H/L's Austin Price Talks Collaborating With Creators as Media Strategy
July 30, 2026
Creator partnerships are no longer just content opportunities or one component of a brand’s social strategy – they’re core components of paid media strategy.
According to 12 media experts who spoke with LBB, including Lizzy Ryan, head of media and communications at Cutwater, the shift has been seismic. As she puts it, “They're becoming the media strategy.”
She adds, “The brands winning right now are the ones treating creator content less like a one-off post and more like a scalable engine that can drive relevance, paid performance, and real business impact across the funnel.”
The most successful collaborations align the creator and their audience with brand objectives, and play a meaningful role within the brand’s broader content ecosystem. Jessi Minneci, senior content strategist at DAC, thinks this is when creator work stops feeling like one-off posts with influencers, and more like partnerships with “strategic brand translators”.
“A strong creator doesn’t just extend reach for a brand, they bring credibility, platform instinct, and a format or perspective that humanises brand messaging and makes it feel more natural in-market,” says Jessi.
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Austin Price, social media director at H/L, describes these collaborations as treating content “like a hypothesis”. He elaborates, “You back the creative risk with data, amplify what earns it, and cut what doesn't. No vanity reach numbers. No 30-day ‘see how it lands’ cycles. Just creative with a reason behind it, measured against the audience that can actually buy.”
The creators’ social channels are then “the real-time nervous system of the market” – a two-way testing ground offering rich sources of context for every creative and media decision. “A creator's comment section tells you why something landed, not just what happened,” Austin explains. “That's intelligence you can't buy from a media plan alone.”
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