Q&A with cooking Creator ‘Topless Baker’
In this post we chat with food and cooking Creator, Matt Adlard, aka Topless Baker. Topless Baker is all about making cooking more approachable and making those recipes that seem daunting, really easy. In this interview Matt talks about the challenges of being a new Creator, the benefits for brands when working with smaller (micro) creators and also his thoughts on how brands should think about working with Creators, to get the best results from their influencer marketing campaigns and budgets.
Q: A quick introduction. What is your name and how would you describe what you do?
A: I’m Matt, also know as the Topless Baker. I making cooking videos online in the aim of inspiring other people to get in the kitchen, and get cooking!
Q: How did you first get into vlogging / creating content, as a full time job?
A: I stumbled into it about 2 years ago, I had a small blog just to store recipes and I saw that all these live streaming apps popping up so I thought that I could break through there rather than YouTube which was really saturated. I started doing live cooking shows and my audience grew pretty quickly. After a while the live streaming apps died down and I started a YouTube channel as another way to showcase myself and the recipes. A few years later and I’ve finally been able to make the jump to doing it full time.
Q: What are the biggest challenges you face, working as a new Creator?
A: I think the uncertainty is tough — every day is different, each piece of content has a different reaction. You hope that you are always going on an upward trajectory but there are highs and lows so you need to be able to take the good with the bad and work through it. When you are a smaller creator, there aren’t really any guarantees so you need to really grind it out and keep working on your passion.
Q: How do you balance your time between creating great content, building your profile and trying to make money?
A: For me, the more content I make, the more exposure I will get and the quicker my profile will grow. This will in turn hopefully lead to partnerships with brands that I want to partner with. The core of our offering as a creator is the content that we are making, so if you can keep creating, everything else should fall into place…you hope!
Q: Thinking about your content and audience, which brands are on your ‘love to work with’ list
A: There are so many ‘legacy’ cooking brands, the likes of Samsung, KitchenAid, Tefal etc — these are brands that I use all the time so for me it is such a natural fit and something I would love to partner with. I’d also love to work with tourism boards and travel brands to showcase some of the food and culture around the world.
Q: In your opinion, what makes a great brand integration video vs an average one?
A: Letting the creator do their thing. Brands are working with influencers because of their success and their audience engagement, so when a brand comes in with a very specific set of requirements, exact lines that need to be mentioned etc, it can strangle the creativeness and therefore effectiveness of a brand integration.
Q: Are there any mistakes that you see brands making, when working with Creators on Influencer Marketing campaigns?
A: In a similar point to the above, I think when brands try and shoe horn their way into the creators ‘creativeness’ you can see it from a mile off in the video. As hard as it is, by relinquishing a little bit of control, the results should be a lot better!
Q: What are the benefits of working with a Creator with a smaller audience vs one of the well known YouTube names?
A: Having worked in a media agency and now being an influencer, there is nothing worse than a brand just picking an influencer because of the total number of followers they have. There is so much data at their fingertips about audience demographics, engagement rates etc so it is crazy to see brands working with these ‘huge’ influencers when they could be spending less, and delivering their message across a larger, more diverse and engaged audience through smaller creators.
Q: So where can we or potential advertisers / brands find you…?
A :Everywhere!You can email me: toplessbaker@gmail.com or reach me on any of my social channels:
www.youtube.com/toplessbaker
www.facebook.com/toplessbaker
www.instagam.com/toplessbaker
www.twitter.com/toplessbaker
You can also see Matt’s profile on our free influencer search tool https://search.dyzio.co/influencer/topless-baker
influencer marketing, creators, youtube, instagram, branded content
Originally published at dyzio.co.
