Earnings season rundown: CEOs are betting big on the creator economy

Below, Digiday rounds up the most telling remarks.

Unilever — Fernando Fernandez, CEO

“We are also using a modern approach to scale the brand, with more focus on content at scale, ‘what others say,’ and influencers. Whether it is the Vaseline Verified social-first hacks campaign — which won nine awards recently at Cannes — or culturally relevant tie-ups such as with the hit series, The White Lotus, Vaseline is leading the way when it comes to new models of reach and persuasion. More on this to come as we steadily bring desire at scale to every brand in every geography, but from what I have shared today I hope you can see that.”

Procter & Gamble — Jon R. Moeller, CEO

“For the PowerMop launch, the Swiffer team brought several top TikTok creators into their labs to learn about PowerMop from P&G scientists and create engaging communication. From there, the created social media content was tested with P&G’s proprietary AI studios. This process ultimately created the superior Mop Smarter campaign across TV, digital and influencer marketing to connect with consumers in fresh ways.”

L’Oreal — Nicolas Irenimus, CEO

“Today, over two thirds of people around the world consider it important to look fit and attractive. That’s six points higher than just three years ago. This is a global trend whether you look at the U.S., Brazil or India, just to name a few. Social media conversations or all things beauty remain incredibly dynamic with 6,500,000,000 beauty searches on TikTok in the first half alone, up over 50% from last year.”

Coca-Cola — James Quincey, CEO 

“To drive transactions, we’re reprioritizing investments driving affordability with refillables, and premiumization with single-serve offerings and scaling connected packaging and our systems digital customer platforms. In EMEA, all three of our operating units grew volume, and we also had revenue and profit growth. In Europe, volume growth was driven by both Eastern and Western markets and was partially held by cycling, an easier comparison versus the prior year. Coca-Cola Zero Sugar, Sprite, and Fuze Tea each grew in volume. We activated our Share a Coke campaign across 38 markets in Europe and included prominent musicians and influencers. The campaign leveraged a memory maker digital tool, which allowed drinkers in some markets to share personalized memes and videos with friends and family.”

Alphabet — Philipp Schindler, chief business officer at Google

“McDonald’s USA harnessed the influence of YouTube creators to ignite awareness for the Minecraft Movie Meal. It leveraged YouTube Shorts partnership ads to increase its reach, generating a 3.3 times higher view-through rate than the industry benchmark.”

Meta Platforms — Susan Li, CFO 

“… We’re making optimizations to help the best content from smaller creators break out by matching it to the right audiences sooner after it gets posted. We’re also working on improving the ability for our systems to discover more diversified and niche interests for each person through interest exploration and learning explicit user preferences. We’re also planning to scale up our models further and incorporate more advanced techniques that should improve the overall quality of recommendations.”

Cloudflare — Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare

“So in quarter two, we partnered with the who’s who of the publishing world from the Associated Press to Zipp Davis and nearly everyone else in between to help invent the new business model for content creators on an AI-driven web. The deals we are signing with these companies aren’t high dollars, but they are highly strategic. The response has been incredibly positive from publishers for sure, but also from the majority of AI companies who understand that original content is the fuel that powers their engines. When seismic shifts happen in ecosystems as important as the web, new business models inherently emerge. We believe we are uniquely positioned to power the business model of content creation in the coming AI driven web.”

Roblox — David Vazisin, co-founder and CEO

“… Without giving any forward predictions, we wanna move as much money as we can from the top line to the creator community. And we wanna get to the point where it’s more and more clear, it’s more efficient to build an experience on Roblox both from developer time as well as search and discovery as well as monetization relative to the the stack that creators use in the existing gaming space.hunk of developers that have experiences that make sense for this.”

Etsy — Lanny Baker, CFO

“We also accelerated our Creator Collective spend by nearly 50% sequentially in Q2, primarily directed at influencer marketing. And third, owned marketing channels, including email and push, that allow us to deepen our direct connections with buyers are becoming meaningful high growth drivers of attributed GMS without an associated investment in external ad spend.”

Publicis Groupe — Arthur Sadoun, CEO

“We are accelerating on creators. They are the newest media channel that captures attention across audiences. We are talking about an addressable ad market in the U.S. of $30 billion today, which is the next three years, will exceed the $59 billion currently spent on linear TV. With influential, we bring 4 million creators, including 90% of global influencers with more than 1 million followers and 100 billion data points. This allows brands to find and activate the creators who resonate most with the shopper that will drive their growth.” 

IPG — Philippe Krakowski, CEO

“During the quarter, Weber Shandwick won the biggest industry pitch of the year in the social and influencer space when it was named global earned media agency of record for Mars.”