There’s more to creator marketing than just ‘doing it’ with Agentio’s Arthur Leopold

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Arthur Leopold is the co-founder and CEO of Agentio, an AI-native platform for creator advertising. He is set to speak at Retail Brew’s upcoming event, The Future of Retail Marketing: Content, Data and the Power of Community, on March 19th on how he’s rethinking where brands and creators can work together and simplify campaigns. Before then, we had a chance to pick his brain on the current creator landscape and what brands are leveraging that to their advantage.

Retail is moving at the speed of culture. What’s one shift you think marketers are still underestimating in 2026?

Fifty percent of consumers’ attention goes towards creators’ content, yet only 2% of ad spend goes towards creator marketing. This is the biggest gap today. And while the world’s top brands know that creators matter, it’s not a coincidence that Unilever’s CEO recently said 50% of their budget will move to creators. A lot of marketers still don’t understand that creators need to be embedded across the entire funnel, not siloed into a single awareness play or a one-off campaign moment.

That means building a diversified portfolio of creator partnerships across tiers: macro-creators for pipeline and broad awareness, mid-tier creators for engagement and consideration, and micro-creators for niche community trust and conversion. Each tier plays a distinct role, and the brands that treat them as interchangeable are leaving enormous value on the table.

We see this clearly on Agentio. Our data shows that brands testing ten or more creator verticals increase their chances of finding successful partnerships by up to 2.3x. The lesson is simple: a diversified creator portfolio outperforms concentrated bets every time. The brands winning right now aren’t just “doing creator marketing”; they’re building creator programs with the same rigor they bring to paid search or programmatic.

Let’s connect storytelling to measurable outcomes. Where are you seeing the strongest link between content and conversion right now?

Storytelling is an incredible lever to engage audiences that would never have engaged with a brand through traditional channels, and convert them through creator trust.

One thing that doesn’t get talked about enough is how creators unlock audiences that a brand’s own voice simply can’t reach. Every brand has a defined identity. That’s a strength, but it’s also a ceiling. There are communities and demographics that will never respond to your brand speaking directly to them, no matter how good the creative is. Creators solve that. They act as authentic intermediaries who can translate your brand’s message into their own voice, their own style, their own cultural context without diluting what your brand stands for. You get to reach new audiences with a tone that resonates with them, while the core message stays intact and your brand identity stays protected.

A great example is Maev, a premium raw dog food brand who used Agentio to run their YouTube Creator program. YouTube was genuinely incremental for them, and for two reasons. First, the long-form format gave creators the space to actually tell the Maev story—why raw feeding matters, what makes the product different—in a way that a 15-second clip or static image never could. Second, Agentio matched them with creators who actually owned dogs across all kinds of verticals—cooking, fitness, lifestyle, family—not just pet creators. When a fitness creator you trust is feeding their dog Maev in the background of their morning routine, that feels authentic, because it is. The results showed it: Maev achieved an 18-point lift in consideration and intent through Agentio YouTube Creators, compared to other channels.

What metric matters more to you today than it did two years ago, and why?

More than any single metric, what’s changed is how the best brands measure these metrics. Two years ago, most teams were relying on last-touch attribution or multi-touch models (MTAs) to evaluate performance.

Today, the top brands are shifting to Marketing Mix Models (MMMs) to measure the true incremental impact of their channel. Klover is a great example. They’re a cash advance app that ran YouTube Creator partnerships through Agentio, and rather than relying on click-based attribution, they worked with BlueAlpha to integrate Agentio delivery data into an MMM. The results were clear: 10% of all iOS conversions were attributable to Agentio against just 5.5% of total iOS spend. Once they had that incrementality signal, they doubled their quarterly Creator spend. This sort of insight is something that wouldn’t have been possible with old-school last-touch measurement.

So the real shift isn’t a new metric; it’s a new measurement philosophy. The brands scaling fastest are the ones that moved from last-touch to incrementality-based measurement and gave their marketing programs the attribution framework they actually deserve.

What’s one experiment your team ran recently that changed the way you think about growth?

Recently, we had our entire company read Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara. It’s a book about how Eleven Madison Park became the best restaurant in the world not by obsessing over the food alone, but by creating an unmatched experience for every guest. Guidara’s core insight is that extraordinary client experiences can only come from teams that are themselves having an extraordinary experience. You can’t deliver something you don’t feel.

That idea hit home for us. At Agentio, we’re building infrastructure that brands and creators rely on to move real dollars and make real decisions. The only way that works is if the people building it are exceptional and deeply motivated. So we constantly hire the best people we can find, and then we give them a high degree of independence to push beyond their comfort zone. We don’t micromanage. We trust our team to own their domains, take risks, and operate with the same standard of care we want our clients to feel.

The lesson from Guidara that I keep coming back to is that hospitality—whether to your clients or your team—isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s the growth engine. Take care of your people unreasonably well, and they’ll take care of your clients unreasonably well. That’s the flywheel.

What’s one brand you’re watching closely right now? Why?

Olipop.

They’ve done something really rare: They’ve built a genuine lifestyle brand in a commodity category. Soda is one of the most crowded shelves in retail, and Olipop broke through not by outspending incumbents but by leaning into creator partnerships and authentic storytelling in a way that made the brand feel like a cultural movement, not just a beverage. They’re one of our partners on Agentio, and watching how they scale their creator program with real strategic rigor across tiers and verticals is a master class in modern brand building.