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Have you ever noticed how every new installment of a long-running series is billed as “the best one yet?” It’s an obvious marketing gimmick—take it from someone who does marketing for a living. They can’t all be the best one yet, right? That’s just basic logic. Plateaus are reached. Regression occurs. So whenever someone comes to saying that something was the best one yet, or bigger and better than ever before, it’s best to take that with a healthy dose of salt.
Okay: having said all that, this was definitely the best CreatorIQ Connect yet. I’m serious about that. No gimmick.
There will be plenty of recap content coming your way soon enough, including full session videos, so I’m not going to cover everything here. That would be an extremely long email. [Note: this is still an extremely long email.] My goal is to provide you with one somewhat overwhelmed man’s inside view of such a massive, incredible event. For the span of this email, at least, you can view the world through my eyes, as I take you through the moments and people that made CreatorIQ Connect LA so special.
If you were there, live it all again from a different perspective. If you weren’t there, live vicariously through me. And if you have no idea what CreatorIQ Connect LA is, or why you’ve received this email, keep reading anyway! I promise it’ll be at least as good as whatever else you were doing on this fine Monday morning.
Alright, enough preamble. Let’s get to the highlights!
As you might be aware, for the first time ever, CreatorIQ Connect was TWO glorious days, rather than the usual Single Day of Glory. So I’m not lying to you when I say that the event was ‘bigger’ than ever. That’s just an objective fact. Fortunately, I’m also telling the truth when I say that it was better than ever.
We’re gonna go day by day here, starting with the prep work.
I’m really breezing over a lot of material here, but trust me: a tremendous amount of effort goes into the planning process, and SO much credit is due to both the CreatorIQ Marketing Team and all our contracted helpers. True heroes, all!
I don’t have any photos of all the boxes we unpacked and all the product we arranged, but shoutout to Dove for sending us what I’m pretty sure was twenty of every offering they’ve ever manufactured. It kept our product gifting suite extremely well-stocked, and it really improved my familiarity with various types (flavors?) of body scrub.
Though I might not have gotten a photo of the Dove smorgasbord, I did get a few photos of the calm before the storm.
It would look a lot more official in a manner of hours—no paper on the floor, stage fully assembled. Almost like a real event!
Plus, I even got to peep on CreatorIQ CEO Chris Harrington’s keynote prep session:
Attendees wish they could get this level of behind-the-scenes access. I, on the other hand, wish that I could get the level of access where I could actually watch the keynote, because as it turns out, that wasn’t in the cards for me. Stay tuned to find out why…
CreatorIQ Connect began the way it always does for me, and for other members of the marketing team: waking up early in the morning to print out labels and paste them to badges.
That sounds snarky, but I actually love check-in. It’s a great opportunity to meet people, I thrive on the buzz of the crowd, and I get to be out in the sun—sometimes a little too much so. Fortunately this year we had an umbrella.
In addition to an umbrella, this year we also had a pretty nifty QR code on the back of each badge. This QR code summoned a digital agenda to complement our printed physical agendas. So that was a fun little wrinkle. Per my unscientific count, far more people preferred the digital agenda. Score one for technology!
Another first score during the check-in process? My first celebrity spotting of the day! No, I don’t mean me recognizing one of the many famous and fabulous Connect attendees, though we had plenty of such moments. I mean something even more exciting: one of those attendees recognizing me.
Thank you to Emily for your support of this newsletter, and thank you to my check-in station mate (and teammate, and State of Creator Marketing Report writer) Cherline Bazile for very kindly pressuring Emily into taking this photo. You’re a star in my book, Emily! It’s no surprise that a Head of Talent & Casting would have an eye for talent *hair flip.*
Also, have I mentioned lately how much I love Tastemade? A global community dedicated to food, home, travel, and living my best life? Sign me up!
Alas, the downside of being on check-in duty for the fifth consecutive CreatorIQ Connect event is that for the fifth consecutive CreatorIQ Connect event, I missed the opening remarks and keynote address. Please, everyone, show up on time so that I can finally learn what it is that my company sees fit to present to the world! Maybe the sixth time will be the charm.
