Happy Sunday! 

If you’re reading this, I hope you’ve had a great weekend so far, and you’re feeling ready to lock in for the week. This past week, I gave a virtual talk with Social Snowball and went deep on how DTC brands should be working with creators in 2026. The audience was super engaged, and the reason was simple: I skipped the fluff and just told them where to go do it and make money. In that spirit, I wanted to share my full take on creator marketing today, especially because the landscape is changing faster than most brands can keep up with.

Let's get into it. But first…

If you’re in Miami on April 3rd, come join myself, Hudson Leogrande (COMFRT), Sarah Lee (Glow Recipe), and Danny Yeung (IM8 Health / $Prenetics) for a mastermind. Seats are limited, join here.

Vibe.co — How Hairstory drove $220K+ in revenue from streaming TV.

I've talked about Vibe.co a few times now, so instead of re-explaining the platform, I want to go deep on one case study that I think every brand can achieve.

Hairstory is a haircare brand that grows the way most great DTC brands do: education and repetition. Their product requires a behavior change (ditching traditional shampoo), which means the purchase cycle depends on trust, not impulse. That kind of brand usually struggles with TV because the typical CTV play is "blast awareness and hope for the best."

However, Hairstory's Vibe.co results tell a different story:

• $220K+ in revenue attributed to streaming TV
• 2x blended ROAS across campaigns
• 5x ROAS on retargeting (this is the number that matters)

That 5x retargeting number is what I want you to pay attention to. Most brands think of CTV as a top-of-funnel play. But when you combine it with retargeting (showing your TV ad to people who already visited your site or engaged with your brand), the economics completely change. It stops being a "brand" channel and starts behaving like a performance channel with a massive trust advantage, because your ad is running on a 65-inch screen, not a 3-inch phone between two memes.

The reason this works specifically on Vibe is that you get the targeting controls to actually run this playbook. Lookalike audiences, first-party CRM uploads, site visitor retargeting, and real-time measurement through integrations with Triple Whale, Northbeam, and Haus. No six-figure IO. No three-month lead time. Self-serve, same speed as Meta.

If your brand relies on education, trust, and repeat purchases (supplements, skincare, wellness, food, anything subscription-oriented), this Hairstory case study is worth studying.

Read the full Hairstory case study here.

If you missed this past week’s episode of Limited Supply, I spent 33 minutes ranting to you about why you need to lock in on the intersection of AI, eCommerce, and marketing. If you feel like you’re behind on all things AI, I get it… and there’s frankly a lot of noise with tech bro’s just building glorified assistants. But truth is, when it comes to building mini apps that help you move faster, write advertorials easier, identify ADA bugs earlier… that’s where this can be useful.

Give me 33 minutes and listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. I promise I’m not wasting your time.

Here's the thing nobody talks about at influencer marketing conferences. Before you build your creator outreach process, before you set up your affiliate program, before you seed a single product... you need to ask yourself an honest question: Would a creator with real taste and a real audience actually want to be associated with my brand?

Most founders skip this entirely. They jump straight to outreach templates, seeding playbooks, and affiliate commission structures. Meanwhile, their brand looks like it was designed in Canva in 2019, their product is a commodity with no story, and their website reads like it was written by a committee. Then they wonder why the only creators responding to their DMs are ones with 50K followers and 0.2% engagement.

The best creators, the ones who actually drive sales, the ones with passionate audiences who trust their recommendations, they are selective. They have to be. Their audience trusts them BECAUSE they're selective. If a creator promotes everything, they promote nothing. So the good ones only attach their name to brands and products they genuinely believe in.

That means your job, before any outreach happens, is two things:

1. Build a brand that creators want to be a part of from the jump. That means your messaging is tight, your visual identity is dialed, your voice is clear, and there's an energy or a community or a point of view that makes people want IN. Not just "nice product." People should see your brand and feel something.
   
   
2. Have an exceptional product that over-delivers on its promises. The best creators are storytellers. And the best stories come from real, genuine reactions. When a creator tries your product and has an "aha!" moment, that's when the creative spark ignites. You can't script that. You can't brief that into existence. It either happens because the product is genuinely great, or it doesn't happen at all. 
   
   This is where the brands that win with creators separate themselves from the brands that keep throwing money at influencers and getting nothing back. 
   
   Look at Jolie. They could have positioned themselves as a plumbing product. A shower head filter. Instead, they built a beauty brand that happened to filter your water. They hosted dinners around different types of water. Actual events centered on the concept of water quality and what it does to your skin, your hair, your body. Those dinners alone made so many creators curious and want in on what Jolie was doing. The product was great, but the brand was magnetic. 
   
   Cadence, the travel capsule brand, is another perfect example. Beautiful design, intentional packaging, a clear point of view on how people should travel. Creators didn't need to be convinced. They saw the product and wanted it in their content because it elevated everything around it. And then there's a completely different Cadence, the electrolyte brand, which did the same thing in a totally different category. Clean design, clear positioning, product that actually works. Both brands attracted creators organically because step zero was done right. 
   
   Go back even further. Lalo and Caraway both crushed it with creators and PR. Not because they had celebrity founders or massive budgets. Because they had exceptional products and knew how to build a brand that people wanted to get involved with. Listicles, gift guides, influencer seeding with mommy bloggers, all of it worked because the foundation was there. The product was undeniable, and the brand had a clear identity that creators could see themselves being part of. 
   
   None of these brands had influencer founders. None had celebrities attached. They had exceptional products and real brands with real identities. Messaging. Voice. Visual identity. Energy. That's your brand. And that's step zero. 
   
   Get this right, and every tactic I'm about to share works 10x better. Skip it, and you're just renting attention from people who don't actually care about your product.

