Your Creator Program is Killing You

Welcome to The Playbook—your backstage pass to marketing mastery. We don’t just share tips; we hand you strategies to dominate the field. Get ready and make bold moves in the ever-evolving marketing game. 🎯

🥲 Your Roster Looks Perfect. That's Exactly Why It's Underperforming.

Most brands select creators based on whether the creator fits the brand's aesthetic and category. A skincare brand picks creators who look like skincare creators. The brands' compounding pick on a different axis entirely: whether the creator's audience matches the buyer profile, regardless of whether the creator looks on-brand.

A creator who looks off-brand but reaches your exact buyer outperforms a creator who looks perfect but reaches an adjacent audience. Most rosters are built on the wrong variable.

The Data Tab Nobody Opens During Selection

Most creator selection is done by looking at the creator: their feed, aesthetic, follower count, content style. The audience-side data sits in the analytics tab that gets skipped.

Run this audit on every active creator:

• Audience demographics vs your customer profile

• Audience interest overlap with your buyer's category behavior

• Purchase behavior signals at your price point and frequency

The pattern that surfaces is almost always the same. Creators whose feed looks perfect have audiences structurally different from your buyer. Creators who look off-brand index 3-5x against your actual customer profile. The roster that looked right was reaching the wrong people.

Reweight The Selection Criteria

Modash is running a free 3-hour session on June 11th with brand-side teams from Moroccanoil, Edelman, and L'Oréal on exactly this: which creators on your current roster do not belong there, and the criteria that actually predicts whether a creator moves product. 

If the rebuilt roster looks identical to the old one, the brand-fit weighting is still overriding the audience signal. You can secure your free spot now!

Recalibrate What "Brand Fit" Actually Means

The brand-fit conversation usually happens around aesthetics: does this creator look like our brand? The sharper question is whether the creator's audience behaves like your customer: do they buy in this category, at this price point, with this purchase frequency?

That recalibration changes who has authority in the selection process. The brand team's aesthetic judgment becomes a check on creators who already passed the audience filter, not the primary filter that shapes the roster before audience data is even considered.

The creator was always the proxy. The audience was always the asset.

Partnership with HubSpot

Quick gut check: how many of your marketing tools actually talk to each other?

If the answer is "not enough," you're losing context every time a signal moves between platforms.

HubSpot's updated Essential Apps for Marketers collection pulls together key apps from TikTok Lead Syncing to Canva to Amplitude that connect directly to your CRM, so insights, leads, and creative all live in one place.

Less tab-switching, more context, and AI that actually knows your business.

🚀Quick Hits

📱 Instagram officially launched Instagram Plus for $3.99/month, adding features like Story Spotlight, Story analytics, anonymous Story viewing, custom profile options, and extended Story duration as optional premium upgrades. 

🛍️ While 90% of consumers report satisfaction with AI shopping tools, trust remains a hurdle. Only 33% are comfortable letting AI complete purchases, and 76% believe shopping agents should work for them, but just 27% think they currently do. 

🛒 YouTube is ending its product tags in the Community Posts experiment. Creators can no longer add new product tags, and existing tags will disappear by July 3, as the feature failed to gain enough traction.

🎯 Google clarified that Demand Gen and Discovery campaigns promoting products tied to sensitive categories (health, financial hardship, personal issues) may face audience targeting and delivery limitations under its personalized advertising policies. 

💪Tweet Of The Day

💃Events

🔥 Crystal Carter, Head of AI Search at Wix, Is Teaching the Exact Signals That Control How AI Surfaces Your Brand

Tomorrow | Virtual Event | Free

AI is forming opinions about your brand from signals your team never prioritized. Crystal Carter, Head of AI Search at Wix, and Bogdan Babiak, CMO at SE Ranking, show exactly which ones matter and what to build first. 30 sessions, 70+ practitioners, zero vendor pitches.

✅ Reserve Your Free Spot

Can't make it live? Register anyway, you'll get the recordings within 24hours.

🔥 The Agentic Playbook Udemy Uses to Scale AI Search Without Adding Headcount

June 11 | Virtual Event | Free

Nicholas King manages SEO and digital experience at Udemy at a scale most teams never reach. He's not adding people to keep up. He built a system that scales without them. On June 11, he's showing exactly how, alongside Bridget Nelson, who built the same thing at Chime.

✅ Reserve Your Free Spot

Can't make it live? Register anyway, you'll get the recordings within 24hours.

Advertise with Us

70% of email clicks are bots but not with The Playbook. Reach real human buyers with verified clicks and only pay for actual engagement.

Checkout our Partner Kit

You’ve got the plan—now it’s time to execute. Thanks for being part of The Playbook squad! Let us know if this was helpful so we can keep the play strong with all the right ploys.