brutal truths that everyone reads and quietly nods along to. Can we do it live? What are your top three truths?

 

Nathan (16:39.694)

I mean, I just gave one, which is like, if you're measuring engagement rates still, I don't know why. We've talked a little bit about the siloed marketing departments. Raise your hand if you work in social marketing in some capacity.

 

So now he's going to raise it all. Why you guys fall for that?

 

How many of you have a very close personal, not personal, a very close positive frequent working relationship with the person who manages your backend digital analytics of customer conversions and their profiles? Okay, so it's, you are the necessary geeks because, no, it absolutely is necessary. Because for social to grow,

 

because again, we know that social media is now globally the number one ad spend platform by channel. It just overtook search last year. We know that influencer marketing is the fastest growing channel in the globe right now. It's growing at a rate of like 26 % by budget per year. so the people who are close with their digital teams are knowing we need to show efficacy. It's like, and we need to be able to show that this is actually effective cost spend.

 

The unfortunate part is that we are losing our soul in that process and you are losing the ability to implement brand in that conversation. Is that you're just prioritizing clicks and you're not really prioritizing like, what are we building here? I think those are good.

 

Paul (18:16.199)

I'm going to change gears. Do you want to add anyone to those?

 

I wanted to say if they're not measuring engagement, what would you recommend them to measure since it's changing so much?

 

Views past three seconds and total number of not followers views. Total not non follower views. So this is something, man, I feel so bad for everybody in this room. You have to measure this in the app. The dashboards don't give you this information. So right now, Instagram and TikTok are basically prioritizing how many views you get.

 

Was that last one total?

 

Nathan (18:54.798)

that are not following you. They will feed a certain amount of content to people who do not follow you based off of contextual targeting. The videos that go viral, it's funny, because Lindsay had a stat up there that said like one in five consumers get their news from influencers. I'm a political influencer as well. So 600,000 followers across TikTok and Instagram. My videos that get over a million views are almost 99.7 % non-followers.

 

When a video goes viral, if you look in your Instagram or TikTok dashboard, like you'll see non-followers because Instagram wants to become TikTok. They're slowly turning it into the for you page. That's why you have a Reels tab at the bottom. It drives me crazy because I don't know where my notifications are and I keep hitting the stupid like button at the top right still, I'll evolve, but that's how-

 

What? Is it your age?

 

I know I'm 42 years old you guys. It's like, it's getting tough to be in this industry, but like, but yeah, so like those are the two metrics. Like if you're working in organic or even an influencer, like I would ask an influencer that you're working with, how much are you penetrating non-followers right now? Because specifically an influencer, like comments, most of them are your friends because you all are in a pod together trying to boost each other. It's like, it's true.

 

It's like, you know, likes, whatever. But like, likes and comments are not actually eliciting the number of reach. The whole purpose of organic is penetrating with a new audience or actually getting your content in front of people. It's the tree falling in the forest paradigm. If the tree falls in the forest and nobody sees it, what was the point of making the post? It's like, so getting it into non follower views will automatically boost it into your actual followers.

 

Paul (20:40.206)

I would actually see that a as we were having a conversation last night at dinner and the advocates or the creators that a brand typically doesn't want to work with, at university across all the programs that I've worked on are always the ones that go viral. Like it seems to be that this kind of curation process from a brand side was, yes, obviously those are people you want to build the culture of the brand, which we'll talk about in a second.

 

actually from a commercial perspective, what is going to go viral? What's going to get the algorithm going? It's like almost, in fact, it is never the one that you choose. And therefore it becomes a little bit of a game of actually how many shots at goal can you have to actually find the one that's going to be successful yet actually doing that in a way that you can manage your brand's safety at the same time then becomes a complete nightmare. Cause if you've got a thousand or 10,000 people doing things like how on earth, how in fact, actually how would you manage brand safety in that? don't know if you've got any thoughts.

 

That's a 30 minute conversation. Talk about brand safety.

 

It's a valid question, but it's a kind of different panel, don't you

 

I think it's that it waves in that side of it because I think that what's quite interesting because you were talking about it, your newsletter, massive fan of it, you did a post yesterday, I think it was, around this concept of the social franchise, which is very similar to this. know, how are you working with creators and there are arms lengths, but they are associated with the brand. First of all, can you tell us, just tell us a little bit about actually how you see that working and evolving? Because I think it's a fascinating concept.

