Rob Weston, Chief Commercial and Marketing Officer at Loop Earplugs, laid out how the Belgian brand budgets for creators and celebrity partners as it grows from about $100 million in annual revenue to a projected $240 million to $250 million this year, in an episode of the “D2C Diaries” podcast posted to YouTube on October 30.

Weston joined Loop three years ago after marketing roles at Unilever, John Lewis, M&S and Samsung, when the business was running at around $100 million a year and leaning heavily on Meta ads. “This year we’ll hopefully get anywhere in the region of 240, 250, hopefully,” Weston said. “The golden goose of Meta isn’t necessarily going to keep laying eggs forever.”

Six of the practices Weston described apply directly to creator budgets.

1. Fund creator work from a separate experiment budget. Loop carved roughly 10% of its marketing budget out of performance spend and planned it at a return on ad spend of 1, instead of the roughly 2.5 to 3 Weston cited for performance spend. “10% is what we did,” Weston said, calling the carve-out “an insurance bet.” Creators chosen for influence rather than immediate sales were paid from that pool. “We allowed ourselves to spend that money from our experimentation part rather than from our performance part,” Weston said, which “freed us up to I think do some slightly more interesting work with creators than we might have done otherwise.”

2. Keep the experiment budget accountable. A separate pool still needs a measure, Weston said. “You need to measure it in some way,” Weston said. “People still need to be held accountable. But it doesn’t have to be a very strict ROAS target.” The view lines up with what creator agencies told NI about brands judging creator partnerships too quickly on immediate ROAS.

3. Agree the early signals with finance before launch. When Loop tested YouTube and Google with a longer attribution window of at least 12 weeks, Weston said, the CEO and CFO agreed in advance to judge progress on traffic, attributed brand search, brand lift and conversion lift. “We’re not going to wait for 12 weeks and say, ‘Okay, have we hit our break even yet?'” Weston said. “Are we moving in the right direction? And if so, we’re going to keep spending.” Weston added that brand effects “can take 18 months,” which is “a very very difficult thing for any marketing team to balance” with venture or private equity investors.

4. Sign talent who already use the product. Loop’s partners were seen with its earplugs before any deal. “We saw him wearing them at Glastonbury before we even partnered with him,” Weston said of Harry Styles, and the team had also spotted McLaren driver Lando Norris wearing them. Paris Hilton “was a fan before we went to her,” Weston said; Loop released a limited-edition Loop Engage with Hilton in August and presented the ADHD creator summit Hilton hosted in October. “We weren’t asking people to suddenly put something in that they hadn’t used or didn’t know about,” Weston said.

5. Structure collaborations to break even on product. For co-branded products, Loop agreed a minimum fee and then a revenue share. “As long as we sell this many of this collaboration, we break even,” Weston said. “Then kind of everything else is a bonus. The PR we get is a bonus.” That let Weston point to covered costs instead of defending the deal on awareness or likes.

6. Launch creators together, and keep control of the message. For the Harry Styles launch, Loop coordinated PR, posters outside Wembley, influencers at the event and paid ads on one date. “There’s a multiplier effect between the number of channels you use,” Weston said, citing a Vaseline campaign that used 450 creators at once: “Use multiple at the same time create a proper wave.” Performance-driven affiliate creators carried a risk, Weston said. “We genuinely had a few ads where you know some creators had just taken it and said this is a fire sale,” Weston said. “That just simply wasn’t acceptable.”

Weston said measuring individual creators remains unsolved, calling the occasional creator post “very hard to measure.” Loop has used The Cirqle, a conversion-focused influencer marketing platform, for performance creator work. “Overall I’m a buyer of the creator economy,” Weston said.

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