Brands turn niche news creators into a new earned media engine

“In a lot of ways, creators are almost becoming this new version of late night or morning shows,” said Mercedes Barba, director of public relations and business advisory at UnderCurrent talent management firm. Think news-adjacent creators — reacting to reality television, explaining movies and man-on-the-street interviews.

Changing the earned media pitch

Increasingly, publicists are pitching earned media opportunities to the talent agency, said Barba, who is leading a new service, focused on booking celebrities, founders and CEOs on the agency’s creator shows and podcasts.

“You look at the creator economy…and that’s where a lot of our potential client audiences and ideal client/customer profile — their ICPs — are on social,” she added. 

The numbers prove it. More than half of U.S. adults get their news from social media at least sometimes, according to Pew Research. For Gen Z, that figure rockets to 76%. 

And where Gen Z is, marketers follow.

Expanding definitions

Brands are making more of these moves: NASCAR partnered in February with news creators, including hosts of the media brand that creates content about the ad and marketing world, Breaking and Entering, to interview American professional stock car racing driver Ross Chastain, according to William Nader, group brand director at 72andSunny. 

Another example is Naked. The Tropicana-owned smoothie brand sent drinks to Love Island star Nicolas Vansteenberghe while he was training for the New York Marathon last year. Photos of the star drinking the smoothies were seeded with Deuxmoi, a pop culture social media account. It ultimately became a creator-led play, followed by paid media amplification, according to the brand.

Amazon too has expanded its definition of press. At its first “editorial exchange” event in Seattle late last month, pitched journalists, including Digiday, as well as creators and marketers its approach to AI, sustainability and workforce development to get news in front of consumers — whether that be via traditional press or Instagram creator. 

Supplement, not subsitute

Still, marketers say, creators are meant to supplement — not substitute — traditional press.

“They actually fuel each other. And the more that we approach these moments like that, we are creating that credibility and velocity of momentum towards each other,” Meghan Hubert, senior director of communications and community at 72andSunny told Digiday. 

Where creators offer engagement and awareness, traditional press means credibility, marketers say. At the same time, LLMs have upended how people search, research and shop for products. Brands are trying to hack the system by revamping FAQ pages and hiring creators to more readily appear in LLM search results, and influence how their products appear in AI-generated results. 

“It’s shifted [earned media strategy] into: how do we tell the story, and how do we get somebody to sort of transfer credibility to that story,” said Sean Akaks, co-founder and CEO of SonderCo, a partnerships agency.

New measurement uncertainties

But as with most things in marketing, it comes down to measurement and attribution. Traditional earned media is measured in clicks. Add creators in the mix and the measurement looks a bit different and marketers are still writing out the rules. For NASCAR, the measurement is focused on “fandom metrics” and perceptions of the sport, according to 72andSunny’s Nader.

For Naked, metrics included things like engagement value or earned media value. 

“Those earned media impressions, one for one, are not going to be the same as your traditional media outlets that get you those high numbers of impressions on paper,” said Tiffany Williams, director of creative excellence and brand PR at the Tropicana Brands Group. 

The new earned media playbook

Out of the seven marketing organizations Digiday spoke to for this story, two said they haven’t started to deploy creators as part of the earned media strategy — at least not yet. 

“While it’s unclear how much of this is organic or strategic from agencies, I can see the value,” Kira Lauber-Stracey, senior digital PR director at PMG, said in an emailed statement to Digiday. She later added, “I could also see this working well for campaigns targeting prompts in LLMs, where social influencers and news publishers are cited simultaneously.”