 

Ana (22:10.636)

Yeah, like affiliate programs, like when you actually pay people and they go, actually, I don't remember what I meant by that because I wrote like a while ago, but you know how franchise go, you partner with someone and you can either help them completely like McDonald's, like you open completely and they provide the back-end support. So you kind of open risk-free business. That's what sort of what my Sephora storefront has done is like you have creators and you open on.

 

Sephora site, you have a complete vertical integration, you promote Sephora products as if you open your own sort of brand, like open brand within Sephora brand. So you sell Sephora products, but you style them the way you want to sell them, the way you want the messaging is yours, the look is yours, your personality goes through. So that's not affiliate link, affiliate link is just linking that goes to third party.

 

You just get the percentage of that cut. Here you're part of the business really. So you have the entire earnings for whatever you are. It's just that you don't pay for costs of their housing and any of that. So it's really risk-free. And I think that's kind of amazing model because in all culture industries, all taste industries, food, fashion.

 

people buy from people. And I think that is kind of the next level, not just in beauty. Beauty is a very good example because everyone needs recommendation from each other when it comes to beauty and everyone has their own personal looks that people identify with. want to look like, look highly Bieber built her entire value, one billion valuation, $212 million.

 

in sales empire based on women wanting to look like her, having her skin. So in fashion, that can be the same thing, like style like myself, and you sell those products without actually having to buy that inventory. You just have a back end and you pull from that and sell. So I think that sort of decentralized models is actually genius because you spread across without having...

 

Ana (24:27.96)

to go into that vertical integration with ever better targeting, where you use performance media, ever better, specific, specific, specific, algorithms are pushing you around and making you change every time. Like this, you really diversify and you see, this person is really selling well. Let's double and triple down. Let's give her more stuff. This is not, let's kind of like eliminate them.

 

from the portfolio, but that portfolio approach is where the brands are going in their model, like brand endorsement model, rather than that vertical integration that we've seen before. And then I would say about brand safety just really quickly, it is a problem because of the algorithm, because of the keyword search. You know how Will Farrell recently had that six-year-old, nine-year-old landlord, 12-year-old landlord, next thing he knew there was like a children...

 

or an advertising there because of the keyword search, because the internet is what ruined everything basically. always comment on the nominating. Like the T-shirt. Yes. So it's the lowest common denominator. Like look it up. It's like it's a sketch comedy. So on YouTube, it's like 12 year old landlord because it's a 12 year old, all of a sudden the internet, God bless, starts serving you lowest common denominator.

 

it.

 

And so how does that surprise with kind of like just the internet just being a bad place with keywords, but like if you've got these sort of franchises and this portfolio approach with a lot of people, like how much do you think brands should be getting involved in the narrative of what those people say? we, any of us can sign up to a Sephora storefront. We don't, we are actually not endorsed by the brand in that sense there. Like where does, where does the line step with the brands being like, well, okay, this doesn't represent us. This does represent us. And, and how do you kind of.

 

Ana (26:22.922)

that you need to meet certain criteria. It's not about like there needs to be alignment, it's values, it's aesthetic. Obviously you're not going to, but that's the same thing as with franchises clearly, you're not going to display like some paraphernalia from Second World War or whatnot, you know? But you know, they're like, you need to kind of like meet specific aesthetics. Yes, I didn't say it on purpose.

 

Hahaha!

 

Brand safety. So there obviously there are, but again, there needs to be some, some sort of trade-off in a sense. you have, if you're going to have a portfolio and if you want in this really fragmented culture, which TikTok is really showing us how it works. If you want to meet those states, communities and niches and subcultures, you really do need to allow that that brand aesthetic is.

 

sort of very interactive, very dialogue and really gets filtered through subcultures. So you treat subculture as a creative partner, not as a target, which brands now do.

 

Fascinating. So I think, like, and Nathan, by the way, if you have any other questions, if you have any questions for them, we'll be using Slido. So you can just scan that and pop them in and ask a couple of questions in a second. So Nathan, you said that organic palein influence needs to be on the same page.

 

Paul (27:48.462)

When we're talking about something like here with social franchise and we've got culture, those who are trying to build culture, we've got those that are driving more of those performance revenues and actually, how do you actually recommend that brands unite that across like actually building out a strategy? Is this something that starts at CMO level, say this is what we want to do? Or actually, is this something you can actually have the different teams segmented and working towards it?

 

Nathan (28:16.984)

So CMOs today, they have to have social media literacy at least at an associate manager level. It's like, otherwise it's just going to be lost. You're going to spend more of your time trying to explain what you're doing than you are actually able to do things. So like it can be a chief brand officer. It could be a chief communication officer. can be a chief. It's usually a chief marketing officer.

