Influencers Aren’t Just for Consumer Brands: A Case for Creator Marketing in the Arts
Influencer and creator marketing can help arts and cultural organizations reach new audiences, build brand awareness, and make arts experiences feel more accessible. Drawing on examples from the Metropolitan Opera and Jazz at Lincoln Center, the post offers practical guidance on choosing the right creators, working with micro-influencers, targeting younger and more diverse audiences, and using authentic content to overcome barriers to attendance.
If you, like me, have an occasional propensity for doomscrolling, you already know that brands are everywhere on social media, and they’re reaching us through people in addition to traditional ads. Scroll through Instagram or TikTok for a few minutes and you’re likely to encounter a creator recommending a moisturizer, trying a new restaurant, unpacking a suitcase at a hotel, or telling you about the shoes they’re “obsessed with.”
None of this is particularly new.
When I worked at agencies in the 2010s, we were already partnering with influencers, although we were more likely to call them bloggers back then. This was the heyday of the “mommy blogger,” and for consumer brands trying to reach women and young mothers these bloggers could be incredibly valuable.
In the early days, sometimes all it took was sending someone a product and hoping they would write about it. We got Chrissy Teigen and John Legend to swoon over Talenti Gelato on Instagram just by sending them a few pints. That didn't last long. Creators quickly figured out that the audiences they’d built had real value, and influencer marketing became increasingly pay-to-play.
But one thing hasn't changed: the partnership has to feel authentic.
Creators build their own brands and relationships with their followers. If every post suddenly feels like a commercial, audiences notice. That authenticity is precisely what made influencer marketing so attractive to brands in the first place.
In some ways, it wasn't that different from traditional PR. A brand could tell you its product was wonderful, but of course it would say that. If a magazine, newspaper, or trusted critic said it was wonderful, that endorsement carried more weight. Creators offered brands a new version of that third-party credibility.
Today, audiences are obviously much savvier about how the system works. Creators are required to disclose sponsored content, paid partnerships, and even products they receive for free. We know that money is changing hands.
And yet creator recommendations can still feel considerably more personal—and more credible—than a traditional advertisement. If you've followed someone for years, you may feel as though you know their tastes. When they recommend something, that recommendation arrives in a very different context than a 15-second commercial.
If this works so well for consumer brands, why wouldn't it work for the arts?
It does.
The arts have been slower to embrace creator marketing
Arts and cultural organizations have generally been more comfortable investing in familiar forms of digital advertising (Meta, Google, display, video, etc.) than paying someone on TikTok or Instagram to attend a performance and talk about it.
Some of that hesitation is understandable. Influencer marketing is still closely associated with fashion, beauty, travel, food, and other consumer categories. An opera company or dance organization may not immediately see itself in that world.
But that's why I think there's an opportunity.
Creator marketing can be an effective and relatively cost-efficient way for arts organizations to reach audiences they may struggle to reach through their existing channels, particularly younger audiences and specific communities or interest groups.
And importantly, the creator doesn't necessarily have to "sell" the performance. In fact, I think creator marketing for the arts is often most effective when it does something else entirely.
Think awareness before conversion
For most arts organizations, I would think of creator marketing primarily as an awareness and brand-building tool, rather than a direct ticket-sales tactic.
That's partly a function of our product.
If you're marketing a Broadway show that could run for several months or even years, someone seeing a creator's post today has plenty of time to decide to buy a ticket. But many performing arts organizations are promoting shorter engagements that last a weekend—or sometimes a single night. The window between awareness and conversion can be incredibly short.
That doesn't mean creator marketing can't drive ticket sales. It certainly can. But measuring its value solely by how many people click a link and immediately purchase a ticket misses much of what makes it unique and useful.
Creators can help people understand who you are, what you offer, and whether your organization feels like a place for them.
That last piece is especially important.
Many arts organizations are trying to overcome perceptions that have accumulated over decades: That's not for people like me. I wouldn't know what to wear. I don't know enough about the art form. It seems expensive. I wouldn't know where to go once I got there.
A creator can answer those questions without your institution having to say, "We're not intimidating, we promise!"
Start with the audience, not the influencer
As with any marketing tactic, don't start by asking, "Which influencers should we work with?"
Start with your goals and your audience.
Are you trying to reach people under 35? Introduce your organization to a particular cultural community? Build awareness among families? Reach people interested in a musical genre, dance style, history, architecture, fashion, food, or nightlife?
The more specific you can be, the more interesting creator marketing becomes.
Imagine a museum trying to attract younger visitors to a fashion exhibition. A fashion creator may be more valuable than a general arts influencer. A dance company presenting work rooted in a particular cultural tradition might partner with creators who already speak to that community. A performing arts center trying to position itself as a date-night destination might work with local lifestyle, food, or "things to do" creators rather than someone who specializes in theater.
