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JournalSocial30 July 2026

Creators are a casting decision

Casting session: a young man filming himself on a phone in a dark studio

We cast creators the way we cast a film: for a face, a voice and a reason to believe them. Follower counts come last.

Ama OwusuHead of social & creators · 5 min read

Our social team runs creator programmes like productions, with casting rounds, call sheets and usage agreed up front. It sounds slower than sending a brief to an influencer platform. It is slower, by about a week. It is also the reason our creator work gets repeated rather than skipped.

Start with the part, not the person

A film director does not begin with a list of famous actors. They begin with the part: who this person is, what they have to make the audience believe, and what would make them unbelievable. We write the same thing for creators before we look at a single profile.

For Pell Skin’s Bare Faced, the part was simple to write and hard to cast: someone with a real, visible skin concern, who would film the same shot on day one and day thirty, and who would not be tempted to use a filter on either. That ruled out most of the beauty accounts a platform search would have returned.

Self-tapes, not media kits

We ask every shortlisted creator for a self-tape: thirty seconds, on their phone, answering one question in their own words. Media kits tell you about reach. A self-tape tells you whether people will keep watching.

  • Do they look at the lens, or at themselves?
  • Do they sound like the product, or like an ad for it?
  • Would you believe them if you had never heard of the brand?

For Bare Faced we watched just over 400 tapes. The 60 creators we cast had a combined following smaller than one of the accounts we turned down.

Agree the usage before anyone films

The most expensive mistake in creator work is finding the perfect piece of content and discovering you cannot run it as an ad. We contract usage, whitelisting and exclusivity at the casting stage, in plain English, with fees set by the part rather than by follower count.

It means a creator knows exactly what they are signing up to, and a client knows exactly what they are paying for. It also means the media team can start planning on the day the content lands.

What we measure

We do not report on creator reach. We report on the same number as the rest of the campaign: the result we agreed in week two. For Pell, that was return on paid social, and the whitelisted creator ads were the best performing format by some distance.

Casting takes a week longer. The work it produces is the work people stop for.

A wall of instant-film casting photos pinned in rows, a hand pinning one more
The casting wall for Bare Faced: 400 self-tapes, 60 creators.

Ama Owusu, Head of social & creators · 30 Jul 2026

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