This Agency CEO Says the ‘Spice Girls’ Strategy Is How You Win Influencer Marketing

For founders looking for a place to start, begin by finding your brand’s Spice Girls. That’s the advice from Jo Cronk, the co-CEO of Whaler, a creator marketing agency that counts Anthropic, Spotify, Waymo, Activision, IKEA, and the NFL as clients and was acquired by Accenture Song, the creative, marketing, and customer experience arm of the global consulting firm, in June. 

What do the Spice Girls have to do with influencer marketing strategy?

“Create your version of the Spice Girls,” Cronk told a group of entrepreneurs while speaking at the Inc. 5000 Conference in Dallas last week. “The Spice Girls were before their time. None of them would have become what Spice Girls have become unless they came together. Five faces, five voices, five different fan bases that together created magic.”

That means “spreading your bets” when it comes to working with creators, Cronk added. Hedge against risk by investing in different personalities and testing out different platforms. “It’s like your own financial portfolio. You need to diversify to protect yourself,” said Cronk, who has spent more than two decades in marketing and advertising and co-led the creation of Whaler’s Moby Ventures, a venture studio that works with creators to build, launch, and scale direct-to-consumer brands. Platforms “change the algorithm,” and “One person can get canceled in today’s culture.” 

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When hiring creators, Cronk advised founders to treat them not just as an ad maker, but as consultants and advisors, who can evaluate your company’s products or services and provide user feedback. “Outside voices coming in and actually sitting at a table,” said Cronk, “They might see something in your product that you don’t see yourself.”

Cronk has experienced this firsthand when working with creators on behalf of clients, such as Canva, Adobe, and Microsoft’s Copilot. Her team is asked to “brief a creator on something” and discover that they “actually use the product for this…not the thing that you think we use it for.”

Founders also need to find their own internal Spice Girls, who are already on payroll, Cronk advised. As much as entrepreneurs and CEOs “need to lean into being a creator,” they need to turn their team into creators as well, encouraging them to lean into their own areas of expertise and create relevant content around it on different platforms, including LinkedIn. “You need the Spice Girls below you, so you’re not the only person posting. There’s a group that are posting,” she said.