In a world of fleeting social trends, how do you build a creator strategy that drives measurable, long-term revenue instead of just chasing momentary spikes in engagement?
Agility requires not just launching campaigns, but building systems that can learn and adapt in real-time based on actual consumer behavior and sales data.
Today, we’re going to talk about the evolution from influencer marketing to true creator commerce. This isn’t just about paying for posts anymore; it’s about building scalable, data-driven ecosystems where creators become a genuine extension of your sales and merchandising teams, directly impacting the bottom line.
We are here at eTail Palm Springs, and to help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome, Wendy Wildfeuer from Motom.
About Wendy Wildfeuer
Wendy Wildfeuer is a leading expert in the creator economy and social commerce, helping brands and retailers turn creator marketing into scalable, sustainable revenue through Motom’s white-label creator storefront solution, Anchor. Wendy’s career spans leading marketing and monetization for iconic teen brands such as dELiA*s, Alloy, and Gossip Girl. She also played a pivotal role in the rise of YouTube influencer networks and spearheaded NBCU’s first original digital IP production deal for brands with Broadway Video, creators of Saturday Night Live.
A recognized innovator at the intersection of retail, tech, and media, Wendy brings extensive expertise as brands look to take back control of the shopper journey in a rapidly evolving digital landscape, where social commerce is a critical pillar of a unified commerce strategy.
Wendy Wildfeuer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wendywildfeuer/
Resources
Motom: https://company.motom.me
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Transcript
Greg Kilhstrom: In a world of fleeting social trends, how do you build a creator strategy that drives measurable long-term revenue instead of just chasing momentary spikes in engagement? Agility requires not just launching campaigns, but building systems that can learn and adapt in real time based on actual consumer behavior and sales data. Today we’re going to talk about the evolution from influencer marketing to true creator commerce. This isn’t just about paying for posts anymore. It’s about building scalable, data-driven ecosystems where creators become a genuine extension of your sales and merchandising teams, directly impacting the bottom line.
We’re here at eTail Palm Springs, and to help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Wendy Wildfeuer from Motom. Wendy, welcome to the show.
Wendy Wildfeuer: Thanks for having me. Good to see you.
Greg Kilhstrom: Should I say welcome back to the show? So, yeah.
Wendy Wildfeuer: That’s right. That’s right.
Greg Kilhstrom: So, before we dive in, uh, why don’t you give a little background on yourself and your role at Motom?
Wendy Wildfeuer: Great. My name is Wendy. I am one of the co-founders of Motom. We are a social commerce technology and managed services company that enables any brand or retailer to build their own creator commerce solution so that they can solve some of the challenges tied to customer journey from social media, first-party data ownership, and direct relationships with creators.
Greg Kilhstrom: Great, love it. Um, so let’s, let’s dive in here and want to want to start from the the strategic level, kind of, kind of high level here. So, um, Motom recently did a creator commerce report, and in that report, you draw a clear line between traditional influencer marketing and this newer model that that we’re going to talk about today. So, for a CMO at a enterprise, what’s the fundamental strategic difference between a more traditional influencer marketing and and the newer model and and why is this distinction so critical to grasp right now?
Wendy Wildfeuer: That’s a great question. What I would say is there shouldn’t be a distinction any longer because the old school, which is really new school, but the old school way of influencer marketing was obviously focusing on identifying creators that have large reach, recognition, recognizability, and using them for campaigns and crossing your fingers and hoping that it resulted in lower funnel impact. And now today, given technology, sophistication of social shoppers, sophistication of creators, and just the advancement of tech, that purchase funnel, that marketing funnel has collapsed, not in a bad way. In a good way. So it’s condensed, right? So you go from upper funnel awareness, which is at the discovery point, and given the way that creators are really focused on driving recommendations, et cetera, with linking technologies and all of that, you get the ability to discover and purchase in the same moment. And so what marketers have been struggling with is how do they quantify the investment in creators? How do they demonstrate performance internally, and more importantly, how do they actually turn it into a revenue model?
And so for CMOs, for heads of e-commerce, for heads of affiliate, whoever it might be, what we’ve built enables to bring those disparate groups together, and so paid social can work in collaboration with affiliate, who can work in collaboration with influencer marketing and PR to turn this incredibly powerful marketing engine into a revenue growth engine.
Greg Kilhstrom: Yeah, yeah, got it. And so you work with some, some amazing brands, like your partners, Macy’s and Sephora. They have well-established merchandising and e-commerce teams. How does integrating a a robust creator storefront strategy change the internal dynamics and processes between marketing, merchandising, and that the core e-commerce functions?
