Award Case Studies Highlight Successful Creator Campaigns
By Bill Zimmerman, APR, M.Ed.
November-December 2025
Brand safety fails. Overlooked skeletons in the closet. Misspent money on a collaboration that makes no impact.
There’s plenty to send a shiver down the spine of a PR pro tasked with leveraging the power of content creators in campaigns.
Thankfully, there’s a beacon of best practices growing brighter by the day:
- Major brands are adding positions like creator partnerships lead, influencer marketing manager and creator educator.
- Brands like Starbucks and Nerf are outright hiring creators as employees to use their audience-building skills in-house.
- Conference presentations, panel discussions and webinars are clarifying what works.
- And, perhaps most helpful, case studies are offering practitioners a playbook for supercharging campaigns with the reach and trust possessed by creators.
Annual honors such as PRSA’s Anvils illustrate how brands integrate content creators in ways that are increasingly more strategic. The following are four themes of these modern, finely tuned campaigns.
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Bill Zimmerman, APR, M.Ed.
Bill Zimmerman, APR, M.Ed., is an assistant teaching professor in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State University. He’s the author of the textbook “Understanding the Creator Economy: Making Digital Media Work for You,” which will be published by Kendall Hunt in fall 2024.
