The employee creator trend demonstrates the problem perfectly. Across B2B, employee advocacy, executive visibility and influencer marketing are increasingly being folded into the same proposition: find people inside the business, put them in front of a camera and help them become creators.
Expertise is not creator capability. Most employees should not become creators. And before marketers ask how to turn them into creators, they should ask a more fundamental question: Why have we assumed that they should?
B2B Has Confused Employee Influence with Creator Influence
Employees can be enormously valuable in marketing. But creators do something different. They repeatedly turn ideas into material that people voluntarily choose to consume. That is not a production format. It is a specialist creative capability.
Many programmes mistake creator aesthetics for creator capability. The organisation sees a creator because the content resembles creator media. The audience may simply see another corporate message delivered by an employee.
Most Employees Should Not Become Creators
We shouldn’t expect every employee to become a creator, just as we wouldn’t expect every employee to be an exceptional salesperson, strategist, presenter, or copywriter.
Some people possess the combination of expertise, perspective, communication skill, motivation and creative judgement needed to earn an audience. Most do not.
Contributor, Employee Creator or Established Creator?
B2B marketers should distinguish between knowledgeable contributors, employees with genuine creator capability and established creators who have already earned an audience. These are not interchangeable roles.
The Creator Capability Test
Before labelling an employee as a creator, ask: Do they have expertise? A distinctive perspective? Communication ability? Motivation? Audience value? Organisational permission? Strategic necessity?
The purpose of the test is not to help organisations turn more employees into creators. It is to prevent them from attempting it without a convincing reason.
The Question Is Not How to Do It Better
B2B marketing has a habit of turning fashionable ideas into implementation questions. How many employees? What format? What engagement rate?
Those questions arrive too early. The more important questions are: Why does this require creators? Why employees? Would established creators be more effective? What evidence would persuade us not to proceed?
Why This Matters Commercially
The greater risk is that employee creator programmes become another form of activity theatre. They generate content calendars, workshops, filming schedules and engagement reports.
But producing more content is not the same as creating more influence.
This reflects a wider effectiveness problem that appears repeatedly throughout Cos Mingides’ Drum column: B2B marketing has a habit of confusing activity with impact. Reporting with effectiveness. Outputs with outcomes. Marketing effectiveness is defined by whether activities create incremental, sustainable business value.
The creator label does not solve that problem. It may simply give the activity a more fashionable name.
What This Means for B2B Marketers
Choose deliberately between four options: use employees as contributors, support the exceptional employees who already demonstrate creator capability, appoint established creators, or decide not to pursue a creator strategy at all. Not every marketing problem is a creator problem.
Key Takeaways for B2B Marketers
- Most employees should not become creators.
- Employee advocacy is not automatically influencer marketing.
- Creator aesthetics demonstrate nothing.
- Apply the Creator Capability Test before proceeding.
- Consider the alternative of partnering with established creators.
- Be prepared to stop before launching a programme.
You can read the full column here: https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/attack-of-the-clones-b2b-s-creator-problem
About the column
Cos Mingides on B2B Marketing Effectiveness is a regular Drum column exploring how B2B marketing creates long-term commercial value through effectiveness, creativity, media investment and growth strategy. The column challenges accepted industry narratives and examines the evidence behind marketing decisions, with a focus on helping organisations build sustainable growth.
The column is written by Cos Mingides, Co-Founder and Head of Effectiveness at True, the only B2B agency accredited for marketing effectiveness by the IPA.