The goal isn't necessarily to find someone who already talks about your art form. Sometimes the opportunity is to find someone whose audience has an adjacent interest that gives you a natural way in.
Bigger isn't necessarily better
This is where so-called micro-influencers can be particularly useful.
Definitions vary, but micro-influencers are generally creators with relatively modest followings (often somewhere in the 10,000-to-100,000 range) who have developed credibility within a particular niche or community.
For an arts organization with a limited budget, that can be exactly what you want.
You don't necessarily need someone with 500,000 followers. A New York City creator with 15,000 highly engaged followers who regularly posts about interesting things to do in the city may be much more valuable to you than a national lifestyle creator with an enormous but geographically dispersed audience.
Look beyond follower count. Who follows them? Where do those people live? How engaged are they? Do their followers actually respond to their recommendations? Does the creator's content feel authentic? Most importantly: Is this the audience you want to reach?
If you work with a digital agency, they can often help with this process. Agencies such as Capacity or Situation can identify potential creators based on your audience, goals, geography, platform, and budget, rather than leaving your team to spend hours disappearing down an Instagram or TikTok rabbit hole.
Once you have a shortlist, though, I still recommend doing your homework. Spend some time with each creator's content. Look at their partnerships. Read the comments. Make sure their tone, audience, and personal brand feel compatible with yours.
Use creators to dismantle barriers
One of the most interesting uses of creator marketing I've seen in the arts is not promoting a particular performance at all. It's addressing the small barriers that can make an arts experience feel intimidating.
The Metropolitan Opera, for example, has worked with creators on content addressing a surprisingly persistent question: What do you wear to the opera?
For someone who already attends regularly, that may sound trivial. For someone considering their first opera, it might be a genuine barrier.
Creator content can show that yes, you can dress up and make a night of it—but you can also arrive from work in whatever you happen to be wearing. Suddenly, the opera feels a little less like an institution with mysterious rules you need to understand before entering.
That's good audience development.
Show people the experience, not just the performance
We also experimented with creator partnerships while I was at Jazz at Lincoln Center, using them primarily as brand marketing rather than traditional concert advertising.
One goal was to broaden perceptions of the programming itself.
Jazz at Lincoln Center is understandably associated with big-band jazz and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. But the programming is much broader than that. For an Afrobeat to Afrobeats concert, for example, we partnered with a young jazz and music micro-influencer whose content could help demonstrate the breadth of what audiences might encounter at JALC.
In other instances, we partnered with New York lifestyle creators to focus less on the individual artist and more on the experience of going to Jazz at Lincoln Center.
For a salsa-meets-jazz performance at Dizzy's Club, we framed the evening as a great New York date night. That allowed us to communicate several things at once: the intimacy of the venue, the views, the energy of the music, and the diversity of the programming. All through the perspective of someone experiencing it rather than through an institutional advertisement.
We also used creator content to address a very practical issue.
We'd heard from patrons that Jazz at Lincoln Center can sometimes be difficult to find if you've never been there. The venues are inside the Shops at Columbus Circle, and the route isn't necessarily intuitive to a first-time visitor.
So why not show people exactly how to get there?
That's the kind of content an institution might hesitate to put in an ad campaign but that feels completely natural coming from a creator documenting their evening: Here's where you enter. Here's where you go upstairs. Here's what it looks like when you arrive. And here's the view waiting for you.
Again, you're removing barriers.
Give creators room to be creators
There's one final lesson from consumer marketing that arts organizations should borrow: don't over-script the content.
Of course, organizations should provide creators with key messages, relevant information, required language, and any important dos and don'ts. But if the final video sounds as though it was written by your marketing department, you've eliminated much of the reason for hiring a creator in the first place.
You're not simply renting access to their followers. You're benefiting from the relationship they've built with those followers and from their ability to communicate in a way that feels native to the platform.
Give them the information they need—and then give them some room.
The best creator partnerships should feel like the creator genuinely went somewhere, experienced something, and wanted to tell their audience about it.
Parting thoughts
Arts marketers spend an enormous amount of time thinking about how to reach new audiences. But getting in front of people is only part of the challenge. We also have to convince them that what we're offering is relevant to their lives.
That's where creator marketing can be particularly powerful.
A paid social ad can tell someone that a concert is happening. A creator can show them what it feels like to go.
They can show you what they wore, who they brought, where they had dinner beforehand, how they found the theater, what surprised them, what the room felt like, and why someone who doesn't think of themselves as an "opera person" or a "jazz person" might actually have a great time.
That's more than advertising. It's a form of digital word of mouth. And for arts organizations trying to welcome people who don't already see themselves reflected in their existing audiences, it may be one of the most useful tools we have.
So the next time you're building a media plan, don't automatically put creator marketing in the "nice to have" category or assume it's something better suited to skincare and fashion.
Start with the audience you're trying to reach and the barrier you're trying to overcome. There may be a creator who can tell your story in a way your organization simply can't.