Hey friends,
Welcome back to Creator Etiquette®.
I saw a LinkedIn post saying Kenny Gold had just been named the first ever Global Chief Creative Officer at Edelman, which one of the most respected communications firms in the world. I sent him a LinkedIn message and he immediately gave me his email. Less than two weeks later, we were sitting outside at Cannes Lions in the south of France recording this episode. Shoot your shot. He will tell you himself, he responds.
Kenny has spent his career at the intersection of brand communications and creator strategy, and we got into how brands are still getting it wrong, what earned media value really looks like when you strip away the vanity metrics, and how to push back on a brief without torching the relationship.
Creator Is Not a Marketing Function. It Is a C-Suite Endeavor.
Most agencies and most brands still treat creator as a function that lives inside the CMO's remit. It is a marketing channel with a budget attached. Kenny's philosophy is that creators have a reach and a relevance that extends far beyond marketing. They touch business transformation. They touch research and development. They touch employee relations and the way a company tells its internal story. When you treat creator as a full C-suite endeavor rather than a marketing line item, you unlock a completely different kind of partnership.
For creators, this distinction matters practically. If you are pitching yourself only as a content deliverable, you are competing in a crowded, commoditized space. If you can articulate how what you know about your audience is genuinely useful to a brand's strategy, you are in a different conversation entirely.
You Are an Audience Anthropologist
Kenny called creators audience anthropologists. The people who are literally unearthing insights from their community day in and day out, in real time, without a research budget or a survey vendor. A creator with a genuine audience knows things about how a specific group of people think, what they care about, what language they actually use, what they will and will not respond to.
The implication for how you pitch yourself is significant. You are not selling a post. You are selling access to a level of audience understanding that a brand's internal research team cannot replicate at the same speed or depth. If you have never framed your pitch that way, try it. Lead with what you know about your audience, not just what your numbers say.
Relevance Over Reach
Kenny’s concept of earned creator value has many factors, some being engagement rate, sentiment quality, shares, comments, and crucially, how those metrics benchmark against similar creators in the same category. The question Edelman asks is not how many people follow you. It is: if we work with this creator, what is the percentage lift in engagement we can expect against the benchmark, and is that lift worth the investment?
When a brand or agency asks you about your value, this is the language they are speaking internally. The creator who can walk in and say my engagement rate is X, which benchmarks Y percent above the average for my category, and here is the sentiment breakdown of how my audience responds to brand content, is having a very different conversation than the one who leads with their follower count.
What Brands Are Still Getting Wrong
The biggest mistake brands and agencies are still making is treating creators like traditional media vehicles. The mindset that a campaign flows as insight, then brief, then asset, then you go do what I said. That does not match how creator content actually works. The brands that get the best results are the ones who bring creators into the process earlier.
The related mistake is the one-off project. Kenny pushes hard for long-term contracts because the more a creator and a brand work together, the more that trust compounds and the better the creative output gets. He used a doubles tennis analogy that stuck with me: the best doubles partners learn each other's quirks, pitfalls, and strengths over time. That is what a long-term creator-brand relationship builds. One-off campaigns are the equivalent of calling a stranger to fill in on game day.
How to Push Back on a Brief Without Losing the Deal
I asked Kenny directly how a creator can push back on a brief when the ask does not match what they know will work for their audience, all without without torching the relationship or losing the contract.
You can be candid without being crass. You say “I know my audience better than anybody. This is who they are. This is how I have connected with them. This is how this audience has grown from A to B over this period of time, because I have developed content in this way. If you would like to work with me, I want this to be a co-creation relationship, and I would love to represent your brand to my audience. But there are some elements of this brief that will not work with the people I know better than anybody. If I do it the way you are asking, while it might fit the brief, it will not land.”
I loved the bowling alley analogy he used. If you run a bowling alley and a birthday party comes in telling you exactly how they want to do it, you have every right to say “I have seen how this community reacts to this space, and here is what actually works.” We have to trust the person who runs the bowling alley to know the bowling alley.
Do Not Stage Crash
Kenny described what he called stage crashing. When a panel ends and the audience immediately rushes the speakers before they have had thirty seconds to come down from the adrenaline of being on stage. He was clear that it genuinely throws people off, no matter how experienced they are. The elevated mental state of public speaking requires a real moment to transition before the brain can engage meaningfully with whoever comes next.
His advice: wait. Let the speaker breathe. Introduce yourself politely when they have had a moment. A connection made with someone whose nervous system has returned to baseline will always land better than one made in the disorientation immediately post-stage.
Kenny’s Creator Etiquette Tip
Kenny's creator etiquette tip was to “Walk in with an enormous sense of pride in what you have built and why you are in the room in the first place.” Let that pride be the fuel of your behavior as you talk to that executive. Not arrogance. Not performance. Pride — rooted in the real, documented evidence of what you have created and who you have reached and what you have built over time.
Kenny, thank you for thirty of the most useful minutes of the whole Cannes week. Go find him on LinkedIn and shoot your shot! He means it when he says he responds.
Welcome to Creator Etiquette®. I am so glad you are here.
Xo, Gigi Robinson
Founder, Hosts of Influence® | Creator, Educator, Speaker, Author, Dog Mom 🐾
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