How Lipton is using local creators instead of building in-house social teams 

The model gives Lipton many of the benefits of having its own local social teams, while outsourcing the day-to-day grind of finding, managing and briefing creators.

Based on the trial, Billion Dollar Boy sees Social Hubs as a way to run social-first, culturally relevant content creation without building large in-house teams — a shift from the industry’s recent push to internalize creator work. 

“We are a lean organization,” Emrah Oner, digital marketing director at Lipton, told Digiday. “We have a global team and the expertise is around social and communities, channel-native content production, and media… we have local content production through social apps, but we wanted to extend that, bring it much more earlier into the funnel.”

Oner said that Lipton had become too focused on the paid-owned-earned marketing model, and decided to shift to a “social-first, audience-first” approach to spark more brand creativity. To make that work, the team needed people embedded in local markets who had their pulse on culture, audiences, and communities — and who could react swiftly to trends and feedback.

That’s where Billion Dollar Boy’s Social Hubs came into play. 

The agency wanted to lean on creators’ ability to spot trends early and move quickly, and “harness” that instinct for Lipton, said Thom Walters, CIO at Billion Dollar Boy.

Using the Companion influencer marketing platform, BDB sourced and integrated creator teams for Lipton in seven different markets: France, Turkey, Belgium, Spain, the Netherlands, Poland, and Saudi Arabia. It then built a strategy for content production, community management, measurement, and more across those hubs. 

Walters said the two-year test launched in multiple markets at once, with BDB social producers inserting them into Lipton’s local marketing ecosystem. “[We] basically just threw things at the wall, saw what stuck, and built things out from there,” he said. 

Gabrielle Wallace, BDB senior account director, said the model constantly adapted over the two-year trial period to meet platform trends.

Wallace said that while the global-to-local model isn’t “revolutionary,” BDB found a “sweet spot” with Social Hubs. “Having those boots on the ground, people to scale ideas and test and see what works and what doesn’t, that’s huge,” Wallace said. “And cross-market collaboration has been one of the biggest successes…cross-sharing across Lipton’s global network has been a true success, from both a metrics and brand perspective, and cost efficiencies, too.”

Walters said that the “always-on” approach involves creators producing daily, weekly, and monthly content, alongside big campaign spikes, during which BDB will offer extra support through its global team. 

“We could be managing three influencers in one month, but when we have bigger campaigns it can be up to 50,” he said. The Lipton model is run by the company’s global team and local European brand managers, with BDB stepping in occasionally to bring everyone together for workshops, planning, and content creation sessions to keep the hubs aligned.

Joey Chowaiki, COO and co-founder at Open Influence, told Digiday the Social Hubs model feels like a “natural evolution” of creator marketing’s direction. “Brands seek the benefits of local market expertise without the labor-intensive process of building and managing teams in every region themselves,” he said. 

“The interesting tension is that it sits somewhere between traditional agency support and in-housing,” he added. “Brands gain flexibility and local expertise, but they also need the right partner to ensure execution, strategy, and measurement remain connected across markets.”

Local creators, global impact

The early results have been strong, according to metrics Lipton shared with Digiday. In 2025, 16 regional creators posting on Instagram and TikTok through the Social Hubs program delivered far more reach than Lipton said it would have expected from traditional ads.

‘How much we generated investing in the social channels versus spending the same amount of money in traditional advertising channels — in the same amount of money we generated three times more reach,” Oner said. “We want to reach many people in a meaningful way — relevance is key, we don’t want to reach people by buying impressions…we’re looking at outcome more than output.”

Social Hubs’ creators had a combined 924 million views across TikTok and Instagram last year; Lipton is targeting 2 billion this year across paid, organic, and earned.

Oner, Wallace, and Walters pointed to Lipton’s viral “Tea Shake” campaign as an example of a social push that could only work with local creators (and one that was created during an in-person workshop). The Turkish snack is a sort of float: iced tea and ice cream, and a TikTok video of a Turkish creator making it with Lipton outperformed expectations. 

“When you plan to put paid behind something, but the idea is so good and culturally relevant, it increases your effectiveness immediately,” said Oner. “Tea Shake has become a summer-long campaign because of the love story there, so the team decided to invest more…every level of investment is more effective.”

Oner said it’s an unorthodox approach for brand marketers: a “build a campaign as you go” strategy that requires less initial investment and more trust in creative teams and creators. 

“Imagine you just sit down in a meeting to do an isolated, 360 campaign…you’re putting a lot of trust in that it will work,” Oner said. “But this was a simple idea, it resonated, people started to build on the idea, you double down, now you put more behind paid, let’s do a spin-off.”

Not everything has worked, however. This kind of model, which requires companies to loosen their grip on their brand identity and creators to iterate and reiterate, means things can go wrong or just miss on social platforms. Oner referenced last year’s April Fool’s campaign, in which March 18 social posts stated the company was discontinuing its popular peach tea flavor. A day later, it was revealed to be a (very early) April Fool’s joke. Marketing Week reported the campaign was the subject of five complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority. 

Despite the backlash, Oner said that the comments on the posts were “mostly neutral and positive,” but stressed that monitoring feedback on the platforms is crucial. 

Oner said the company is planning to roll the model out in Australia and New Zealand next. “We see the future of marketing evolving to this,” he said.  “This isn’t a sub or separate attachment to marketing — we see it becoming focused on quick content production, a lot of volume of content, variety, quicker development, community listening, so we are integrating this into marketing teams more and more.”

Chowaiki said it’s less a question of if other brands will move in this direction and more a question of how they execute it. “The organizations that can successfully combine local market expertise, creator relationships, strategic oversight, and measurement will have a significant advantage,” he said.