PrettyGreen’s Steve Parker says precise targeting opens up sequential creator storytelling

Steve Parker of PrettyGreen argues that the next big opportunity in creator marketing is not more scale but using existing scale with far greater precision.

For most of the past decade, he says, creator marketing has simply grown: larger creators, communities, budgets and programmes. As creator content becomes more closely linked to paid amplification and sharper platform targeting, brands can decide far more precisely which audiences see which stories, and that is where he believes it becomes creatively interesting.

Rather than a single creator delivering a single story to everyone, brands can start with the various reasons people might care about a product. Different creators can then dramatise each reason for a different audience, with stories that build on one another over time.

One brand idea, many routes in

Parker cites the Barbie film launch, which used hundreds of creators from many communities and gave people very different ways into the same recognisably Barbie world. For brands, he says, that is a much bigger prize than making creator media more efficient, because a single brand idea can stay consistent while each audience finds a more relevant way in.

He says his interest stems from a career spent moving between parts of the industry. He has worked at PR, media and advertising agencies, set up a social agency, been seconded to a client’s startup incubator and advised organisations including the FT Group on social transformation. Consequently, he has never seen social or creators as belonging to one discipline. “The interesting stuff has usually happened in the gaps between them,” he writes.

The ad that haunts you

That background has led him back to a Halloween campaign for Argos he worked on several years ago, ‘The Ad That Haunts You’.

The idea took something consumers found irritating, retargeting ads that follow people around the internet, and turned it into the creative concept. Shoppers who had browsed Halloween products on Argos found the masks, vampire costumes and spooky decorations they had looked at coming back to haunt them in a tongue-in-cheek series of ads as they moved around online. The more the ads followed them, the better the joke got.

The sequential campaign beat the brand’s standard activity by 30%. The technology was not the point, Parker says, since retargeting already existed. The creative leap was making the annoying part of it the idea.

Sequential creator stories

He argues creators now offer many more ways to apply that principle, using the example of a new running shoe. A running creator might launch the shoe and test it. A physio creator could then take over and explain what different runners should look for in a shoe. As interest grows, UGC creators could show the product in daily life, answer practical questions or provide social proof, and people showing stronger intent might see content on fit, sizing or choosing the right model.

These are not just versions of the same ad, he says, because every creator contributes their own expertise, experience and bond with an audience. He cites recent TikTok analysis finding that, for the same media cost, ads led by creators delivered 70% higher click-through rates than those without.

“Each piece can work on its own, but together they can build a story,” he writes.

After years of thinking about sequential media, Parker believes the industry can now take sequential creator storytelling seriously, and that this affects who should shape such programmes. The starting point, he argues, should be the brand idea, the reasons it might matter to people, and which creators and communities are best placed to tell those stories, rather than an audience segment and a media plan. That gives social, creator and earned teams a central role, working alongside media teams who then find and reach audiences more precisely.

He says client conversations are already shifting. When a piece of creator content does unexpectedly well or produces a strong intent signal, the question moves quickly from how it performed to “what should we show this audience next?”

This does not mean slotting different creator types into tidy funnel stages, he adds. A UGC creator may produce an idea strong enough to lead a campaign, or a specialist may create the piece everyone shares. The best work often comes when a creator takes the brief somewhere unexpected. “Better targeting can’t replace that creative idea or judgment. It just gives it more places to go.”

Audible across the UK and Germany

Parker says PrettyGreen is exploring this by bringing together data, creative, earned and paid media and creators, including in work for Audible in the UK and Germany.

There is no single ‘audiobook audience’, he argues. Instead there are commuters, crime fans, parents looking for children’s stories, fantasy readers, self-development listeners and many other groups with quite different motivations.

The aim is not to find one big book creator to talk about Audible but to work out which creators can make particular aspects of the offer meaningful to different people. A crime creator enthusing about the narrator of a new thriller tells one story; someone who listens on a morning run tells another; a parent who finds something that makes a long car journey far less painful tells a third.

“Same brand. Completely different reasons to care,” he writes. The brand stays the same; what changes is how people discover its relevance to them.

That also brings commercial questions into play: which stories create interest, which creators bring in new people, and which messages encourage someone to try a title, start a trial or return.

Keeping the human element

Paid amplification can take those stories beyond a creator’s own followers, Parker says, and the response produces signals that can inform the wider marketing programme as well as the next creator brief.

He sees an irony in this. Creator marketing works because a real person sits at its centre, and brands are now gaining much of the precision of modern media without losing that human element.

Done badly, he warns, it could mean churning out 47 versions of what is basically the same ad and aiming them at ever narrower segments. “Nobody needs that.”

The better question for brands, he argues, is how many genuinely different reasons people have to care about what they do, and then finding creators able to express those reasons in ways the brand could not manage alone. “More precision shouldn’t make creator marketing more predictable. Done properly, it should give creativity more places to go.”