Influencer initiatives, Culture Activations and Seeding

I've been working with "influencers" and athletes for the last 2 decades before the digital transformation.    My teams and I have created proprietary strategies to integrate influencers into brands which are constantly evolving as the Digital landscape changes.     Those have now become  industry best practice.    

At Oakley I run sports marketing global strategy which includes all global events, digital, social media, planning and activation planning for our roster.    At Converse  I was in charge of seeding and Influencer Marketing strategy.   This was a relatively new function globally so we developed mobile driven influencer programs that leveraged the social media and streetwear verticals and started building relationships with influencers within that space.    We moved beyond traditional entertainment and sports marketing to evolve digitally to reach our consumer.    Our goal was to build relationships with trailblazers across both macro and micro levels.  Our strategy was to garner social media storytelling that tied into the culture of launch for each activation in the voice and on the channel of the influencer.

We activated and integrated influencers across 3 strategic pillars to build relationships and garner advocacy:

-experiences & activations

-product design consultation

-content creation & social

At Adidas and with my consulting clients, we worked with influencers on co-creation where they were integrated relationally for over a one year period that culminated with a co-creation product coming to market.     When I worked at NTWRK we always had influencers attached to our festival  and brand partnerships projects through non endemic clients like Microsoft, Mountain Dew, Xbox, Chips Ahoy and Kingsford.