The first session I got to attend was moderated by my boss’s boss and all-around boss Brit Starr, CMO of CreatorIQ. When you’ve got a session called “The Leaders’ Playbook to Scalable, Enduring Creator Programs,” you better come with some true industry stalwarts, and fortunately we didn’t leave the audience hanging.
In addition to Brit, the session featured insights from Jenna Habeyeb, President of Posh Peanut (shoutout to alliteration); Micah Jesse Koffler, Director, Influencer & Creator Marketing at E.L.F. Beauty; and Michelle Miller, CMO of Vegamour. That is a heck of a lineup, and boy did these leaders deliver.
These superstars just so happened to emphasize many of CreatorIQ’s top talking points, and I promise you that there was no prior coordination involved in that: we just so happened to be right about stuff, which is always fun. These speakers emphasized the importance of building products and brand initiatives by and for your creator community, and building tight feedback loops so that you can listen to what these creators have to say.
I was particularly struck by Micah’s account of building out E.L.F.’s first-ever dedicated creator marketing team. As a former creator himself, Micah is logging 18-hour days that in his words “don’t feel like work,” precisely because he spends all that time empowering creators like him to elevate their careers. Micah spoke quite movingly about the authentic bonds that lie at the heart of our industry—themes that were further emphasized by Jenna and Michelle, who delivered more of CreatorIQ’s greatest hits, all completely unprompted, including:
And don’t worry, everyone: Micah now has an awesome team around him, so hopefully there will be fewer 18-hour days in the near future, joyful as those days might be.
From there, after a quick break for lunch and mingling, I hustled over to The Power of a Center of Excellence, an impressively titled session with even more impressive panelists: Kate Brady, Senior Director, Marketing Transformation + Global Head of Creative & Content Transformation at Pepsi; Robert Derow, Managing Director and Partner at BCG; Leah Walker, Director, Social Media Strategy at Adobe; and CreatorIQ’s very own Tim Sovay, Chief Business Development and Partnerships Officer. If length of the panelists’ titles is any indication of quality, then this was clearly a session that I couldn’t afford to miss.
Our superstar panelists touted how creator media outperforms traditional corporate channels, and how to harness that incredible power to service broader organizations. I was admittedly a little biased, since I pulled some data to assist with this session, but I was particularly struck by panelists’ visions for how CoE’s will evolve from campaign management to leveling up their brands’ approach and precision across all aspects of marketing, while also becoming more predictive. (Hold that thought about predictive technology transforming our industry…)
Amid plenty of positive buzz from the audience, I stayed in my seat as speakers filed in for the next session. Folks were eager to hear about one of the world’s hottest topics: AI, of course! (This is what I meant by predictive technology, by the way. You didn’t have to hold that thought for long, and you didn’t need AI to predict that this was what I meant.)
Dubbed ‘Human-Led, AI-Accelerated: The New Rules of AI in Creator Marketing,” this session covered, uh, the stuff in its title. The panel featured Brian Manning, Head of Brand, Influencer, & Social at Wayfair; Natalie Silverstein, Chief Innovation Officer at Collectively; CreatorIQ’s Nate Harris, our Vice President of Product Innovation; and our fearless moderator, professional creator Yaseenthat Guy.
Panelists were all excited about AI’s tremendous potential, but stressed the importance of parsing shiny objects from lasting solutions. If the human element is critical to creator marketing, and therefore AI, so too is moving past all the bells and whistles that have popped up in the industry. If the first stage of the AI revolution was driving efficiency, we’re now shifting toward value creation, and unlocking entirely new areas of content and campaigns.
Alongside that is a need for guardrails: making sure that humans are always in the loop to enhance, rather than replace, creativity. Nate had a lot to say about how CreatorIQ is doing just that. As he wisely pointed out, we sit at a unique juncture within the broader field of marketing, given that human layer with creators. It’s that human layer that savvy engineers, marketers, and organizations are seeking to protect. After all, like Nate said, “audiences will care if something that used to be human is made inhuman.” That’s a bar.
