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Break into the US on the strength of Creator trust - without a big team to do it
Scaling the US was a business priority for SURI in 2026 - anchored by a mandate to build brand awareness fast, in a market where almost no one knew them yet.
For a product like a premium electric toothbrush, that awareness can't be hard-sold with a conventional ad. It has to be earned through trust - and the most efficient way to borrow trust at scale is through Creators, whose audiences take their recommendations the way they'd take a friend's. For this reason, Creator marketing was the key lever SURI wanted to pull for their US expansion.
The catch was capacity. SURI ran a multi-channel Creator program but the internal team was very lean - and it had more budget and backing than it had people or hours to deploy. The channel best suited to building trust, YouTube, was also the slowest and hardest to book.
Why YouTube was the right bet - and the hard one
If Creator trust was the lever, YouTube was where it compounded hardest. Three structural reasons made it the channel best built to do the heavy lifting:
- Time to actually explain the product. A 90-second YouTube ad read gives a Creator room to walk through what SURI is, the problem it solves, and why it's different - something a few seconds of short-form scroll can't deliver
- A compounding, evergreen effect. A YouTube integration doesn't vanish from a feed the next day. It lives on the Creator's channel indefinitely, keeps accumulating views for months, and pushes effective CPMs lower over time - turning each partnership into an appreciating asset rather than a one-day impression
- Deeper relationships with audiences. YouTube communities run deep. Audiences subscribe, tune in weekly, don't skip the ads, and trust a Creator's recommendation the way they'd trust a friend's - with that trust transfering to the Brand
But the very thing that made YouTube valuable made it hard to scale. Sourcing the right Creators and producing long-form integrations took real time, and there was no way to deploy a large, budget on the timeline the US launch demanded. SURI had a throughput problem - the channel with the most upside was the one that couldn't easily scale.
A system that can be run by a single person
Instead of scaling headcount to scale spend, Agentio compressed the entire YouTube Creator workflow - sourcing, matching, booking, and content review - into a system one person could run.
- AI Creator–audience matching. SURI can see whether a Creator's audience matches its persona before committing
- Bid-based direct booking. Creators receive offers from SURI instantly once bids go out - no back-and-forth, no email chains
- Automated Shopify integration. Discount codes and links are generated on the platform instantly, and a SURI toothbrush is sent to each new Creator automatically, stripping out the admin that used to eat the team's time
- Streamlined content review. Preliminary AI review of content ensured SURI only watched integrations
- Consolidated performance tracking. CPM, CPC, view-through rate, ROAS, and CPA in one place - including VTR, a metric SURI started using through Agentio
This let SURI treat YouTube Creators the way it would any scalable media channel rather than a series of one-off deals - and it unlocked a strategy that's hard to run manually: diversification. Rather than betting only onthe obvious lifestyle-adjacent Creators, SURI tested broadly, because audience matching made it safe to.
Execution at scale - and efficiency on every metric
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In their first quarter, SURI tested 45+ distinct channel categories - from ASMR to gardening or architecture, surfacing incremental audiences a category-by-category search would never have reached.
In roughly five months, that system let one marketer build a US Creator program at a scale that would normally require a full team:
- 153 videos sponsored
- 45+ Creator categories tested
- 6.46M impressions generated
The volume came without trading away performance. In just five months, scale and unit economics moved together:
- MMM reported Creator marketing's true impact at almost 2.5x compared to what discount code-based attribution alone
- CPMs 60% lower than contracted, and trending down since day one as integrations kept compounding
- CPA has dropped 70% since launch, continuing to blend down as videos mature, and the earned media value grows
- VTR consistently above 80%, with standout Creators reaching 99% - a signal of both engaged audiences and genuinely native Brand fit
Infrastructure + intelligence
SURI's story is a reminder that for many modern Brands, growth isn't gated by budget or ambition - it's gated by the ability to deploy large budgets quickly. The business had both conviction and capital; what it lacked was a way to put that capital to work on its highest-potential channel, fast, without hiring a team to match.
Two things made that possible. First, Agentio's AI-native infrastructure collapsed sourcing, booking, and content review into a workflow one person could run — letting SURI quickly deploy an entire quarterly budget, on the channel that mattered most, without adding a single hire.
Second, Agentio's AI matching let SURI test far beyond the obvious categories. Because Agentio is a closed marketplace, it works from real, detailed first-party audience data for every channel — not scraped estimates — so SURI could see exactly who it was reaching, regardless of what a channel was ostensibly about.
SURi is also an example of the importance of measuring Creator advertising the right way: measured by their MMM, Creators' true impact comes in at almost 2.5x compared to what discount code-based attribution alone reports. So much of the value lands later, when viewers who first met SURI in a YouTube integration come back to buy, judging the channel on last-click would dramatically undersell it. The MMM is what lets SURI see - and act on - the full picture.
The result is a US Creator program that compounds: integrations that keep working long after they go live, CPMs that keep falling, and acquisition that keeps getting more profitable.
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