How CPG Brands Build an Always-On Creator Strategy That Drives Retail Velocity

Rethinking the Real Goal of Social Media for CPG Brands

7:55 – 9:05

The best brands are the ones daring to fail and be open — whether with AI, creative content, or social platform strategies. Being transparent and a little vulnerable is a key unlock for social media success. Adam compares it to seeing a doctor: don't tell the doctor what your rash is. Let them examine you and then tell you what to do. That's where brands get tripped up — they come in convinced they already know the answer.

9:05 – 10:02

When a brand claims to know nothing or pretends to know everything, both signals point to the same problem: a lack of current understanding. Adam's first move is to reset the frame entirely:

"Imagine social media shut down. All the platforms disappeared. Start over. What is the actual goal of your brand? And it's always retail velocity. I want to move products at retail. Don't get lost in the sauce on terms — what's the goal of the brand?" — Adam Brown

When brands strip away the jargon, the answer is almost always the same — retail velocity. Moving product. The goal was always word-of-mouth; social media is just the modern infrastructure for it. Before platforms existed, you had Mavens and word-of-mouth spreaders finding products at farmer's markets and telling their friends.

10:02 – 11:05

Once the real goal surfaces, Adam works backward — from goal to strategies to tactics. He'll often try to talk brands out of hiring his agency first:

"Pretend I'm not even for hire. We're just having a coffee. What do you want to have happen? Let's break down the goal down to the strategies, down to the tactics." — Adam Brown

He spends more time acting as a therapist than a social media strategist — and once a brand can admit "I don't know what to do, I need to move more product, how can I do it?" — that's when a real conversation can begin.

What Small & Early-Stage Brands Should Focus On

11:53 – 13:15

"It's almost the best time ever to be small." Every major platform has followed TikTok's interest-based content model, which means new brands don't need a large existing following to get discovered. The algorithm favors new, relevant content over established follower counts — so if you're putting out content about wellness, beauty, food, or beverage, the right people will start finding you. You don't need to aggregate followers anymore; you need to reach people who are ready for discovery.

Even a modest paid social budget goes a long way:

"Even $10 can go a long way to target Whole Foods shoppers who live in Iowa. Why would you not want to guarantee that delivery?" — Adam Brown

13:15 – 14:47

For smaller brands with limited footprints, one-on-one conversations compound into network effects — the same way word-of-mouth worked before social networks existed. Adam recommends a hyperlocal community approach: local food markets, niche events, and one tactic he loves — the college speaking circuit. Jake Karls of Mid-Day Squares is a strong example: free public speaking engagements at colleges, roughly 100 students per session, every one of them a potential buyer and word-of-mouth ambassador who leaves with product in hand. The feedback loop from brands who've tried this has been consistently strong.

How the Strategy Shifts for Scaling Brands

14:47 – 17:06

A lot of the core strategy is consistent as brands scale — it just gets bigger. A brand moving from a $2M to $5M to $10M run rate in CPG has usually unlocked one key retail milestone — a Walmart national rollout, a successful Costco rotation, a Whole Foods national expansion. At scale, it's a portfolio of those bets running simultaneously rather than all eggs in one basket.

Creators and influencers serve multiple needs at once across different retail partners — you're not running one creator for one test; you're getting multiple bites of the apple, hitting overlapping shopper audiences across Kroger, Meijer, and Walmart in the same region. The big practical difference at scale: larger budgets unlock macro influencers, more sophisticated rights usage, and whitelisting strategies that simply aren't accessible at the early stage.

How to Use Creators at Key Retail Moments

17:06 – 19:10

Influencers and creators are not a vertical — they're horizontal. They touch every part of your business, up and down the funnel and everything in between. The real magic lives at the intersection: creator-influencers who are smaller, authentically influential within their community, willing to build ongoing relationships, and capable of serving multiple funnel stages at once.

