Giulia Mazzei crossed from client to agency in January 2026, joining London-based agency Greenpark as Influencer Marketing Director after more than five years leading Swarovski’s global influencer function. From the other side of the brief, the pattern she observed as a brand leader looks exactly the same. Agencies are brought in after the strategy is set, asked to execute rather than advise, and brands rarely invest in the in-house expertise needed to use them well.

“Brands tend to bring in agents and agencies too late in the game into their own strategies,” she says. “While really agencies and brands should work as strategic partners, especially when it comes to Influencer Marketing.”

At Swarovski, Giulia launched the brand’s first coordinated influencer strategy post-pandemic, leading a multi-million-euro program spanning Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), North America, and Asia Pacific (APAC). At Greenpark, which has expanded from content SEO into what it calls creator intelligence, linking Influencer Marketing to AI visibility and discoverability, she now applies that operating experience to clients whose brand-agency relationships she argues remain structurally underbuilt.

Influencer Marketing Earns Its Own Budget, or It Stays PR’s Dependency

When Giulia took on the influencer function at Swarovski, the channel did not yet have its own strategic mandate. “It had always been like PR’s little sister,” she says. “Hand in hand, but never its own growth engine.” Her task was as much internal as external: to build the case that Influencer Marketing warranted its own budget line and a seat in planning conversations, rather than remaining a layer added onto events or press campaigns.

The argument was made through returns. By aligning creator output with measurable brand performance and growing the budget as results justified it, she made the channel visible as a lever in its own right. “My main objective was to prove that Influencer Marketing was effectively a growth engine,” she says, “and not something that you just add on to projects here and there.”

That framing shapes how she advises clients at Greenpark. The channel’s effectiveness, she argues, depends on treating it as a dedicated strategy with its own measurement and infrastructure, not a supplement to what PR and events are already doing.

Creator Programs Are Built Over Years, Not Per Campaign

Giulia draws a clear distinction between a creator program and a series of creator campaigns, and argues that brands systematically undervalue the difference. At Swarovski, the influencer function was organized around long-term ambassador relationships: creators contracted across key moments throughout the year rather than sourced fresh for each project.

“You have a PR event, let’s invite X amount of creators, you contract them for that, and then you basically don’t nurture the relationship,” she says. “And then the year after you’re using a completely different set of creators.” The approach she contrasts this with is a program built on continuity: the same creators contracted across key moments in the year, developing their understanding of the brand through repeated engagement rather than a single brief.

The Swarovski x Skims collaboration illustrated what a deeper model makes possible. “We did an enormous collaboration with Skims, which was a masterclass in marketing,” Giulia says. “They had enormous cultural momentum, and Swarovski brought that craftsmanship and heritage.” Identifying creators who could speak credibly to both brands’ audiences, rather than simply amplifying the partnership through existing relationships, was the most time-intensive part of the preparation.

In Luxury, the Brief Is the Reputation

For luxury brands, creator selection carries unusual stakes because the asset being protected, heritage and image, is precisely what Influencer Marketing requires latitude to convey. Giulia frames this as a structural tension. “In order for Influencer Marketing to work well, you need to give creative freedom to your influencers,” she says. “You need to trust them as collaborators.”

The resolution, she argues, is time rather than tighter control. The longer a brand works with a creator, the less the content requires review, because the creator has absorbed the brand’s visual language through experience rather than briefing documents. “I really noticed the massive difference between when I started and when I left,” she says. “The type of content coming out of creators didn’t need much review, because we had worked with them for years.”

The corollary holds equally. A creator briefed without sufficient context requires constant correction, which consumes resources on both sides and produces content that reflects oversight rather than partnership. Getting the foundational brief right, Giulia says, is what makes everything downstream simpler to execute.

Agencies Are Brought In to Execute, Not to Think

The pattern Giulia observed most consistently as a client, and now recognizes from the agency side, is that brands engage their agencies on execution after strategy has already been shaped. The agency receives a brief, not a problem to help solve.

“The agency has the frustration of being asked to execute but not maybe being part of that strategy,” she says. At the same time, agencies often do not see the internal complexity that shapes what a brand can commit to. “There are decisions involving multiple stakeholders, legal reviews, regional teams, and commercial priorities that aren’t always visible from the outside.”

The pace expectation sits at the center of both frustrations. Brands want fast turnarounds; agencies need time to produce work the brief actually requires. Having operated on both sides of that expectation, Giulia is more forgiving of the delays she once found costly. “When I was asking for things to be turned around so quickly,” she says, “I should have taken a breath.”

The Strongest Partnerships Stop Looking Like Contracts

From the agency side, Giulia’s prescription for the brand-agency relationship starts with timing and brief quality. A brief that defines the business problem, the audience, and what success looks like creates the conditions for an agency to contribute strategically rather than execute against instructions. Bringing agencies into conversations earlier, before the parameters are fixed, is what she describes as the difference between having an agency and using one well.

The requirement she returns to most consistently is having the right person on the brand side managing the relationship. “I think brands will need to really look at their teams and start hiring some specialists in-house to manage an agency,” she says. “In order to manage something like Influencer Marketing, you need to really understand it. It’s complex, and it’s even more data-driven now.” Without that in-house fluency, she argues, even capable agencies remain underutilized.

The model she describes as most effective is closer to integration than vendor management. “The best relationships I had with agencies were when I trusted the people on the other side,” she says. “They’d become part of my team, an extension of what I was doing in-house.” That standard is now what she holds for her own work at Greenpark.

What Changes When You Can See Both Sides

Six months into agency life, Giulia is frank about what the transition has cost in terms of pace. “As an in-house leader, you can connect the dots across commercial priorities and then make decisions,” she says. “From the agency side, even when you have a strong point of view, you’re one voice in a much broader ecosystem.” 

The influence she once exercised through direction now has to work through trust, context-setting, and earning a client’s confidence in areas where speed is what they tend to ask for.

What the agency position has given her in return is breadth: the ability to see across multiple businesses, categories, and challenges in ways that a single brand does not allow. That combination, operating depth applied through an agency integrating Influencer Marketing with SEO and AI visibility, is what she is building Greenpark’s practice around. 

“The best client-agency relationships,” she says, “are built on trust and a shared commitment to solving business problems, not just delivering campaigns.”

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

Check Out Our Podcast