What Advertising Week Europe Confirmed: Creator-First Thinking Is the New Foundation for Premium Brand Building

Last week, Disrupt took to the stage at Advertising Week Europe alongside Elie Barnes, Chief Marketing and Digital Officer at Bremont Watches, and Mathieu Couret, Senior Influencer Marketing Manager at Vinted. Joining the panel was Hannah Turner, Campaign Lead at Disrupt, who heads the agency's work with Vinted across the UK and Ireland. 

The session, Building Brand Legacy in the Creator Era: Lessons From Luxury and Fashion, brought together brand leaders at opposite ends of the prestige spectrum to explore a question that's becoming impossible to ignore: as luxury and premium brands increasingly turn to creator-led strategies, and the influencer marketing matures into a serious brand-building channel, how do you scale through people without losing what makes you special?

The front door has moved

Jay Richards, Managing Director at Disrupt, opened with a provocation. The front door of a premium brand is no longer a boutique, a billboard, or a campaign. It's the person your customer trusts on their phone at 11pm. In high-consideration categories like luxury watches, premium fashion and heritage beauty, that's not a trend to manage, it's a structural shift to build around.

"A brief to a creator should be like scaffolding. We are giving you scaffolding that allows you to then build your world and tell your story within it." - Jay Richards, Managing Director, Disrupt Marketing

It's a shift that's been building for years, but the panel argued that many premium brands are still treating it like a channel decision rather than a brand architecture one. The question isn't whether creators have become the primary interface between brand and consumer. They have. The question is what you do with that reality and whether your business is structured to take advantage of it or simply react to it.

For high-consideration purchases, creators now do the work that editorial, PR, and word-of-mouth used to share between them. They shape perception before a customer ever visits your site, enters your store, or engages with your brand directly. They answer the questions a brand's own channels can't answer with credibility: is this worth it? Does someone like me wear this? Does this brand actually stand for what it says it does?

Elie Barnes was candid about this from a luxury watch perspective. For Bremont, creators aren't the sole front door, they're a critical contributor to it, particularly when it comes to reaching a younger, more digitally native audience earlier in what is a long and considered purchase journey.

"It's an emotional purchase. It might be a wedding gift, a promotion, a gift to yourself. The customer journey for us is a lot longer. So we have to be considerate about it, but creators have really helped us reach younger customers who are online more than perhaps the older customer set we have." - Elie Barnes, Chief Marketing and Digital Officer, Bremont Watches

That makes creator selection a strategic decision, not a media one. And it means the brief, the relationship, and the way you measure success all need to catch up.

Prestige at scale: the real tension

The session's most commercially charged discussion centred on a tension most premium marketers recognise but rarely talk about plainly. Democratic platforms and premium positioning don't naturally coexist. Social media is built for reach, participation, and volume. Luxury has traditionally been built on scarcity, distance, and controlled narrative. Creators collapse that distance almost by definition.

So how do you maintain mystique at volume?

For Vinted, the answer lies in the architecture of the creator programme itself, and the discipline of the brief. Hannah spoke directly to how Disrupt approaches this with the brand: keeping the creative parameters tight enough to protect brand feel, while giving creators genuine room to be themselves.

"We just want you to do these two things, but then we want you to show you. That's good authenticity, that's what it's all about. We want it to look organic." - Hannah Turner, Campaign Lead, Disrupt Marketing

That philosophy has driven significant scale. Vinted now works with around 60 influencers a week on a rolling basis across the UK and Ireland, a volume that would be impossible to maintain without a brief that creators actually want to work with. The feedback from creators, Hannah noted, is consistent: Vinted's brief is one of the most flexible they encounter. That flexibility isn't a lack of strategic intent. It's a deliberate choice to protect creative freedom at volume.

Mathieu Couret framed this within a broader strategic model, one that moves beyond the idea of creators as a single channel and towards a layered ecosystem where different tiers of creator do different jobs.

"I see it more as a holistic system. Creators are definitely where most of your ROI is going to come from, but you have to bring all the layers above and below and make it a holistic system." - Mathieu Couret, Senior Influencer Marketing Manager, Vinted

The contrast between Bremont and Vinted on this point was one of the session's most useful assets. Both are navigating the same underlying challenge, how to build something that feels genuinely premium through people, but from entirely different starting points. Heritage and craft on one side. Community and values on the other. What they share is the understanding that prestige, in the creator era, is earned through trust rather than distance.

Architects of culture, not content factories

The third part of the session moved from frameworks to people and to a distinction that the panel argued the industry consistently gets wrong.

Not all creators are equal. For premium brands, reach is often the least interesting variable in the brief. The session introduced the idea of architects of culture: creators who don't just reach audiences, but shape how those audiences think and feel about a category over time. These are people who are genuinely building something in their space, not just posting into it.

Mathieu pointed to a standout example from Vinted's work in France, a singer called Theodora, whose follower count was modest by celebrity campaign standards but whose engagement rate sat at 29%. The campaign went viral. The lesson wasn't that reach doesn't matter, it was that the right person, with the right brand alignment, will outperform a bigger name with weaker fit almost every time.

The panel was equally direct about what that means for how brands need to operate. Identifying architects of culture requires someone at the brand to actually be online watching, spotting, moving fast (or to work with an Agency like Disrupt). As Mathieu put it, in the luxury space these people get identified and signed quickly.

Hannah echoed this from the Disrupt side, pointing to the compounding effect of finding creators who genuinely love the brand and rebuilding those relationships over time rather than treating every campaign as a standalone activation.

"It's about looking for people who have a genuine love for the brand. People just genuinely love Vinted, and so it's about finding those types of people." - Hannah Turner, Campaign Lead, Disrupt Marketing

That long-term thinking translated directly into results. When Disrupt and Vinted launched Ireland as a new market last year, they replicated the UK creator model, and the result was one of the most successful market launches Vinted had seen.

"We launched Ireland as a market last year and we were able to just replicate what we did in the UK. It was one of the most successful launches of the Vinted market ever." - Hannah Campaign Lead, Disrupt Marketing

For Bremont, the architects of culture principle plays out differently, but the underlying logic is the same. Rather than chasing creators who are shaping culture broadly, the brand looks for people who can carry British identity into new global markets. Adventurers, explorers, and individuals with authentic stories, people like Jason Fox and Alastair Humphreys, who become long-term ambassadors rather than campaign placements.

Legacy is built, not bought

The session closed with a challenge to the room. Creator marketing is still treated as a performance channel by most of the industry. Budgets are allocated against reach, impressions, and short-term conversion. The measurement frameworks are built for efficiency, not equity.

What Disrupt, Bremont, and Vinted all agreed was that done right, creator marketing is something more durable than that. It builds the kind of brand equity that compounds. The kind that means people want to belong to a brand, not just buy from it. The kind that survives a product cycle, a platform shift, or a cultural moment that moves on.

Mathieu made the commercial case plainly: get the creator strategy right and the results don't stay on social, they end up being reported in the Financial Times. PR teams spend years trying to land that kind of coverage. The right creator relationships can make it happen as a byproduct.

That requires a different kind of thinking. Creator-first, not creator-as-tactic. Long-term relationships, not campaign activations. Architects of culture, not content factories.

It also requires brands to be honest about what they're actually investing in, and whether the way they're measuring success is giving them the full picture.

That's the conversation Disrupt came to Advertising Week Europe to have. And judging by the response in the room, it's one the industry is ready for.

Disrupt is a London-based creator and influencer marketing agency. To talk about what creator-first thinking could mean for your brand, get in touch.