Why brands like Anthropologie are commissioning creator-created shows instead of posts

All of which has turned Tripathi into a social showrunner of sorts, operating in a corner of the creator economy where more brands are starting to shop. 

Take Anthropologie – the brand’s marketers were already fans of Tripathi’s work before they got in touch earlier this year. 

“We engaged her because we’re fans of her work,” said Barbra Sainsurin, global CEO at Anthropologie Group. The admiration turned out to be mutual and Tripathi “leaped at the chance to create a series for us,” she said. Her comic voice was the draw for the brand, which wanted to try its hand at comedy even though “humour and entertainment haven’t been voices or characters that we’ve incorporated in our story telling traditionally,” said Sainsurin.

The result was the brand’s first micro comedy series “The Holiday Party,” a twist on the seasonal misadventure trope that sits inside its “On My Way” seasonal campaign, which went live last month. Each episode is 90 seconds and will air on the brand’s social channels between November 11–19 alongside behind the scenes footage.

Tripathi developed the characters and the direction of the show while Anthropologie’s team took charge of the styling, from what each character wears to how the party itself was decorated. The goal was a setting that felt true to Tripathi’s audience and also looked like “a party that an Anthro person would throw” said Sainsurin.

The brand took a few more pages from the entertainment playbook for the rollout. Anthropologie is “treating it like a movie launch,” with trailers, teasers and hooks at the end of each episode to pull viewers into the next. Instagram and TikTok are getting the series as are YouTube, Pinterest and Reddit, which means it will be “distributed more broadly than it has ever,” said Sainsurin. 

Whether it goes further depends on the numbers. Sainsurin’s team is watching earned reach, how many non-followers the series lands in front of and “how far is this content travelling in the algorithm”. Saves, shares, comments, site visits, product page views and sales will come into the picture once the full spread of holiday content has run. That’s a big shift for a team that doesn’t even do much with creators now. They make up a smaller share of the media mix than at other brands, said Sainsurin. 

Putting a price on that kind of work is its own puzzle. Hyphen, the Reign Maker Group-owned talent management firm that brokers series deals, splits the bill into the creator’s fee, production, usage rights, exclusivity and the number of episodes. On its own roster, a single sponsored post from a mid-tier lifestyle creator starts at around $8,000 to $10,000. A multi episode series lands “well into five figures,” and paid usage plus category exclusivity can push the total to six, said Victoria Bachan, CEO of Hyphen. Her team tells brands to weigh that against “ what it would cost to build that audience habit themselves,” she continued.

More brands are starting to have that conversation. They’re hiring social show runners like Tripathi, sometimes in place of part of their influencer marketing spend and sometimes alongside it. In doing so they’ve reopened one of the industry’s longest-running arguments: whether influencer marketing and creator marketing are different things at all.

Both pay someone with an audience to put a product in front of it but they arguably split from there. Influencer marketing leans on the person, whose recommendation and follower count do the heavy lifting on a post that lives and dies on their own account. Creator marketing, on the other hand, heads off toward the content itself. Think characters that viewers get attached to and a format they come back to week after week. All of that sits with the show itself so it holds value well after the influencer post has scrolled out of view. 

Take the show We Are MICE, a mockumentary set at a fictional live events agency whose name stands for meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions. Beauty creator Genevieve Turley, in her first acting role, plays Maggie, who manages the agency’s team. She’s a 40-something parent who is nearly divorced and recently back at work, trying to pull off flawless events with a team that’s some way short of flawless itself. The clients are real as in they’re the brands that sponsor the series and the plot follows Maggie’s team as it tries to deliver an event for them. Laura Geller Beauty is the first, commissioning six episodes between 60 and 90 seconds that started rolling out across Instagram and TikTok last month (October 26).

The format comes from Rooscreen, the Royal Television Society-nominated production company behind comedy short film Mourning Glory, and was developed with brand partnerships strategists DASH Talent. Like plenty of sitcoms before it, MICE started life in a writer’s room, built around an idea Rooscreen founder Becky Rooney had been carrying around for a while. The characters and their world came first, in other words, and the brands were invited in after.  

“Yes, it’s an advert and yes it’s a commercial but rather than a typical product placement or doing a standard influencer post we’ve tried to get into the storyline with the brand,” said Rooney.  

“I wanted it to be funny and edgy but also brand safe,” she added.

The plan is for each new series to bring in a different brand and a different event while Maggie and her colleagues, who are also creators, carry their storylines from one to the next. Which leaves room for a different member of the cast to step forward each time, depending on whose audience best fits the brand. A sportswear deal, for instance, would hand the spotlight to Austyn Farrell, a creator and keen marathon runner who plays Mo on the show. “These creators understand their audiences so who better to guide how we advertise certain brands than the people who actually really understand that product,” said Rooney.  

Early numbers appear to back that up, or at least as far as views and interactions can tell. As of earlier this week, the episodes had collectively hit 1.3 million views on Instagram with 11,000 interactions. 

“Going viral is one thing but if that means reaching two million people who don’t want to buy the product then does that have as much value as reaching 20,000 people who actually do?,” said Rooney. 

None of which means brands are turning their backs on creator scale. Anthropologie, for instance, has around 50 creators working on the same campaign. Some are returning partners. Others came through an agency to reach audiences the brand isn’t getting to yet. Similarly SharkNinja works with Tripathi as well as Alex Berry, John Connor Hammon and Ari Caga — the three creators of The ick vertical digital web series — while continuing to work with large groups of creators.