 

they have to have basic understanding of social literacy. In terms of cultural impact, a lot of marketers can handle the performance and can handle the numbers. They can handle the aspects of like, how do we show efficacy? I can build models in Excel. I can work with our digital team and we can show how like this is effective and we're growing in certain age demographics and we're growing in reach and blah, blah.

 

The second challenge is in terms of uniting is

 

You have to be culturally relevant because otherwise you're pouring money into things that are not like actually going to do anything. Okay. Somebody in the room and it's usually the VP of whatever team needs to be able to say, Hey guys, you know what? I don't think spending a hundred thousand dollars in a top view, TikTok ad is going to be good if we use this commercial. And that starts at the top. Now I'm not going to go as far as saying what I'm like, I'm not going to, I'm not going to hardline dig my heels in this, but

 

I am at the point now, just with the way that algorithms are working, with the fact that social media is the almost core channel to actually build brand advocacy, brand efficacy, brand love, brand affinity, all of those things, people are turning to social media because it's the one place where they want to kill a brand, and it's the other place where they want to fall in love with a brand, okay? The VP, not the CMO, they have to at least fundamentally...

 

Nathan (30:19.116)

want to understand, and this is something that just happened in the past 24 hours, they have to at least understand or get what group seven means. Okay? Like, and I have to train a lot of senior marketing leaders on like, you need to know what group seven means, you need to know what Riz is, you need to know what like, you know, like six, seven is, why are kids just walking around saying six, seven, six, seven?

 

You shouldn't say that as well.

 

It's like, so like that aspect is so important because if social is moving at the speed of culture and culture is moving at the speed of social, okay, you have to basically have that level of literacy so that you can just let your teams do what they need to do. But to get back to your point, okay, they have to work together at the very least. And again, this is

 

one of the most unpopular things that I say, at the very least, organic and paid have to sit next to each other.

 

They just have to. It's just, it's not possible to be able to get the TikTok code and boost it within 24 hours because it's doing well. It's not possible to gif the influencer who has a viral post almost immediately. It's not possible to reach out to the group seven person immediately unless you have the dollars. Who controls the dollars? Paid media controls the dollars. Very few organic social teams. I think I was one of the few people.

 

Nathan (31:52.616)

in my industry when I was running social for the brand that will not be named, it's like that like I had an $800,000 a year boosting and quick response budget that just sat there for me to be able to just immediately like do something as quick as possible. That's really hard. I come from a paid and performance media background. I was able to prove that it was necessary. But the paid and organic teams in the very least

 

have to communicate with each other. We all know that user-generated creator content works better than campaign content. We all know that. But the paid media teams are just kind of taking what they get from the creative department and they're just shoving it in there. This is where we actually start to at least build the foundation of trying to actually not be so siloed anymore.

 

And yeah, that goes back to the portfolio approach. You see what's performing well, you put money against it, you amplify it. What's not, kill it immediately. Why would you waste money and time on underperforming things? then you, and that's that real time nimbleness, real time responsiveness that very few departments are set up for.

 

We actually have question that's quite relevant to that, is how can you achieve ROI in a paid influencer campaign if consumers can easily recognize it as a sponsored video? So you're going to have the ones that are going to go viral, but some of those are going to be the paid for ones. How actually can you make that real?

 

any main work.

 

Paul (33:19.694)

Well, I how are you going to get the ROI,

 

Nathan (33:25.612)

just ignore. Influencer, in my opinion, is upper funnel. Upper funnel is awareness building. Okay. We're holding influencer marketing to performance marketing KPIs. And it just doesn't really make sense in the grand scheme of things. Like.

 

Still my question.

 

Nathan (33:49.464)

The biggest question that CFOs often give is, okay, you want a $2 million influencer budget next year, how's it gonna lead to sales? You can finagle it and say, we're gonna dedicate X amount for TikTok where they tag the video and it'll immediately drive, you know, but the reality is in terms of like ROI is that you just have to be willing to accept that what we consider to be return on investment

 

five years ago is not what we consider to be return on investment today. It goes back to the original question, is measurement is still being stuck specifically in media agencies in KPIs like CPC, like CPMs, like, like CPAs that we, was using when I was like, I launched Starbucks first iPad ad back in like 2010. That's how long ago

 

like in terms of performance metrics. And we're still using those same metrics to show effectiveness in media. So like we have to evolve the KPIs in order for us to actually show the ROI. Like you have to convince them, our ROI for this is how many views did this actually get where people are actually engaged? Did they watch past three seconds? Did we actually like, did the collaborative posts actually lead to us getting a higher number of followers that are in a younger demographic over the course of three or four weeks?

