The Brand Manager's Dilemma: Big Campaigns, Lean Teams, Shrinking Budgets
As brand managers, the pressure to deliver bigger campaigns and better results is constantly increasing while internal teams and budgets are shrinking. Influencer marketing and creator partnerships have evolved from a "nice-to-have" checkbox into a strategic performance driver, yet navigating the internal mechanics of getting budgets approved, managing agencies, and protecting your ROI remains a massive roadblock.
In this exclusive roundtable discussion, Tony Tran (CEO of Lumanu) sits down with enterprise marketing leaders Allie Hartman (former Creator Strategy Lead at Keurig Dr Pepper) and Eric Valenzuela Solis (Associate Brand Manager at Kenvue) to unpack what it actually takes to run a high-performing, modern marketing ecosystem. They share raw, unfiltered insights into the realities of pitching ideas to finance, auditing agency fees, and transitioning from broad marketing vendors to true strategic partners.
Watch on-demand to discover how to stretch every dollar, maximize your ROI, and make your marketing budget work harder for your business.
Key Takeaways
The Internal Battle: Convincing Everyone (Not Just Marketing)
As a brand manager, you have to wear a lot of hats. The hardest one to wear is often the internal pitch. Getting budget for bold ideas requires convincing finance, procurement, and leadership. The hurdle isn't that they don't want your campaigns to succeed; it’s that they often don't understand how the channel operates. Perfecting the skill of internal alignment and translating marketing strategies into business logic is what ultimately determines if a campaign ever gets off the ground.
Broad Agency Capabilities vs. Specialized Scale
Every agency (PR, social, and even paid media) claims they can execute influencer marketing. However, when influencer marketing is not a core focus, the skillset isn't honed. To build a results oriented program, look for specialized strategic partners who move at the speed of social and culture, challenge your thinking respectfully, and bring ideas to the table before you have to ask for a brief.
Moving Past "Empty Calories" and Vanity Metrics
Evaluating an influencer program based purely on reach, impressions, and engagement rates fails to tell a true business story to leadership. To build a program that compounds over time, look at content as a long-term asset that can be optimized across owned, earned, and paid channels. Transitioning toward data-backed frameworks and measurable conversion shifts your influencer budget from a soft marketing expense into a verifiable performance engine.
Maximizing Working Media and Eliminating Hidden Fees
When facing pressure to do more with less, a priority is identifying and cutting non-working media costs, such as inflated processing and vendor transaction fees. Comb through the operational details of your budget to ensure your dollars are spent on driving traffic and conversion, not administrative overhead. Shifting to leaner, streamlined payment workflows allows you to reallocate saved capital directly back into creator partnerships and extra content assets.
Relationships Are a Performance Muscle
Creator relationships are a business asset that pays compounding interest over time. One-off campaigns function like one-offs, but committing to long-term, always-on creator programs yields dramatic metric growth (such as scaling average engagement from 1.7% to 5.8% over a five-month span). Building sincere, direct, and collaborative relationships with creators not only unlocks better rates and added value, but builds a sustainable foundation for your brand equity.