Speaking of bars, my next engagement was with a man who swapped the world of creator marketing for the world of beer. Conor Begley, former Co-Founder of Tribe Dynamics and Chief Strategy Officer of CreatorIQ and current Co-Founder of Father’s Brewing, was joined by former RHODE Beauty CEO and current Founder & CEO of LORE Melanie Bender, as well Joe Cloyes, Co-Founder of Youth to the People, LORE, and Father’s Brewing, as well as Greg Gonzalez, Co-Founder of Youth to the People and Lore, who was roped into the talk about two minutes prior to starting time, for a friendly game of “who here is the most serial of entrepreneurs?”
It was indeed a very founder-centric session, given that it was called “Founder Stories: Building Iconic Brands Across Categories.” These founders and friends, all of whom have worked together across multiple companies and eras in their lives, talked about the trials and tribulations and triumphs of the founding process.
I was struck by how the panelists sang the praises of ‘formlessness,’ and giving structure to the void. (I might be editorializing a little there.) The inventiveness, joy, beauty, and just pure fun of the building process came through loud and clear from every participant, making for an exciting and uplifting session. And that is why I am humbly asking these illustrious and highly successful founders to please send me some free product from all of your companies.
It was also quite gratifying to see Conor, normally so shy and demure, gain some confidence and make a mark for himself after his many years of churning out weird content, like podcasts where he’s eating chicken wings and hot sauce with no-name guests. Moving on up, my man. Congrats on the success!
The day’s final keynote featured the musical stylings of Vince Sasso and Rafaele Massarelli, aka Crash Adams, as well as Brit doing double-duty as emcee. Crash Adams came to fame on TikTok, amassing over 23M cumulative followers across their social channels, proving the perfect candidates to discuss “Cracking the Code of Virality.” The duo discussed their journey to fame, shared insights into their experimental highly analytical approach to building viral content, explained their infectious drive to spark joy for their listeners and treated the audience to some songs, sending us out to happy hour on a high note.
That’s right: you’re now only through the Day One portion of this newsletter. If it feels overwhelming to read all this, imagine how it felt to actually live through it.
Fortunately for both me and you, Day Two went by a little more quickly. But we saved a big surprise for the end, so please keep reading…
On the morning of Day Two, we rose weary yet energized, ready to do it all again. I only needed to look at the itinerary to get excited, and to remind myself of what a special day it was going to be. This day was structured for more actionable, close-knit sessions straight from experts, featuring some of my favorite folks from CreatorIQ, including:
If this doesn’t give you FOMO and send you rushing to bookmark CreatorIQ Connect 2026, then I don’t know what will, folks. I was there, and I still have FOMO about it!
Let’s jump in once again, and sprint through some of the highlights from a spectacular second day.
Starting with the Brig and Nate power duo (Brate?), session attendees were treated to a thoughtful overview of the space from two men who have been grappling with AI since well before it was a buzzword. Brate laid out the distinction between the technical ramifications of the great AI debate and the marketing implications, and how those aspects of the conversation intersect.
After laying out the landscape, the duo took questions from technical practitioners, often around how to best utilize AI within their creator strategies (might we recommend CreatorIQ?). I loved this interactive portion of the session, which gave the audience a chance to pick Brate’s Brain. Nate gave many detailed answers about CreatorIQ’s next generation roadmap, which you’ll be hearing a lot more about soon, since you clearly subscribe to our emails.
Another takeaway from the AMA: turns out the people crave brand safety and sentiment analysis and language modeling! Good thing we’ve got all that stuff. It’s a new age!
From there, it was right into celebrating another star moment with my HBBIP: Live! Costar, Cherline Bazile! Cher was leading the heck out of a session on The Creator Perspective, featuring incredible panelists in Chaz Smith, McCall Mirabella, and Shima Katouzian (@herosheemaz).
