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Creator advertising was the strategy. The process was the bottleneck.
Graza launched with Creators at the center of its go-to-market strategy. But as the company added products, categories, and channels, the manual mechanics of partnering with Creators started to cap how fast the strategy could move.
Every partnership was a project. Each one started from scratch: sourcing the right Creator, briefing them, then negotiating terms and price a single deal at a time. Start to finish, that ran weeks and often months, requiring a full team member committed to it.
There was no team member to commit. Graza runs lean, with everyone wearing multiple hats at once. The Creator program had always been central to how the Brand grew, but there was no influencer manager to run it, so it had to fit around jobs people were already doing full-time.
New channels meant new risk. YouTube was the obvious next step for upper-funnel reach, but it was unproven for Graza. So was any Creator niche outside the culinary lane the Brand had always worked in.
The pain points were concrete:
- Weeks-to-months cycle time from sourcing a Creator to a live video
- No dedicated in-house influencer or partnerships manager
- Manual, one-off negotiation with no pricing benchmark
- No efficient way to test unfamiliar Creator niches without risking spend on a guess
The dilemma: Creators were Graza’s most effective channel, yet its most operationally expensive one.
Partnering with Creators: from months to a couple of days and a couple of clicks
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Graza began partnering with Agentio to launch YouTube Creators, then expanded into Agentio’s Meta Partnership Ads offering. Instead of running each partnership as a bespoke negotiation, Graza started treating Creators the way it treats its other media channels: briefed, booked, measured, and re-bought.
What Agentio enabled:
- AI-powered Creator–Brand matching with data-backed audience-niche recommendations
- Transparent and standardized pricing - no endless negotiations, no back-and-forth on rates
- Streamlined brief-to-launch workflows, collapsing weeks of coordination into a few clicks
- Creator-level performance tracking across both platforms in one place
- Cross-platform re-engagement - re-booking proven YouTube Creators for Meta Partnership Ads
The Creator categories Graza would never have tested
Agentio also unlocked incremental value by tapping into completely new audiences. Graza’s default Creator was a home cook developing recipes. However, Agentio’s algorithm surfaced van life as a potential fit. Because the recommendation was data-backed, testing it wasn’t a gamble.
Performance that travels between platforms
The cross-platform advantage compounds on itself. Because Graza books both YouTube integrations and Meta Partnership Ads through Agentio, a Creator who performs on one channel arrives on the other as a known quantity rather than a bet. So when Graza needs to launch Meta Partnership Ads, it filters for its top-performing YouTube Creators and contracts them for Meta in a single click.
Those Creators showed up already fluent in the product: they knew how Graza works in a kitchen, how to talk about it, and what their own audience responds to. That fluency transfers across formats: the same Creator who can hold attention for a long-form integration can make a short-form ad that converts. Several of those Partnership Ads have now been running for six months, which in paid social terms is an unusually long life for a single creative.
Reach that over-delivers and gets cheaper over time
- 33.3M views delivered across Agentio integrations - 2.0x over expected delivery
- 87% view-through rate, evidence that Creator-made integrations hold attention
- ~50% lower effective CPM than contracted CPM, as views accrue over a video’s lifetime
- 36% Creator renewal rate - more than a third of partnerships with Agentio Creators are worth running again
Efficiency compounds. On Agentio, a Creator integration is priced against the views a video is expected to earn at the moment it's booked. But a YouTube ad read doesn't stop working when the campaign ends: it keeps accruing views indefinitely from search, recommendations, and the Creator's back catalogue. The cost stays fixed while the audience keeps growing, so the number Graza actually pays per thousand views falls every month the video stays up. Overall, Graza's effective CPM lands roughly 50% below the CPM it contracted.
Measured like every other channel. Graza holds its Creator program to the same evidentiary standard as the rest of its media, measuring incrementality and the halo effect of upper-funnel spend rather than crediting whatever touchpoint happened to come last.
That distinction matters more for Graza than for a pure DTC Brand, because a large share of its revenue happens on shelf, not on site. A shopper who watches a Creator cook with Graza on YouTube and then picks up a bottle at the grocery store leaves no click trail at all: click-based attribution simply cannot see the conversion it caused. Measuring incrementality is the only way to price that exposure honestly, and it consistently shows upper-funnel Creator activity moving retail conversions. Agentio is a core part of that upper-funnel mix.
Infrastructure + intelligence
Graza never needed convincing that Creators work: the Brand was built on them. What it needed was a way to run Creators at the speed and scale of a media channel, on a team where no one's full-time job was Creator marketing. Agentio supplied exactly that: AI-matching removed the sourcing, standardized pricing removed the negotiation, and brief-to-launch collapsed from months to a couple of clicks.
And Agentio’s intelligence supplied the part a lean team cannot brute-force. No one at Graza was going to arrive at van life on their own: it sits nowhere near a culinary content calendar, and proposing it without evidence would have been an expensive hunch. Data-backed matching turned that hunch into a test worth running, and the test turned into one of the Brand's best-performing categories and a permanent line in its evergreen strategy. The same intelligence made cross-platform re-engagement a certainty rather than a guess: performance data identified which Creators to re-book on Meta before a dollar was committed.
Together they change the economics. Reach over-delivered at 2.0x, effective CPMs settled near half what was contracted, 36% of partnerships proved worth renewing, and upper-funnel exposure showed up in retail conversions — all of it compounding well after the campaigns technically ended.
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