Lipton is testing a new way to do creator marketing without building big in-house social teams.
After a two-year global trial, the tea brand is using influencer marketing agency Billion Dollar Boy’s “Social Hubs” — a program where local creators make a steady stream of content for Lipton’s social channels and their own, effectively acting as on-the-ground social teams in each market.
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.
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