The mistake brands make is treating creators as one-and-done:

"You can do 50 squats today — and that'll be better than if you did not do 50 squats. That's like hiring one creator for one thing. But if you do 50 squats every day at 2:00 PM for the full year, you will see results." — Adam Brown

19:10 – 21:27

When a brand just lands on shelf — especially at a major retailer — you have to get people in store right away because the shelf life on that opportunity is short. Retailers analyze velocity data fast. The play: get local creators in-store immediately to tell the real story — not a polished ad, but an authentic "I went to my local [retailer] and picked up this product which solves this need" moment.

But that's only the first step:

"A lot of people stop there. You need to grab that baton and be in full sprint. You already have rights usage, so you're able to use that content. You're going to whitelist it if there's a micro influencer, and you're going to pump a lot behind those local creators." — Adam Brown

That means you already have rights usage negotiated so you can immediately push that content into paid ads, whitelist it from the creator's account, and run hyper-local paid social behind it. Put your creator and paid social activation plan in your sales deck six months before launch. Buyers care about velocity, and they need to know you have a plan to underwrite it.

What Content Actually Moves Product

21:27 – 23:46

Two types of content serve different but complementary functions. Prescriptive content — showing exactly where in the store the product is located, which aisle, how to find it — solves a real friction point. Retailers merchandise differently, and a creator showing "I found it in the ethnic aisle, not the sauce aisle" genuinely helps shoppers.

But what actually moves product is real storytelling — the kind that spreads naturally, the way word of mouth always has:

"A friend of mine's wife — she's targeting women in their forties. I just look at her stories all the time and I'm like, done. I share the recipes with my wife, or I just go buy those products. She probably has very few followers. But I know that she is a person of influence that I align with fundamentally." — Adam Brown

Deeper storytelling around the product, rooted in a real person's real life, consistently outperforms surface-level "smile in the parking lot with the product" content.

29:19 – 31:04

Series content and story arcs work well for food brands — especially utility content that shows how the product fits into real life. Adam references Smash Brands (formerly Chia Smash): the founder put a camera on herself and showed her product on everything — toast, bread, crackers — throughout COVID. "Sometimes she was in it, sometimes it was just showing it — and it works." People started asking, "How else can I use this?" which is exactly the engagement loop a brand wants.

When working with third-party creators on series content, don't over-control the narrative — let them pitch ideas. The brands winning with creators are the ones willing to release some control and let creators find their own angle.

34:51 – 36:10

The best creator content often comes from unexpected use cases a brand would never have written into a brief. Adam's own example with NeuroGum:

"The number one unlock for me is: I've been skiing and snowboarding since I was 4. Having a large cup of coffee and then getting up on the ski lift and having to go to the bathroom is a thing. These give you caffeine without all the liquids. No one would have told me that as the brief. But anyone I know who can ski and snowboard, I'm like, you've got to get these." — Adam Brown

You cannot manufacture authentic use-case content — but you can create the conditions for it by giving creators creative freedom and trusting them to find it.

Authenticity: How to Vet Creators the Right Way

23:46 – 27:38

Authenticity is the most important element in this part of the strategy — and it should not be outsourced to AI. When evaluating creators, Adam cares very little about follower count or aggregate engagement rate. What he cares about is depth of engagement: if someone asked them a question, did they respond with a thoughtful answer? A creator who never responds to comments is inauthentic regardless of their following. Some cite volume as their excuse — "there are just too many comments." That, Adam says, is a crazy thing: not taking care of your community is neglecting your whole business.

The content diet ratio Adam recommends: 50% created content (who you are, why you matter, what's in your product, where to find it) and 50% curated content (fan photos, tagged UGC, real usage moments). AI can play in the experimental edges of that curated bucket — but replacing authentic human conversation is a mistake.

Additional vetting signal: does the creator post consistently around the topic? Trust is pre-built over time. It can't be manufactured in a single sponsored post. When agencies bring influencer lists and the only justification is "she gets lots of impressions," that's the wrong metric. Look at the actual comments — if they're all "fire 🔥" and "you look so pretty," that's low-depth engagement, not the real thing.