Wendy Wildfeuer: That’s a a great question and it it’s a great segue from what we were just talking about, which is it brings it together. And so every team is structured differently. Sure, especially the influencer marketing teams vary company to company. Some have a very, uh, robust group and robust could be 10 people, and many have two people. And so shared responsibility can be a very positive thing, it can also silo groups. And so what the most effective way for leadership to bring these things together is to build an own capability and bring it in-house. And we don’t advise clients to do that in lieu of being in marketplaces because you have to be in the places and spaces where people are shopping, but what’s super important is to minimize the over-reliance for brands and retailers on third-party platforms because they don’t get the first-party data. They don’t have a direct relationship with the creator. They may have an indirect relationship, but the platforms gatekeep that. And so the then the brands and retailers lose control, and the power dynamic has compleTaily shifted. So, the market’s now catching up, and when I say the market, I mean brands and retailers are starting to catch up and understand that having your own creator commerce solution and offering that to creators is critical to their business growth and also something that the teams have to come together and align on in order to greenlight and move forward.
Greg Kilhstrom: Right, right. And I I know we’re mostly going to talk about this from the from the brand perspective, but I can’t help but imagine from the creator perspective, that’s got to be a load off as well, right? Because I mean, all that they don’t need to have as much infrastructure to be able to support some of these efforts as well, right?
Wendy Wildfeuer: Well, if you think about, I’m going to use creators as a broad term. Sure. So, doesn’t matter what category, from a retail standpoint, it could be beauty, it could be sports, could be pet food. Right, right. They want to work closely with the brands and retailers. That is where the revenue comes from for them at the end of the day. Even if it’s, you know, even if the transaction happens through a platform and they get affiliate commission or a flat fee payment is run through someone’s agency, the brands and retailers fund the economy.
Greg Kilhstrom: Yeah. Creator economy.
Wendy Wildfeuer: And so when you have creators who are fans of a brand or retailer, they want to work more closely. They want to have direct access. And so they’re excited about this, and they have been, you know, what we’ve been doing over the last few years is testing the experience. So what, you know, I think the problem in the market has been that all these tech solutions popped up, right? And then there were redundant tech solutions that were just iterations of the one before. And so you have creators. There were platforms like LTK and Shop My who have kind of established the market, were built for creators. Right? They were built to help creators monetize, and everything was focused on that. You have on the other side, you have all these B2B platforms in the old SaaS world, which we’re not, we don’t say SaaS anymore. I don’t know if you know that. Um, and so, um, and so those platforms were built for brands and retailers to find creators, but they weren’t built for creators, right? And so you have that split if someone doesn’t address the middle, right? And the middle is building something that delivers on the needs of brands and retailers, that brands and retailers can control and, um, monetize, but in a way that is built to address the needs of creators. And that is where that kind of secret sauce comes in.
Greg Kilhstrom: Yeah, yeah. So let’s let’s talk a little bit about how this works in in practice. And so you’ve had um some recent success with themed creator storefronts for things like Valentine’s Day. Um can you walk us through, you know, the the tactical process of how a brand moves from an idea to a live multi-creator campaign that actually drives sales?
Wendy Wildfeuer: Oh, boy. That’s a big one.
Greg Kilhstrom: Maybe the condensed version. Yeah, the 30-second elevator pitch of that.
Wendy Wildfeuer: Um, what I would say is, so in that example specifically, um, Macy’s has been our client for long-term in the short-term world that we all live in. And they’ve got a great network of creators, and what they started to identify was that they wanted to align seasonal priorities with their content campaigns. Obvious, right? Back to school, Valentine’s Day, et cetera, but the campaigns were focused on content. And so now with the ability for them to give creators options to merchandise and curate products, and then have themed seasonal storefront designs, the creators are excited to share their storefronts, and Macy’s gets to drive their broader brand priorities through that lens. But it doesn’t matter for the Valentine’s Day, uh, initiative if the products were tied to Valentine’s Day. Right. So it’s just a fun way for a brand to own the experience, um, while giving all of that flexibility and adaptability to the creators.
(Music)
Greg Kilhstrom: So, um, a a key part of the value proposition is also curating the customer journey. How does the path to purchase through a creator storefront differ from a more traditional social ad or click-through to a main brand site and what are the friction points you’re helping to eliminate? I know you touched a little bit on this, but maybe a little more detail.
Wendy Wildfeuer: The most important thing is to enable a potential customer to come over to an a non-chaotic environment when you’re coming from such chaos on social media. So with the concept of creator storefront, a brand-owned creator storefront, or just a direct product link, because that those still exist, you know, you have to give the creator tools so that they can use what they need in that moment. But focusing on storefronts, the previous journey would be a brand pays creators or they give them access to affiliate links through either their affiliate network or through an LTK or Shop My if that’s the category, right? Creator and then their content features the products, the recommendations, and then there’s a link in their link tree or link in bio or they, you know, post as a comment like many chat and things like that. And then they drive the customer to a marketplace that has many different brands, hard to find that product, or the brand will give the creator a direct link and they’re driving them to the homepage. And so you lose the customer when you drop them in a non-contextual environment. They’re motivated, inspired by the content that they’ve seen from the creator or just loving that creator and wanting to, you know, whether you are seeing a piece of content where that product matters, or you just trust that creator’s advice, making that path to purchase and to get their recommendations easy is is table stakes. And so what we’re seeing is increased conversion rate. We see creators, this again, this is brand-owned. So we’re able to compare the creator conversion prior to having this capability for the brand, right? And can increase 10 times. Um, average order value. So when the creator has a storefront and they have a potential customer run through, they may not buy anything from that exact those that exact curation, but we can track all of the the click paths and the cart value, and so that then what we’ve seen is that we’ve been able to increase AOV by 135%. So rather than just grabbing a link, or clicking on someone’s link that sends them to a marketplace like LTK, they get right to where they need to go, and it’s done, right? Because they want to buy from the brands and retailers. As much as TikTok Shop has blown up and will continue to be a very important piece of the puzzle, they, you know, people don’t want to buy from a social platform. They have concerns about privacy, trust, and also logistics, operational.
