Joining the ACTIVATE Family

I am Thrilled to Join As Vice President of ACTIVATE Studio & Strategy

I am thrilled to join the team as Vice President of ACTIVATE Studio and Strategy, where I will focus on expanding the scope of our Studio capabilities, as well as working closely with ACTIVATE’s product and technology team on platform growth and innovation. The team has been relentless in recent months, continuing to push the boundaries of what the ACTIVATE platform can offer. We are excited to roll out a number of new releases today, including an expanded flexible workflow, universal messaging, native conversion tracking, and more — you can read more about it in our CTO’s note here.

A Passion for Partnering with Talented Storytellers

Working with talented storytellers to expand and elevate their narratives has always been my passion. I’ve worked with talent for the entirety of my career, and as I’ve matured in this industry so too has the marketplace for digital creators. I began my career at Creative Artists Agency working with traditional television and host talent, eventually shifting my focus in 2012 to digital, developing early-age influencers and short form video series.

By the time I joined the newly-formed talent division at Refinery29 in 2015, the influencer marketing revolution was in full swing. It was during my time at Refinery29 that I fully realized the potential impact of influencer-created and distributed content as well as the true depth of brand engagement opportunities that exist for creators. There, I worked with a growing and dedicated team to provide bespoke ideation and scaled campaigns to brands across fashion, beauty, retail, wellness, CPG, and technology.

I’ve spent the last year on the PR and communications side, advising consumer brands on 360-minded influencer strategy and working with integrated marketing professionals to better leverage data and analytics in influencer discovery, curation and partnership architecture.

The Challenges Today in Influencer Marketing

As formidable a movement as influencer marketing may be, uncertainty still runs rampant in this business. I regularly speak with brands that ultimately believe in the value of influencers but have valid concerns surrounding performance monitoring, pricing transparency, audience viability and market saturation. And with the pool of capable and eager digital creators growing exponentially each year, it’s becoming more challenging to identify the right partners and cultivate collaborations that stand out from the competition as differentiated and meaningful (yet efficient to execute and scale).

With the number of direct to consumer brands rising, companies can’t afford to invest in over-saturated talent or deploy flat creative. It’s a race to capture audience awareness and loyalty through demonstrated talent relationships and fresh campaign ideas.

The Power of Thoughtful Technology in Navigating Roadblocks

Despite these challenges and nuances, it’s important to remember that successful influencer marketing ultimately comes down to nailing three things: The medium, the messenger and the message. Audiences will respond to and engage with thoughtful content from credible sources, served up on the platforms that are native to their routines and consumption preferences. The brands that stay true to these principals while continuing to experiment and innovate are the ones that win in the long run.

In learning about the ACTIVATE platform, I was excited to find that it is designed with today’s influencer marketing challenges in mind while still maintaining focus on fostering authentic connectivity between brands, influencers and social channels.

Our team has worked hard to provide greater transparency and efficiency with regard to ROI and measurement, creator pricing, influencer discovery, audience insights and workflow. Our ultimate mission is to give brands the autonomy to assemble, deploy and amplify campaigns that access the strongest storytellers and content producers and resonate across the channels that matter most to core consumers.

The Art and Science of Influencer Marketing

I frequently talk about the importance of balancing art and science in influencer marketing. With that in mind, a key differentiator of ACTIVATE is our blended approach to both Platform and Studio.

While we provide brands with the technology and the data to win at influencer marketing, we also have a collective of in-house ideators, talent curators and executors that act as an extension of our brand partners’ teams. This allows us to stay nimble, consistently evolving our platform to address emerging needs and opportunities as well as extracting actionable learnings from campaigns to strengthen and future-proof our approach and partnerships.

In the coming months, we will expand the scope of ACTIVATE Studio’s offering to address the role of influencers across a broader spectrum of the marketing mix, expanding the definition of what it means to be an influencer in today’s digital landscape and creating scalable opportunities for brands to access influencers through both our Platform and Studio offering. That includes:

• Providing full-circle talent strategy and consultation
• Evolving our services to support always-on initiatives and Ambassdorships
• Allowing brands to discover and engage with new and existing fans through organic and sampling opportunities
• Connecting brands to talented creators for bespoke content as well as product innovation
• Bridging the gap between URL and IRL through immersive experiences and events that drive content creation

ACTIVATE is a fully end-to-end influencer marketing platform, covering influencer discovery, program workflow, measurement, and analytics. Our ACTIVATE Studio team also helps brands build out and execute their influencer strategy. Last year, the ACTIVATE platform enabled over 75,000 influencers to collaborate with brands.

Want to learn more about Activate? Just drop us a note at research@activate.social.