Building an Always-On Creator Strategy

36:11 – 40:25

For brands unsure where to start, Adam has a direct suggestion: go into ChatGPT and ask what an always-on creator strategy would look like for your specific brand. It will contextualize what a good one looks like versus a bad one — and most brands will recognize themselves in the bad list. A good always-on strategy has three components running together: creators generating content, paid social amplifying that content, and community management working proactively in the background.

Creator content and paid social should never be treated as separate silos. If you've negotiated rights usage, you can work with three creators up front and drip their content over three months in paid ads — it feels like you're everywhere, and you spent the work up front.

Early-stage brands without a full team should lean into volume plays: the college outreach model, or pure founder hustle — always carrying product, always making the ask. Two types of opportunities to pursue:

• Hot opportunities — people who already love your product and just need the ask. "Hey, if two people see you share it, it really would help me out." More people than you think will say yes.
• Warm opportunities — college audiences, LinkedIn outreach for campus reps, sending product to interns who go back to school and share with 10 friends. Low-hanging fruit that compounds.

40:25 – 45:34

Proactive community management is one of the most underused and highest-ROI activities in CPG social. The Bobby formula brand is a strong example — people talk about Bobby because of the surprise and delight follow-through: sliding into DMs of people who mention them organically, sending product, sending coupons.

"That word of mouth doesn't cost you a lot of money, but it goes a long way — especially in a niche community." — Adam Brown

The same logic applies to real-world events. Anyone posting about a Hyrox race or a Spartan Sprint is in a peak emotional moment — euphoric, challenged, proud. Adam's practical challenge for brands: commit to doing 20 outreach messages a day for 5 days — that's 100 touchpoints. A lot won't respond. But if 20–25 do, you've created real positive brand affinity:

"You can even get creative about it — if you are big in Texas and you see people posting in Texas, over-index. Say, 'We're at HEB, here's the product.' You're seeding word-of-mouth opportunity in a way that before the internet, you didn't even have." — Adam Brown

45:45 – 46:51

On founder-forward content: if you have a star quarterback, use them. Not everyone is camera-ready, and not everyone needs to be — but even getting a reluctant founder from neutral to "kind of okay with it" is worth pursuing. Culture Pop Soda and Graza are good examples of brands that pull founders into content naturally without making it feel forced. Founder involvement is a strong authenticity trigger — it signals that the people who built the product are still engaged with the community around it.

Proving ROI & Budgeting for Influencers

51:37 – 54:06

Proving creator ROI to executives is one of the hardest conversations in CPG marketing. Adam's framing: show them that creator marketing is horizontal, not a vertical line item — it touches paid ads, retail media (Instacart), sales deck materials, organic social, and earned media all at once.

When a brand recently gave Adam a budget for a Target national rollout that would only cover five influencers with full whitelisting, he pushed back: when you sit with your bosses in three months, are they going to love five people — or do they want to see volume? The answer was obvious. Brands need to have an appetite for both true influencers (for reach and credibility) and creators (for content volume and paid ad fodder).

"Don't analyze this as: we gave Emily $100, did we get $101 in return? Because that's a fool's errand when it comes to supporting a CPG brand in-store." — Adam Brown

The better measurement framework: did this content support velocity across all retail partners, feed paid ads, and generate enough earned word-of-mouth to compound over time?

56:42 – 58:31

On influencer pricing: for a highly engaged influencer with rights usage and whitelisting, budget in the thousands — not hundreds. If that's out of reach, prioritize creators without traditional influence and put the budget into paid ads on their content to guarantee delivery.

"We're in a little bit of an inflated influencer pricing dynamic right now. I think it'll start to creep down, especially as creators start to rise up." — Adam Brown

Co-op opportunities — two complementary brands sharing the cost of a single influencer partnership (a cracker brand and a jam brand, for example) — are an underused way to access larger creators on tighter budgets. Keep warm relationships with agents and managers; when influencers get hungrier, the brands with existing relationships will get better deals.