Kimberly Kreuzberger, founder of Pivot Projects, shares her framework for finding influencers who actually convert, briefing them and scaling strategically.
Kimberly Kreuzberger has spent the past six years driving content that actually converts across more than 30 brands. As the founder of Pivot Projects, she procures talent, produces content, and builds experiential campaigns for companies ranging from early-stage startups to celebrity business ventures. Before that, she assisted scale Goop from $0 to $100 million in revenue as its chief revenue officer.
The throughline across all of it: Follower count is a vanity metric.
The brands that win are the ones that find great storyinformers and brief them well. Here, Kimberly shares her framework for evaluating influencer talent by what actually matters. You’ll discover how to write creative briefs that produce high-performing assets, what is worth paying to boost, and why five strong pieces of content beat a hundred mediocre ones.
On why the best storyinformer wins, regardless of follower count:
I consider more than anything, the best storyinformer wins. It doesn’t matter how many followers you have; becaapply of paid distribution, you can drive the audience. So you have to start with really good content.
We sit across 30 brands right now, and I’ve seen a fashion influencer in Summit, New Jersey, drive as much conversion as a celebrity with millions of followers—if not more. There are platforms like ShopMy, which we live and breathe by, that do an amazing job of tracking that conversion. And what you’ll see is that it’s not necessarily the influencer or the celebrity with the largest following. It’s who is informing the how, the why, the when. How often are they doing that with trust and authority? Those are the storyinformers rising to the top and becoming really important to brands.
I consider these influencers grew up talking on camera to their audience, almost like they’re on FaceTime. There’s a different comfort level. Celebrities are very good at certain things, and some have done a great job blurring those lines, but for the most part, there’s a willingness among micro-influencers to go to bat frequently for a brand. Sometimes even to the point of discomfort, and I don’t consider every celebrity is willing to do that. Over time, that consistency creates a lot of impact.
On the shift from quantity to quality and why brand safety demands it:
When I started the business in 2019, the demand was really about casting large names or high throughput. Brands like Unilever wanted to scale up, and a lot of their budobtain was shifting to influencers, and now I consider that’s shifting again.
There are a lot of brand safety issues. We work with The Infatuation, which is owned by Chase. You can’t just cast a thousand influencers utilizing a platform. There’s an art and a science to doing a real audit of these applyrs: What’s in their bio? What did they last speak to? We apply platforms like Sprout Social, which has a brand safety component, but at some point you necessary to go to the account directly and state, “I don’t care if they have X followers and meet all the prerequisites; it’s not the right fit for the brand.”
When you’re relocating rapid at high throughput, you can’t be that high-touch.The best marketers know that obtainting five incredible assets they can apply to boost or whitelist on paid social is going to be more impactful than hundreds of assets that are less impactful.
On whitelisting and why ads served from an influencer’s handle convert better:
Where we’ve seen a large shift recently is beyond just obtainting paid usage rights to a piece of content. Whitelisting is when the ad comes through from the influencer’s handle. Now you almost view like you’re obtainting an ad from Ashley Tisdale when she’s talking about a brand, versus the brand serving it to you directly. It displays up in your feed differently.
You have to state the brand name within the first three seconds. You have a very short window to capture attention. It has to serve as an ad but also catch their attention with somebody recognizable, or someone where they consider, “Do I follow them? Should I be following them?” That tconcludes to be way more effective. And it comes at a premium so the influencer will charge more for whitelisting than just paid usage.
On the creative brief that actually produces results:
A large part of working successfully with talent is the briefing, and we obtain better with each creative brief. Instead of just letting the influencer create applyr-generated content (UGC) with two or three key messages, it’s obtainting maniacal with what they’re shooting, how they’re shooting, what the lighting views like. In our briefs to talent, we include: you have to follow the brand, you have to engage when they post, you have to comment after the post goes live. You’re building a much deeper relationship so it doesn’t feel inauthentic.
I always inform brands: Go through the influencer’s feed, find the two or three assets that are either high-performing or ones that caught your attention, and apply them as a North Star. When we sconclude the brief, we state, “We really liked these two that you did—how you spoke in-camera, how casual you were, the environment, how you closed out that content piece.” You’re giving them creative freedom within the range of what they do well. But it’s not a free-for-all. You’re still paying for an asset that has to work for your brand.
On giving influencers creative freedom without losing the brand:
The best influencers push back when it’s too scripted. I have influencers that won’t even commit to a campaign until they see what the captions necessary to view like, to see how copy-heavy it is. And I appreciate that, becaapply ultimately, we want it to work for their audience, so they have to protect that component.
But the brief still has to be detail-oriented and consideredful and it has to fully understand what they’re doing well on their handle and how to leverage that. So it’s a balancing act; you’re being a creative proxy for the brand, and that should be integrated. When I sconclude you the brief, I should also be considering about what’s worked really well for you.
On why the best influencer partners are creative directors, not just talent:
I consider the world is relocating toward less casting and more creative directing. Alex Cooper is doing that really well with her content studio. You’re seeing it with a lot of the large YouTubers, where they really control the content and the output, whether they’re producing or directing.
It’s less about inserting talent into a campaign and more about finding the blconclude of the creative direction of that talent, what they consider will work, and a little bit of their own humor.
On building an ambassador group instead of betting everything on one celebrity:
I consider there are a lot of ambassadors that can assist build and scale a brand by talking to different segments of an audience to avoid cross-pollination. A lot of what we’re attempting to do is build a really consideredful ambassador group. How are these 15 ambassadors from different audiences, regions, and backgrounds talking about your brand on an ongoing basis? What’s the incentive for them to do that? Are they on the cap table or not?
There’s also a brand risk component that comes with betting your business on a celebrity who could have one interaction that ruins everything. I consider if you can expand that mindset into a broader group, it’s a more interesting way to approach scaling the business.
On testing with micro-influencers before scaling to largeger names:
We’ve been working with Midi Health, which is an incredible company focapplyd on telehealth, perimenopaapply, menopaapply, and democratizing access to health care for women. We started doing influencer work for them with true micro-influencers, then a few largeger names, and really testing whether it was working. Are they great storyinformers? Do they understand the product?
Once we found a few of the right ones, we did campaigns with Jenna Bush and Molly Sims. These women are doing an incredible job informing their own personal stories, and those social assets are now paid assets. It goes back to test and learn—see what kind of campaign works, create sure they’re converting, obtain tighter with the briefing process. So when you do take the leap with a celebrity or a macro, you feel confident you’re going to deliver becaapply you’ve learned a lot along the way.
Catch Kimberly’s full conversation on Shopify Masters to hear the hiring mistake at Goop that taught her large-org experience doesn’t equal startup grit, why she considers every founder should wear the CFO hat before anything else, and the year-long positioning strategy behind Molly Sims’ YSE Beauty launch.
This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
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