Urban Outfitters is launching a creator program centered around the hyper-personalized engagement that comes with passionate micro-creators and their communities.
The move marks a structural shift in the retail brand’s creator strategy, and sees it join a growing group of brands that are gamifying their creator programs — moving away from curated, one-off partnerships toward broad, recurring, points-for-rewards systems that encourage consistent content creation.
Head of brand marketing Cyntia Leo told Digiday the program, called Me@UO, which will feature seasonal campaigns culminating in rewards for top creators, won’t replace traditional influencer marketing or even affiliate schemes, but will signify a shift away from “campaigns you just watch to campaigns you really want to join.”
Leveraging creator communities
Me@UO, launching Feb. 25, is a platform for creators with fewer than 10,000 followers that invites them to respond to weekly prompts in exchange for affiliate revenue and access to exclusive content.
It’s kicking off with Add to Story, a campaign starring pop icon Zara Larsson that will run until April 24. The top 100 creators who participate in the campaign will be invited on a brand trip to Joshua Tree, California at the end of what the team is calling “Season 1.” Financial details of the partnerships were not made available.
Leveraging the power of smaller creators who are already brand super fans isn’t new territory for Urban Outfitters, but Me@UO marks a new reinvestment.
“This has been a long-standing pillar of our strategy and offense,” Leo told Digiday. “We really started this about two years ago, taking the approach of ‘How do we create moments? How do we create experiences that really bring communities together?’ We’ve heard from our Gen Z customers that they want more moments, especially in real life, to come together around causes, interests, habits, etcetera.”
A year and a half ago, the brand launched UO100, an initiative that highlighted 100 creators encouraging customers to “stop the scroll” and use creativity as a form of self expression. Me@UO will build on that as the brand looks to pivot from an algorithm and follower-count model to one centered on participation.
“Discovery looks completely different,” Leo explained. “It’s time for us to open up the next chapter of what a community looks like… and how we connect with our customers and celebrate our everyday customers.”
Leo believes the program will give emerging creators the opportunity to enjoy the benefits that are traditionally reserved for larger influencers. “For us, we’re saying as a brand that if you’re loyal to us and you love the brand and you’re talking about us — and we know that follower count isn’t necessarily the only factor that matters anymore — then why not celebrate the community that talks about us every single day.”
The program will also give the Urban Outfitters’ team a chance to find new talent to work with (Leo confirmed they could potentially pull successful Me@UO creators for more bespoke brand deals) and new metrics to measure success outside of traditional affiliate marketing.
“No one is buying stuff through direct attribution,” said Keith Bendes, chief strategy officer at influencer marketing platform Linqia. “We know influencers influence a ton of purchases, but the number of those purchases that happen through a direct link that we could attribute to a creator is tiny.”
The UO marketing team has the next few “seasons” laid out already and have created their own internal tools for the Me@UO campaign that will measure engagement, involvement, and awareness. But they don’t plan on immediately getting actionable KPIs.
“We know this isn’t going to turn on overnight,” Leo explained. “That’s why it’s so fundamental for us to have this ‘always-on’ approach, we are having this big influx moment to recruit. But how are we keeping that engagement consistent and that pulse consistent?”
Building a creator program
Building a creator program leverages microcreators across traditional social media platforms, but Leo said this approach isn’t cheaper or less time-intensive than traditional influencer marketing, nor is it just a content play.
The team has been planning Me@UO “daily” for the last eight months, building the right internal tools to track creators’ progress and defining what engagement looks like for both the creators and the company. “How are we communicating with them? What’s the right cadence?” Leo asked. “The planning is never done, we’ll continue to move and shake and shift the way our community wants to… now our community will have a little bit more of a hand in some of our brand decisions.”
This could range from getting feedback on what kinds of experiences the brand should put on to asking them what product colors they want, or what items they should “bring back from the vault.”
“It’s not just a moment in time, we want to use this as a source of insight into community engagement,” she said.
The team plans on measuring success through a “structured, multi-factor evaluation” that includes participation, engagement, and creative quality, not just follower count or engagement “in isolation.” It also aims to ensure the process doesn’t feel purely transactional.
The plan is to get as many people involved out of the gate, which is why they’re putting some traditional ad spend behind the Zara Larsson Add to Story campaign, with the hopes that she’ll bring in some of her fans — though the program wants to reward activated Urban Outfitters customers the most. Brand execs did not share how much they’re spending on the campaign.
“How do we make sure we’re recognizing you [as a creator]? We’re sending you product, we’re bringing you on a trip, we are casting you in something,” Leo explained about the still-forming rewards process. “We want to have that constant conversation with creators.”
The hope is that Me@UO becomes an “engine” for the brand moving forward — one that involves regular connection to creators via text, voice, and video communication app Discord and a regular back-and-forth with the Urban Outfitters community that can drive connection (and, of course, engagement) that goes beyond the traditional influencer marketing push.
Why now?
As the creator economy matures and platform algorithms continue to threaten to upend a campaign, both brands and creators are looking to diversify their approach to be less dependent on follower counts and virality. Beauty and fashion brands like American Eagle, Express, Sephora, are among to have adopted similar-style models to Urban Outfitters, as part of their broader creator economy strategies.
“Paid ads have hit a wall — CPMs are up, attribution is broken, and consumers have developed a near-perfect filter for anything that feels like a brand talking at them,” said Rahul Chauhan, founder and CEO at social commerce network LinkFluencer. “Creator programs are how you manufacture trust at scale, systematically. The timing isn’t a trend, it’s a reckoning.”
More and more brands are realizing that dedicated consumers can double as influential creators. “You don’t need to segment these things — like a paid influencer goes over here, an employee goes over here. They’re all advocates of your brand. And if you could create an ecosystem where all of them can live, that’s insanely valuable to you as a brand,” Bendes explained.
Me@UO is a more structured, long-term initiative building off of the work Urban Outfitters has done over the last two years to engage and mobilize smaller creators to build a creator community. It will slot into the existing influencer marketing ecosystem, not replace it, and marks a noted shift of focus.
“This attitude and the start of this is really representative of our next chapter of connection[…] it’s not just a one-time thing, it’s a structural shift,” Leo said. “We’re going to get after participation, community-building, emerging creators, etcetera. We’ll still have approaches with influencers and creators that are part of our channel mix, but we’re looking at balancing both…this is just a new wave and a new shift of where we want to focus this year.”
