Monks’ head of social sees this as the biggest challenge for marketers in the creator economy

“One of the biggest challenges with influencer creative marketing is that they forget about the brand-building part of things,” Luca told Digiday. “It’s all about, how am I relevant now?”

In this interview, Luca also dives into how consolidation of technologies and services will be part of marketers’ evolving responsibilities to get various platforms and creator programs — and the data they generate — to work together.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

How do you define a real-time brand?

Every brand is social, whether they believe they are or not, [and] whether they participate in it or not. We’re encapsulating this bigger philosophy, and it centers around … how do you have timeless meaning? How do you build your brand? We’re playing around with this idea right now of what does it mean to be real-time — that is timely and timeless, [and] that is in producing [both] slow and rapid types of content ideation.

What is the timely versus timeless strategy?

There’s two things that brands have to balance. One is the timeless communication: how you express the brand’s beliefs, their purpose, what they stand for, their brand story, their origin story — the timeless messages that make people stay with a brand for a long period of time. Versus timely communication, which is this quick-hit drug of something that’s of the moment, that’s tapped into culture, that is something that is trend-setting.

You mention marketers will have to become “orchestrators” of various channels, tech and services. What is changing?

How do you orchestrate all of those behaviors that the brands have to do in culture, from a Super Bowl ad to a reactive piece of content and social. How is that message orchestrated in a way that feels like it’s part of the same brand story? We’re working on a big [pitch now], and they keep coming back to: We don’t know how to tie it all together. Because we’ve got a brand agency working on this thing, but we need a really strong social strategy and media-reactive media strategy.

How do we orchestrate PR, social, other types of content, CRM and customer touch points, communication channels, so they actually work together? Two, what is the technology stack that they need to do that with? And those are the common themes we’re seeing.

Can brands do both and stay consistent?

They have to be both timeless and timely, even though it’s going to take a little bit longer to be able to produce those, [like Super Bowl ads], versus rapid, quick-hit social media content, which is on the rapid side of things. … [There were] trendy brands that didn’t stand the test of time. Gap’s gone through peaks and valleys, but Gap is a brand that’s been consistent over time.

So you think about fashion and beauty, the timeless versus timely. I would argue that I want to be sitting on the side of brands that are really doing both jobs, but really focusing on the timeless communication supported by that timely communication.