Viral Nation’s Chief Commercial Officer Nicholas Spiro is applying psychological principles and artificial intelligence to transform how brands approach creator partnerships in 2025. After building his career at Meta, Snapchat, and Twitter, Nicholas now leads commercial strategy at the company he describes as “the leading social transformation agency”, developing technology that analyzes video content frame-by-frame while advocating for brands to give creators more creative freedom.

Nicholas is helping brands connect psychology, artificial intelligence, and social media strategy through Viral Nation’s three distinct pillars: a full-service social and influencer agency, a talent organization managing creators, and a proprietary AI-powered technology platform.

“When I talk about social, I think there’s an under-told story about what makes us human,” Nicholas explains. “Three billion people sign into Facebook every day because we have an innate psychological need to connect with others.”

Unlike most executives in the creator economy space, Nicholas draws heavily on his psychology background from Emory University when developing strategies for brands. “No one asks about the psychology degree, but it’s so important,” he says. This perspective provides a foundation for understanding why certain content resonates with audiences.

“We have a human need to compete and share,” Nicholas says. “There’s so much you can learn about people. Even if you raised someone in isolation, they’d still have certain innate capabilities.”

These psychological insights directly inform Viral Nation’s technological approach to content analysis and creator partnerships. By recognizing the core drivers behind audience engagement, the company helps brands develop more genuine connections with their audiences through social media.

Translating Psychological Insights into Brand Safety

Building on this psychological foundation, Viral Nation developed Secure, an AI platform that addresses important gaps in social media analysis. While traditional social listening tools primarily analyze text, Secure examines video content frame-by-frame, recognizing that visual content now dominates how humans connect online. “Traditional social analytics platforms focus on text, and that leaves a lot to be learned,” Nicholas says. “One of the biggest trends is the obvious push to video, even on platforms like LinkedIn.”

This technology serves as Viral Nation’s differentiator in the creator economy, focusing on two critical functions that deliver tangible value to brands. The first is thorough brand safety analysis, which can examine a creator’s entire historical catalog of public posts.

“Your reputation is your most valuable asset,” Nicholas emphasizes. “You can lose it in a moment. One brand safety incident can stick in consumers’ minds for years.”

The creator intelligence component goes beyond safety concerns to provide deeper insights into content patterns. “That’s everything else you can learn from video,” Nicholas explains. “If a creator says ‘hamburger’ every day and a vegan brand is looking for an ambassador, that’s not a match.”

The technology even includes a scoring system based on the Motion Picture Association’s rating framework, automatically evaluating content as G, PG-13, and so on. This functionality proves particularly valuable when assessing creators with extensive libraries. “A creator posting four times a week across three platforms for ten years, you can see how quickly that becomes impossible for humans to review,” Nicholas says.

The Social-First Transformation

Armed with psychological insights and AI-powered analysis, Viral Nation guides companies through what Nicholas calls “social-first transformation”, an important shift in how organizations approach marketing strategy.

“Many of these organizations are decades or even a century old, and they didn’t grow up with social media,” he says. “So they treated it as an afterthought, something you’d add to the end of the marketing plan with a small budget.”

A successful transformation recognizes that “social is everything; PR, crisis comms, marketing, identity, voice, and personality.” Organizations that embrace this approach place social media at the center of their strategy rather than treating it as an auxiliary channel.

This social-first philosophy connects directly to Viral Nation’s technology platform, as their Secure tool enables brands to confidently scale their creator partnerships without compromising brand safety. “We work with some of the world’s most valuable brands,” Nicholas says, explaining that many are expanding their creator programs, but remain concerned about potential brand safety risks that could undermine their reputation.

Creator-Led Creativity: Psychological Connection

Building on both psychological principles and technology-enabled safety, Nicholas advocates for an important shift in how brands approach creator collaborations. When asked about the biggest misconception chief marketing officers have about working with creators, he identifies “the combination of fear and control.”

“The best brands learn to give up a little control and let creators be creative,” he says. “There’s a human, emotional connection they’ve earned with their audience, and brands should respect that.”

Nicholas recounts speaking with a creator who endured “30 rounds of edits” on brand-sponsored content. “At that point, it’s more corporate than creative,” he says. “You’re killing the very thing you’re trying to harness.”

This insight led to Nicholas’ Advertising Week keynote titled “What if Creators Ran the Creative Brief,” where he argued for elevating creators from amplifiers to strategic partners. “They can help shape the brand strategy and reach niche audiences, but more importantly, they can inform the creative direction because they know their audience better than a brand tracker or focus group ever could,” he says. “They live it every day.”

He adds that creators could even advise on product development. “Many can tell a company what to make next, that’s how in tune they are with their communities.”

Driving Commercial Outcomes: Where Psychology, AI, and Strategy Converge

As Chief Commercial Officer, Nicholas ultimately focuses on how these psychological insights, technological capabilities, and strategic approaches drive business results for both Viral Nation and its clients. His transition from Chief Product Officer to Chief Commercial Officer reflects this focus on measurable outcomes.

“At the end of the day, we’re a business, and it comes down to commercial outcomes, how we think about KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and growth,” he explains. His top three priorities are commercial outcomes (revenue, profitability, and predictability), partnerships (with platforms and growth channels), and operational rigor.

This commercial focus extends to how Viral Nation measures the success of creator partnerships. Looking toward the future, Nicholas identifies two key factors that will define successful collaborations: cultural relevancy and performance. “A great brand-creator partnership injects the brand into the cultural conversation, that’s the superpower of creators,” he says. The second is “outperforming other channels” based on the brand’s goals.

The integration of psychology, AI technology, and strategic guidance forms Viral Nation’s unique value proposition – enabling brands to confidently expand their creator partnerships with both safety and genuine creativity. Their approach addresses the core tension between control and sincerity that many brands struggle with in the creator economy.

While excited about continued growth in social media and new developments in form factors like VR and AR, Nicholas acknowledges challenges ahead. “What keeps me up at night is AI, especially AI content production,” he says. “If more of our feeds become AI-generated, it’s unclear how that affects the psychological connections that make social media meaningful.”

Despite these concerns, Nicholas remains optimistic about the creator economy’s future, returning to the psychological foundations that drive human connection online. “The more we understand that, the more the creator economy will grow, and more creators will be able to make a living doing what they love,” he concludes.

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