The old model of influencer marketing was simple and broken. Pay someone with a big following, hope their audience buys your stuff, measure success in impressions and likes. The focus was on the influencer's brand, not what their content could do when amplified by an algorithm. That model treated influencers like a media buy. You were paying for eyeballs and hoping for the best.

The symptoms were predictable: an addiction to vanity metrics, inefficient one-off campaigns, and rigid scripts that killed the very authenticity you were paying for.

That model isn't completely dead. It's retreated to one place where it still makes sense: podcast host-read ads. There, the influencer IS the media and the creative in one package. For everything else, you need a new mental model. Stop thinking about "doing influencer marketing." Start thinking about hiring creators to do specific, measurable jobs.

There are three jobs.

This is the one that changes your ad account. The goal here isn't to tap into a creator's audience. It's to generate an endless stream of high-performing creative for your paid media.

Build your own vetted group of creators. These are reliable partners with agreed-upon SLAs: turnaround times, formats, variations. This isn't a campaign. It's a system.

Start by whitelisting their content. This alone can drop your CPC by 30-50%. Then build the model: seed product to hundreds of creators, track performance (this is where a tool like Social Snowball becomes essential), and when one creator pops, boost their creative and give them a 1-3% cut of the ad spend. That last part is important. When a creator knows their income scales with performance, their content gets better. Incentives aligned, everybody wins.

COMFRT is the clearest proof this works at scale. Hudson Leogrande (I wrote about him a few weeks ago) built an army of 500K+ affiliates and his entire creative engine runs on this model. The creators make the content. The media buying team runs it across every channel. TikTok generates the content and the awareness. Meta converts it.

Your move: Identify 20-30 creators who match your customer's profile. Reach out. Offer product. Start whitelisting. Track everything. Double down on winners.

This one has two parts.

Part A: Borrowing trust. This is about more than reach. When someone like Nicole (@nobread) works with a brand, her audience knows it's been vetted against her principles. You're not buying ads. You're buying a genuine endorsement from someone her audience already trusts. That trust transfers to your brand instantly, and it's worth more than any CPM you can buy.

The key here is finding creators whose audiences overlap with your ICP and whose content style matches your brand. Don't go for the biggest name. Go for the most trusted voice in your niche.

Part B: The digital real estate. Do not sleep on bloggers. I know it sounds like 2014, but a single mommy blogger can still drive a million dollars to a brand. Seriously. The play here is tapping their websites for advertorials, listicles, and first-person POV articles. You're not just getting a post. You're renting valuable digital real estate.

Here's where it gets tactical. Once that content is live on their site, you whitelist their account and run paid ads directly to that content. The article lives on a trusted domain, reads like an authentic recommendation, and converts like a warm landing page. Then you layer on a named offer. "Sarah's Favorites Bundle" or "Nicole's Pick for 25% off." Now the creator's name IS the offer, and you can track attribution cleanly.

Advertorials are one of the most underutilized tools in DTC growth. If you're not already running them, you're leaving unoptimized ad spend and cheaper customer acquisition opportunities on the table.

Your move: Find 3-5 bloggers or content creators with real websites in your niche. Pitch an advertorial or listicle. Get one live this month and start driving paid traffic to it.

Most brands treat creator content as a top-of-funnel play. They get the post, it goes up, they measure impressions, and it's done. That's a waste. Creator content should be working for you deep in your funnel, every single day.

Embed creator content everywhere: on your landing pages, as alternate images in your PDP carousels, in your cart abandonment emails, in your post-purchase flows. It provides social proof that feels infinitely more legitimate than the AI-generated slop everyone is running right now. The middle of the funnel is where most brands have a content gap, and creator content is the best way to fill it.

Apparel and furniture brands tend to be the best at this because they HAVE to show one product in multiple settings. But this works for every category. A supplement brand can embed a creator's "morning routine" video on the PDP. A skincare brand can use before/after content from real creators in their abandon cart sequence. It works because it's real, and customers can tell the difference.

Your move: Take five pieces of creator content you already have (or go get them) and place them on your PDPs, landing pages, and abandonment flows this week. Measure the conversion lift. I promise you'll be surprised.

You don't need to do all of this at once. But you do need to start.

Step 1: Find your people the right way. Don't use platforms. Don't ask AI to generate a list. Go find creators by browsing like your customers do. Create a new TikTok or Instagram account, train the algorithm to match your ideal customer profile, and see who the platform surfaces for you. If you sell anti-acne skincare, find the creators with rabid engagement who are talking about acne solutions. Those are your people. The algorithm already did the vetting for you.

Step 2: Start your engine. Whitelist everything. Reach out to the creators you found and start whitelisting their content immediately. If they have a website, get an advertorial or listicle live. This is your opening move. It's low risk, high signal, and it starts building your creative pipeline from day one.

Here's the thing I want to leave you with. When creator marketing is done right, it accomplishes two things that most brands treat as separate line items: performance marketing and brand marketing.

The creator content drives measurable, trackable revenue. That's the performance side. But it also builds trust, generates social proof, and creates a perception of your brand that no amount of polished studio creative can match. That's the brand side.

In every other media channel, you're fighting for cheaper CPMs and better deals. With creators, you need to do the opposite. Give more. Be generous with your product, your praise, and your terms. These are humans building their own businesses, just like you. Treat them like partners, not vendors, and they'll reward you tenfold. That generosity is the best investment you'll make.

The brands that understand this aren't choosing between brand and performance. They're getting both, from the same channel, with the same partners.

If you've been thinking about building out a creator program (or fixing one that isn't working), I hope this gives you a clear starting point.

It’s Sunday night, so I hope you plan to get 9 hours of sleep going into the new week. It feels like everything is moving a million miles per minute these days… don’t forget to slow down, go for a walk, get a sweat in, and take care of yourself. I hope you have an incredible week. See you next Sunday!

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