Brands are embracing partnerships with accounts like SubwayTakes as they move away from traditional influencer spots

It’s a strategy being embraced by bigger brands, too. In May, skin-care brand Kiehls partnered with celebrity gossip account Deuxmoi to promote the brand’s summer pop-up. The post featured reality star Brittany Cartwright, of “Vanderpump Rules” and “The Valley,” in which she hard-launched Kiehl’s as her new “partner.” 

Lea Huruglica, senior brand marketing manager at Ghia, chalks up the interest in these partnerships to an ongoing shift in how brands engage with culture. Ghia partnered with the Instagram account GirlsCarryingShit last year to promote its new branded Nalgene water bottle. “[We’re] moving away from traditional influencer partnerships toward authentic, relatable moments that truly resonate,” she said.

Huruglica added that many consumers can now spot sponsored content quickly. “So instead of focusing on big-name influencers, we try to prioritize emerging creators and accounts who are shaping the conversation,” she said. This also makes campaigns more cost-effective and feel more genuine, Huruglica said.

Making the campaigns feel genuine is dependent upon finding a creator whose interests overlap with that of a brand’s core audience. Melody Park, director of brand marketing at cat food brand Smalls, led the company’s “cat dad” campaign, which was centered around Father’s Day and included a sponsorship of the popular interview show SubwayTakes. Smalls is primarily a DTC brand and relies on digital marketing to create brand awareness.  

Park said the brand knew that host and cat dad Kareem Rahma had tried Smalls when he first got his cats during the pandemic, and pitched his team on the idea to feature the brand. It resulted in a segment uploaded last month featuring Smalls co-founder Veronica del Rosario being interviewed by Rahma, in which she outlines her hot take on why the world needs more cat dads.

Smalls first tested the concept earlier this year with Shop Cats, the online series hosted by comedian and creator Michelladonna, in which she interviews New York City bodega cats. Throughout the campaign’s sponsorship, a number of the cats were treated to Smalls’s treats on camera, while the humans wore official Smalls cat dad merch. 

While Smalls works with influencers regularly, this is its first foray into organic brand integration via social media-based talk shows. The company invests in many traditional marketing channels, as well as digital ads and TV spots. However, Park said, “It’s super different from our typical influencer ads.” 

Due to the nature of these shows, Park said the hosts often like to keep the branding minimal so as to not distract from the content. Park noted that Smalls is not actually called out in the SubwayTakes ad by name. “Even if you tie in a five-second direct brand call out, people are going to swipe away or stop watching,” Park said.

The goal for the partnership was to raise awareness for Smalls’s products, but not necessarily to drive sales. “We have other ad channels that call out the brand and drive website sales,” Park said.

Park said Smalls chose to pitch these specific shows due to the hosts’ natural affinity for cats. It’s also logistically easy to pull off, given that the Smalls team is also based in New York. “SubwayTakes took about 30 minutes and was a really smooth process,” she said. “And for Shop Cats, I can send an Uber courier to get treats to them during filming.”

Other companies have used these types of partnerships to promote new products or collaborations. The kids’ food brand Little Spoon recently partnered with lifestyle brand Dusen Dusen on a limited-edition tote and chose to promote the release via sponsored posts on GirlsCarryingShit and WatchingNewYork.

Caryn Wasser, chief brand officer, said the brand’s core audience is “culture-fluent” and made up of style-minded, digitally-native women.

As such, the company tries to stand out in its category by embracing messaging and collaborations that will appeal to these digitally-native parents. The brand previously created a pasta puffer with designer Rachel Antonoff and a bag with State.

It’s also why the brand chose popular Instagram accounts WatchingNewYork and GirlsCarryingShit to showcase the Dusen Dusen bag in action, along with Little Spoon snacks. The WatchingNewYork Instagram page has 1.4 million followers, while GirlsCarryingShit has 287,000. “We didn’t want to launch the bag with some polished, over-orchestrated campaign,” Wasser explained. “We wanted to show how parents actually use the bag in the wild.”  

Little Spoon director of brand content Chloe Fein said the brand “specifically sought out GirlsCarryingShit and WatchingNewYork because they don’t do logo slaps.” 

She added that the GirlsCarryingShit page had been on Little Spoon’s radar ever since a photo of Dakota Johnson holding a bunch of items went viral, which is reminiscent of busy parents hauling products.

While the collaboration wasn’t a direct sales play, Fein said the cultural stickiness and virality strengthened brand recall and affinity across both new and existing audiences. “We saw the direct results of that in bag sales,” she said. The company measured success through organic reach and engagement. 

“The campaign generated over 1 million organic views with $0 media spend,” she said. This averaged a 13% engagement rate, with some posts climbing above 25%. “Our post with GirlsCarryingShit alone drove 273,262 views and 23% engagement, more than double standard benchmarks.”

Similarly, Huruglica said that announcing the launch of Ghia’s Nalgene on the GirlsCarryingShit page felt like a natural fit. Since it was a standalone product, we wanted a scrappy, authentic way to introduce it,” she said. “We shared the collab a few days before launch with a giveaway, and it became one of our top-performing static posts of the year.”

Since then, Ghia has sought out more of these creator partnerships to tap into highly engaged communities. 

Little Spoon’s Fein said that pricing on these sponsorships varies. “In some cases, these partnerships can cost more than a traditional influencer of the same size,” because the accounts are not built for branded work and their owners are selective about collaborations, Fein explained. On the other hand, she said, “What you’re paying for isn’t just reach. It’s also integration, tone and the kind of earned perception that’s hard to buy.” 

There are also content guardrails to these campaigns, Smalls’s Park explained, as they cannot be scaled at the same rate as most plug-and-play creator partnerships. “It can get quite expensive to pursue these kinds of initiatives,” Park said. However, the ROI can often result in millions of eyeballs on the brand, as well as site traffic. 

“It is a way of slowly entering, whether subconsciously or not, into folks’ awareness,” Park said.