This article is based on an interview with Billo Co-founder and CEO Donatas Smailys for The Agile Brand Guide’s Expert Mode series.
Employee advocacy has been a checkbox for about a decade. Marketing writes the post, someone drops it in a Slack channel, and a few hundred people reshare it to LinkedIn. Reach ticks up. Nobody builds a budget line around it, and nobody expects to.
That’s not what Gap Inc. did on July 22, when it opened its Creator Program to store, corporate, and distribution employees across four brands with affiliate commissions attached. It’s not what Starbucks is doing either, piloting a custom TikTok Creator Network that sends creative briefs to baristas and pays them out of ad revenue. Donatas Smailys, co-founder and CEO of Billo, a creator economy platform that turns creator video into performance ads, argues the shift is bigger than scale — and that the companies moving fastest are about to break the exact thing they’re reaching for.
The employee stopped being a distribution channel
Ask Smailys whether this is a real structural change or just the pendulum doing what pendulums do, and he goes straight at the distinction most programs blur.
“Employee advocacy for the last decade meant ‘please reshare the brand’s post’. So staff were a distribution channel. What Gap and Starbucks are doing is different: the employee is now the origination point of the creative, making native content in their own voice. And what it displaces is mostly the paid UGC and mid-tier creator spend.”
That last sentence is the one to bring into a planning meeting. If employee creators displace anything, it isn’t the brand campaign and it isn’t the agency retainer — it’s the paid user-generated content and mid-tier creator line, which is a real number sitting in somebody’s budget right now. That makes this a reallocation question rather than a new-initiative question, and reallocation questions have a different politics inside a company. Worth noting that Smailys stops short of calling it a replacement. Employee content “cannot replace influencer content entirely,” he says, and the mix is what works. He also sells one half of that mix, which is a fair thing to hold in mind while reading it.
Direction versus dictation
His warning in the original pitch was blunt: script people or push them to hit quotas and you kill what made them worth filming. The awkward part is that both programs already do a version of that. Starbucks sends briefs. Gap publishes brand standards and ties participation to commissions. Billo briefs creators too. So the line can’t be brief or don’t brief.
“The line is direction versus dictation. A brief that helps sets the goal and gives hints: here’s what’s legally clear, here’s the true thing about the product, here are the hooks that tend to work. Now go make it in your voice. If the brief is too strict – it kills authenticity. Say these words, hit these numbers, post this often. The first treats the person as a talent. The second treats them as a delivery mechanism.”
Talent or delivery mechanism is a usable test, and it maps to a document. A brief naming the legal boundary and the honest product claim is direction. A posting cadence is dictation, because a cadence turns a person into a content calendar and the audience can hear it. Gap’s published guidance on disclosure and brand standards is the first kind of constraint. A weekly post quota, dropped on a store associate who’s also working the print counter, is the second. Most marketing organizations have far more practice writing the second document than the first.
The constraint isn’t talent, it’s fear
Then there’s Staples, which never ran a program at all. Kaeden Rowland — @blivxx, better known online as the “Staples Baddie” — started filming the store’s print and copy services on her own in January. The videos took off. Staples responded afterward with an employee badge, an advisory board seat, and meetings with corporate. Since then, reporting has surfaced employees at other locations frustrated by the fallout, and suggestions that the company wanted the phenomenon replicated elsewhere.
Smailys says you can’t plan the spark or the charisma, and that the wrong response is a memo telling every location to go manufacture its own viral employee. What you can plan is the thing that catches it. His sharper point is about who never tries in the first place.
“Remember, Kaeden filmed assuming she might get fired for it – and that’s the default assumption for most employees. If people believe posting could cost them their job, only the boldest few ever try, and you lose everyone else before you start. A real program replaces that fear with clear permission and clear rules: here’s what you’re allowed to do, here’s what’s off-limits, here’s what you get for it.”
This is the most actionable thing in his answers, and it’s the piece marketing teams skip because it doesn’t live in marketing. Most companies have an unwritten policy that posting about work is career-risky. Nobody wrote it down. Everyone assumes it anyway. Until permission is explicit, in writing, and visibly survivable, any employee creator program selects for the small fraction of people willing to bet their job on it — and that fraction is not a pipeline. Getting that document written means going to HR and legal before writing a single brief, which is unglamorous work and also the whole ballgame.
Marketing owns it, or nobody does
On the accountability question, Smailys is specific about where the program sits and what it has to prove. It belongs “inside marketing with a named owner, not HR,” and the month-six test should be tracked conversions rather than reach. Gap’s affiliate model, in his read, is the smart one precisely because it’s measurable from day one.
Asked directly where an in-house program beats what Billo sells, he argues addition rather than substitution — and draws a real operational line between the two.
“Employee videos bring something you can’t brief for – a perspective from someone who works with the product or service every day and notices the angle marketing overlooked. They’re closer to it, so they bring a fresher take.”
Ordered UGC, in his framing, is what you buy when you need something specific: a message, a feature, a demographic, content arriving on a schedule you can plan around. Employee video is what you get when you stop specifying. That distinction survives the obvious commercial interest behind it, and it points at a real budgeting problem — one of these is reliable and one isn’t, and only one of them can be committed to a media calendar three months out. A CMO running both should be honest internally about which is which, rather than promising the unpredictable one on a quarterly cadence.
So what does a marketing leader actually do next quarter? Start with the people already posting, Smailys says, because you’re selecting for someone who already enjoys it. Name the person accountable for scaling it. Agree the success metric before launch rather than after. On risk, his advice is to treat employee creators the way you’d treat anyone on a paid campaign and avoid building awareness on one face, because people leave and the audience goes with them.
On the labor pushback — Starbucks Workers United has publicly criticized the barista program as a substitute for settling a contract — he doesn’t try to claim it. A lot of that “isn’t a marketing problem, and marketing shouldn’t pretend a creator program solves it.” That’s the right answer, and it’s worth sitting with, because the temptation to sell an employee creator program internally as an engagement win is going to be strong.
The old version of employee advocacy had no owner and no number, which is exactly why it never went anywhere. This version has both, and it can be run badly in ways the reshare button never could. Before anyone writes the first brief, go find out whether your employees currently believe that posting about work could cost them their job. That answer determines whether you have a program or a memo.