These peppy, shiny people dove right in and talked through how brands can improve their creator partnerships—after all, who better to ask? Shima talked through her drive for long-term partnerships over the transactional, while McCall spoke eloquently about the gratitude on both ends of the partnerships, and the need for creators to share their personal testimonies in branded posts—taking those talking points and applying it to the brand. Meanwhile, Chaz drilled down on going beyond creative control and achieving creative alignment, prioritizing collaboration on briefs and working closely together throughout the ideation process.
From there, things went into AMA mode, with a packed house asking these creators about topics ranging from advocating for regulated industries to how brands can make their pitches more appealing to creators. It was an animated, extremely informative session, and might I just say that Cher did an excellent job of moderating the discussion and adding thoughtful points. Creators are the heart of what we do, but all too often we don’t tap into their powerful voices and hear from them directly.
I could have listened to this for another hour or so—maybe even 90 more minutes, but hey, let’s not push it. Even creators get tired sometimes.
After that, I popped into the workshop featuring Brig, Michael, and Jamir—the backbone of the Strategic Services team—as they led a roundtable workshop walking brand attendees through CreatorIQ’s framework of descriptive, diagnostic, and predictive analytics. This was a trio in full command of their territory, and roved amid several dozen tables of buzzing workshop participants. The energy in the room was palpable; I could almost smell the creator marketing knowledge being shared and the gamechanging ideas being hatched.
It smelled like success, folks. It smelled like success.
During a much-needed lunch-break, I was fortunate to run into the delightful team from LSKD and thank them in person for the incredible shipment of product they sent to me and Mrs. HBBIP. It was such a kind, thoughtful gesture, and I was in no way surprised to learn that Carole and Tegan are just as kind and thoughtful IRL. Thank you, ladies, for all that you’ve done to support HBBIP, and CreatorIQ at large! We’re truly grateful for your efforts, and lucky to have such great people in our corner.
(And to answer your question, Carole, this edition of the newsletter took waaaaaaaay longer than six hours.)
Then we were right back into it for an action-packed afternoon! Which for me, was all about one panel and one panel only: mine! That’s right, my faithful readers: they gave your favorite newsletter writer a slot at CreatorIQ Connect! Now I know that if you didn’t go, you wish you had.
It was my honor to take this newsletter live and in person, and with such excellent participants! Please give a warm virtual welcome to my amazing co-panelists:
This was a stacked lineup, and I learned so much from these accomplished leaders, who were kind enough to take a break from crushing their respective brands to lend me some of their time on a Thursday afternoon. These speakers were determined by selecting from the highest-growing brands among CreatorIQ’s customer attendees, meaning that these were truly the best of the best.
After all, I just talk about building brands and influencing people. These amazing panelists actually went and did it!
A huge thank you to Mindy, Romain, and Malena for all your hard work and collaboration. Like Malena said, we’re co-panelists for life now, so please know that you’ll all always have a place in HBBIP.
As the last session of the day, my crew helped close things out on a high note. But before we wrap up this newsletter, I want to share a few last celebratory moments for the folks at home. This is another way of saying I’ve been writing this newsletter for two days straight and my brain is mush and I’m going through my cameraroll and thinking ‘yeah, that probably warrants a mention.’
Behold, the individuals behind CreatorIQ! What a talented, aesthetic collection of people. It’s an honor to pose with these folks. My thanks to each and every one of you for being who you are.
Finally, the biggest of shoutouts to Kimi Hurtado, our social queen and power-poster extraordinaire. Thank you for all you do to keep our accounts running as the best in the game!
The setting for that photo, btw, is a true behind-the-scenes look that you won’t get anywhere else: we were in the CreatorIQ staff room, AKA The Solarium, which was approximately 125 degrees. And yes, I was still repping my CreatorIQ sweater despite the heat, thank you very much.
Since this is probably the longest newsletter of all time, I’ll wrap things up and leave you with an image of how you might have found me in the solarium between sessions: stooped over, eyes glazed, hammering away at this very newsletter, slowly working toward the point where I could say, as I say at the end of every edition of HBBIP…
See you next time, and thank you so much for reading.
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