 

ROI just cannot be measured anymore to didn't lead to sales. Like the whole purpose of influencer marketing is to push more qualified people into your mid and lower funnel. That is in my opinion, the purpose. You're just trying to get them to the website so that your retargeting can kick it.

 

I used to say all the time in these meetings all the time, was like, which did not make me popular internally, but I used to say all the time, don't care what happens once they get to the website.

 

Ana (35:50.478)

No, that's, I think that's very true. And I would also say not just any place in the website, PDP, because forget about homepage, forget about PDP. They need to go PDP. Otherwise, because that's what search optimizes, that's where social optimizes get to PDP. That is your new homepage because then you provide contextual content there. And where do you go from there? That's again, not your job, but Ecom job to cart and then it's retargeting.

 

Does everybody know what PDE is? Okay, at conference a couple of weeks ago and I found out nobody had any idea what I was talking about. make sure.

 

You were just plain dead. Sick. Far away.

 

Paul (36:35.916)

No, we've got a lot of questions coming here. So we've got any marks? Sorry. If socials go more private, how and what should brands be thinking about in 2026? Should we be thinking about a close friend strategy more?

 

is socials going worse.

 

more private yet.

 

like closed private accounts and so on.

 

I prefer broadcast channels over close friends. To be honest with you, I think they're more effective. we launched a close friends channel. It was very successful. I don't know if it's capped at 5,000 anymore. it was very successful because we announced sales the day before the they were. It's like, so horrible task of working with our digital team to actually turn on landing pages where people could actually have 80 splits of like.

 

Nathan (37:26.424)

getting to access to the sale. but it also was really effective because I can admit this now because I'm outside of my non-disclosure agreement scope, but like we would literally tell our, our close friends that if they comment on this post, they could win a hundred dollar gift card. That was when engagement was important, but it was a way of converting like, and we basically acquired close friends by who's tagging us.

 

Because if you're tagging us in content, you clearly love us because you're a brand advocate for us. It was a way for us to basically figure out how to reward people who were organically amplifying us without even us asking them to do it.

 

And I believe in like lower funnel, believe more in memberships and in-person meetings rather than focus. This is for me a tactical question. It's actually a matter of strategy and your strategy, if you want to, if everything goes private, yes, you're going to have private clubs, you're going to have member clubs, you have invite only, but you're going to have analog culture. You're going to happening in the real world when you see running clubs book.

 

clubs, you have all sorts of clubs, then you're going to think instead of influencers, which is for broadcast, I absolutely agree, you're going to have, are my community leaders? That's a different dynamic is still going to get you your goals, but you're going to have loyalty, you have a bonding, advocacy, that's deeper in the funnel. And then you're going to have a membership. And then when you have membership, you have a completely different reward structure and different relationship. So it's not about close.

 

private groups on social, it is what are you doing with that membership structure and that unlocks completely different monetization and brand relationship opportunities.

 

Nathan (39:14.536)

I'm gonna add on that. The most untapped opportunity in social marketing in the United States of America is mom Facebook groups. I'm serious. like, like, two reasons. One, they are in constant communication and dialogue with each other. They literally can recommend a, like, new car seat and everybody will buy it. But not just that. What you just said, millennial...

 

aged woman in the United States of America control household spending incomes. It's like, so if you can figure out a way to unlock mom Facebook groups, which are closed private groups, you can explode.

 

I said mom boss is real

 

And when you've identified who those, the leaders in those small groups, on the Facebook group or any those things, like how, what would be your tips to people for like holding onto them, celebrating them? Do you put on events for them? Do you build different mailing lists for them?

 

the above and it's not about just them, it's about the entire groups because the groups gets bigger, groups connects to each other. It's about tastemakers group, it's about connection, it's about how do you create different charters, it's fan made communities, fan made brands and how do you manage fandom and that's a different, again, strategy. It's not right for all brands, but it's a strategic decision.

 

Nathan (40:43.016)

And in case you did not know this, this is literally how Stanley started. Stanley started with a group of Utah moms who were in message groups with each other. I'm not saying it's how Stanley originated. I'm just saying it's how they exploded because they basically went to Stanley, offered them advice about different things they needed, like adjusting the size at the bottom of the cup, doing different things. But Stanley penetrated mom Facebook groups.

 

They penetrated the mommy blogger and then they became the official spokes cup of woman in America.

 

Well, on Spokes Cup, we are at time. So thank you very much, Ana and Nathan, can we have a massive round of applause please? Thank you very much. Fantastic.