Greg Kilhstrom: Right. Well, and and to the to the other point as well, I mean, attribution is key from the brand per. I mean, they want to know that their dollars are going to the right place. And and so having, you know, centralizing some of that stuff, and, um, I know you talked a little bit about this, but you know, what what kind of first-party data are you, um, enabling brands to collect through this? Because that’s an that’s another key part of it too, right?
Wendy Wildfeuer: Huge, huge, especially given the importance of paid media in the in the mix. So many conversations we’re having while we’re here at eTail has been about the increase in investment in paid media for social. So being able to capture, drop pixels, drop your Google tag manager on those pages, so rather than sending the potential customer through a circle, right? On a on a, you know, winding road to get to you, to get that first-party data, you get the them they get to you faster, right? So in that storefront environment, they can capture first-party data and then start to use that for retargeting. So it increases their ability to capture first-party data.
Greg Kilhstrom: Yeah. So, um, you know, we’re here at eTail, um, hearing as you said, you know, hearing a lot about a lot of exciting things. A little a little bit of hype, but also a lot of real things in and real. I mean, I I’ve loved some of the real case studies and and real examples as well, because I think we’re all, we’ve been hearing about all this AI stuff and and the the promise of it for so long, and, you know, we’re we’re hearing some real things. As AI becomes more integrated into, you know, e-commerce and and content creation, as everything else, um, how do you see it impacting the creator commerce space?
Wendy Wildfeuer: I think that it’s there’s a lot of discussion. I think more last year than this year about AI creators taking over real creators, and I’m happy to hear that I haven’t heard anything about that yet since.
Greg Kilhstrom: That’s true. Yeah, yeah. It was there was a little about it last year. Yeah.
Wendy Wildfeuer: And I was like, dude, that’s not good. Because it is not what people want. Yeah. For the most part. I I don’t know what everybody wants in the world, but it’s, right. So it it’s it becomes inauthentic. Yeah. Um, and so what I think from a creator perspective, I think it will make for enable brands to identify creators that could be a fit for them and do that faster, less friction. I think that I know for us, AI is enabling us to roll out new features faster. And I think that it will enable, um, with some support because what from our experience, using AI to garner insights from the data that we’re seeing is, you know, there’s holes in that, but it can streamline and take hours off of your, off of your schedule and or out of your schedule so that you can be more efficient. So that’s how we see it. I think that definitely creator discovery, I think in the future could it be product recommendations? Yes. Um, but I do not see it going to a place where an AI creator replaces the actual human creator.
Greg Kilhstrom: I mean, at that point it’s kind of just an ad, right? And maybe a bad ad, but yeah.
Wendy Wildfeuer: Yeah, a bad ad or, um, a not real person.
Greg Kilhstrom: Yeah, right.
Wendy Wildfeuer: And so what we do, and we talk a lot about this when we’re speaking with our clients about how to manage creators, because it is notoriously difficult, lots of pain points with bandwidth and the chase to get in touch and all of that. And the way that we say is they are not media units and they are not affiliate links. They are human beings and you need to treat them that way, and give them the capabilities that that deliver on their needs, and also lean in and support them. So, we, you know, those two things, which is why we have the service arm of our business, because tech alone does not, um, solve every issue for, again, human beings.
Greg Kilhstrom: Yeah, yeah. Love it. Well, Wendy, always great talking with you. Uh, two last things before we wrap up here. What’s been a highlight for you at eTail so far this year?
Wendy Wildfeuer: I think what I would say is it’s great to see people that you’ve seen before. It’s also great to see new faces and people and brands that were not here before. And having discussion about our product, whereas as a provider, the old days is brands run away from you. Run away from you. And now I’m really seeing a key difference in the buy side wanting to really understand what’s out there and have a significant interest in learning. And so that broadly, I just love because it makes, you know, human interaction face-to-face is so important, especially in this post-COVID world where Zoom meetings has, you know, have replaced schmoozing. Uh, so it’s great to do that too.
Greg Kilhstrom: Yeah, love it. Well, last question for you. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
Wendy Wildfeuer: Oh, my goodness. I hire people 20 years younger than me. That’s what I do. Um, I mean, we have to do that. In this space, everything that we do requires flexibility and adaptability. So, you know, having stamina to to, uh, to keep figuring out how we can help our clients and their creators win is what drives me. Plus, I have two dogs and I love them and take care of them and they, um, make me happy in addition to my family, but I love my fur babies.
