On this week’s episode of Earned, discover how Ted Raad transitioned from mergers and acquisitions to revolutionizing influencer engagement, inspired by his wife's journey as a fashion and lifestyle blogger. Learn how AI is reshaping the industry, empowering creators to maximize their potential and redefine brand strategies.
After a career in mergers and acquisitions, Ted’s perspective shifted thanks to one person: his wife, a fashion and lifestyle creator navigating brand partnerships and authenticity. Now, he’s helping lead the charge toward a more thoughtful, long-term approach to creator marketing—one rooted in trust, transparency, and community. Ted shares what it means to prioritize brand-aligned creators over one-off conversions and how his agency is evolving to support both ROI- and awareness-driven partnerships. He also makes a compelling case for integrating creator marketing into core brand strategies, not just siloed campaigns. Throughout the episode, we dig into what’s next: the growing role of AI in streamlining workflows, the challenge of standardizing measurement, and what it’ll take to future-proof creator programs at scale.
Check out highlights from the episode below, or or tune into the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen!
The following interview has been lightly edited for concision.
Brit Starr: When you are helping brands and creators decide what will be a good partnership, what is your criteria? What does good look like on the partnership side? When do you know when to lean in and accelerate those conversations and opportunities? And when do you know when to lean in and accelerate those conversations and opportunities, and when do you decide this isn't the right fit?
Ted Raad: There's Trend Management that manages the creators. We have a division Trend Social, which helps strategize with brands, and what we try to do and we try to tell them is that before you jump into this ROI side, you need to make sure that people understand who your brand is. And if a new brand started tomorrow and they said, hey, we want to just go straight to 2x return on ad spend (ROAS) and we want to pay this creator, we expect two times our money on this creator.
Well, if no one's ever heard of your brand, they're not going to trust the sales process and they're not going to believe in it. So you have to invest in the awareness side to get things going a little bit. Now, if you're the Abercrombies and the Nordstroms, those are well established. But if you're coming out of the gate with no one really understanding who you are, you need to make sure you establish the awareness piece. So we say, put on the side your budget to work with the brand awareness creators to get things moving a little bit, but also set apart a little bit for the ROI creators to get your name out there.
Then we have our ambassadors that are posting on their own channels and we are leveraging them for their audience reach and brand awareness, for those impressions and shares. And then we have affiliate influencers. We have a few different tiers in the structure there and different KPIs each way, and CreatorIQ absolutely is such a powerful tool. You guys have done such a good job and are always releasing new iterations and new features to discover new talent, because we always want to reach new audiences with new content creators and new styles. It's so important to us to be able to curate talent with the tools you have. That's really the community that we rely on to reach our external customer community—our creators.
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