Your Post Might Already Be in a Brand’s Group Chat
Poppi employees share creators and possible partnerships in Microsoft Teams. One saved post has to make sense to coworkers who have never seen the creator.
Somewhere inside Poppi, there is a Microsoft Teams channel full of creators who have no idea they’re in it.
Sophia Sesto, Poppi’s vice president of culture, told Business Insider that employees use the channel to share creators, posts they like, and possible collaboration ideas. People add to it constantly. Sesto also said the process remains very manual because AI discovery tools haven’t been especially useful to the team.
This sounds much closer to the creator economy I know than a clean little funnel with a searchable database at one end and a campaign brief at the other. Somebody is online, sees a funny person, drops the link in a company group chat, and says some version of, “I like them.”
The creator never sees that conversation.
When I post a video, I can see likes, comments, shares, and whatever Instagram has decided to call its analytics that week. I cannot see the brand employee pasting it into Teams. I definitely cannot hear their coworkers asking the questions that follow: Who is this? What else do they make? Could our product belong in one of these videos?
That last question is the one I care about.
A creator’s work needs enough room for a brand to imagine itself in it. I want a marketer to watch the video and immediately picture what their product would be doing there. Maybe my character would brag about one of its features until everyone around him became exhausted.
A viral post may be the link someone shares, and their coworkers will probably click the profile. A few more videos should make the creator’s point of view obvious.
During the 2025 season of Love Island, Poppi employees followed contestant Amaya Espinal and talked about the show in Teams. As viewers rallied around her, Poppi posted a fictional Amaya Papaya flavor on Instagram. Sesto said it became the brand’s best-performing Instagram post ever.
Poppi later partnered with Espinal on a limited-edition flavor called Amaya’s Island Colada, along with watch parties and creator content. The company told Business Insider that creator-made posts around the campaign received more than 212 million views. Business Insider did not independently audit that figure.
Nobody needed a deck to understand Amaya Papaya. Poppi makes soda, and Amaya had a name that begged for a fruit flavor. The audience already loved her, and the fake can looked like an object from the version of Love Island they were discussing online.
The brand found a natural way into a conversation that was already fun.
I think about the same question with Better Than Everyone, my series about the superiority people feel over random, ordinary things. The character brags about soup, coffee, a household habit, or anything else that inspires an unreasonable amount of confidence. Sometimes the random thing is a product.
One episode should tell a marketer how the joke works. For a campaign, the fun part is choosing the product detail that would make my character completely unbearable.
My Better Than Everyone page collects organic videos and brand partnerships so the person who finds one Reel can see the larger body of work. The case studies name what I made, what the partner needed, and the audience response I can verify. I’m aware that nobody joins Microsoft Teams hoping to read a novella about a creator they saw on Instagram.
Sesto’s comment about AI discovery also makes sense to me. Software can search bios, categories, and past partnerships. Taste is harder. An employee still has to recognize why a creator is funny, interesting, or right for a particular moment.
Search my name and the explanation should stay consistent across Instagram and my website. The series title, premise, videos, and partnership history are concrete information for the employee doing research or the software collecting possible matches.
I may never know who saved a post or what they said about it. If somebody drops my link into a company chat, the next person should understand the series and pitch a specific use for the brand.
The work has to survive the copy and paste.
Read Sydney Bradley’s full interview with Sophia Sesto in Business Insider.