A few weeks ago, I was at a Modash Live. For the first time, we had marketers AND creators in the chat. Great energy. And then someone, I forget who, brought up the briefs that ask creators to mention the brand in the first five seconds of the video.

The chat lit up. Creators hated it. Marketers agreed with the creators. Not a single soul was defending it.

Except for me. I was on the other side of my screen, tapping furiously to add in my two cents. Turns out, my two cents were more like 100 bucks, so by the time I had typed my 900-word essay, the conversation had already shifted to something else.

Here’s what I wanted to say.

We may all hate branding early, but IT WORKS. Andrew Tindall at System1 has been running some of the most rigorous testing on the effectiveness of creator advertising I've come across. His findings show that creator videos that show the brand in the first few seconds can triple brand outcomes compared to those that don't.

But still. Everyone hates it.

I’d like to think that what we actually hate is a very specific, very unfortunate way of branding early. And not the general principle.

Could it be that we’re just executing it wrong?

"Mention us in the first five seconds" is about timing, isn’t it? It’s not creative or a strategy. It tells a creator when to do something without telling them the reason or how to make it feel like it belongs there.

The result is usually what everyone in that chat was picturing: a creator pausing their natural intro to announce a sponsor, as if they’re reading from a teleprompter. Audiences notice it. Retention drops.

But that's a failure of briefing, and of creativity. It’s not proof that early branding doesn't work. Or that audiences don’t like it.

If the research shows that brands that brand early have better outcomes, then what exactly is it about the content that’s producing those outcomes?

This is where Andrew Tindall's newest research helps us understand what good branding early looks like.

He introduced a concept called the social device. A social device is something the creator already owns: a recurring format, a prop, a place, a phrase, a specific kind of scenario their audience recognizes within seconds.

Think of a creator who always does blind taste tests in the same kitchen, or one whose whole thing is reacting to absurd product claims. The audience knows what's coming. The brand's job, according to Tindall, is to enter that device — not interrupt it.

When the fit is right, the brand shows up early because it's woven into the structure the creator already uses. Not because someone put a timing instruction in a brief.

Gabriel Gomez from MCoBeauty calls social devices “distinct creator POV in their content.” That’s how they find people they want to co-create with.

Take their collaboration with Abdullah @thisguyabdullah on TikTok & Instagram for their launch into Canada.

In the first 3 seconds, we see:

This collaboration didn’t come from giving Abdullah a brief and saying, “mention the brand name in the first 3 seconds.” This came from a thoughtful co-creation between the marketers at MCoBeauty and Abdullah.

The result: 25.8 million views on Abdullah’s post, $300K in sales during launch, $40K investment.

Watch Gabriel spilling all the tea on our Modash Live.

Probably not going to change everything. But I urge you to consider how you can use this info to test a new way of working with creators. Don’t avoid branding early is what I’m saying. And don’t avoid branding early because it feels like an “ad”.

It IS an ad. It’s your job to make it a good one inside the creator’s world, not yours.

Here are a few guardrails (so you don’t just tell creators to “mention us in the first 5 seconds.”

Early branding works when it earns its place in the creator’s world.

Which brings me back to that Modash Live chat. I don't think the creators and marketers were wrong to hate this type of instruction. I just think the solution they had in mind — brand later, brand softer, don’t brand at all— might not be the right one either.

Have you found a way to brief for early brand presence that actually works in practice? I'm curious how you’re doing it? Hit reply.

This week, I’m jumping back into our #creator-love Slack channel and sharing a cool visual artist shared by Modash’s influencer marketer, Anna.

Who they are: Vita Kari, an LA-based visual artist with 1M followers on Instagram and over 1.5M on TikTok, who has been tricking millions of people with paper and a printer.

Why they're worth a follow: Every video starts the same way: "The craziest thing about being creative..." Then they reveal that something in the frame — their ear, their lip, the text on screen — is actually a paper printout. It’s very rare for the opening line to change. Textbook example of a social device.

Vita's audience recognizes it within seconds. And the brands that have already partnered with Vita — Adobe, Curology, Sephora — stepped into that device rather than asking them to step out of it. If you're briefing creators, study Vita's collabs.

Dream collab: Olive & June. A perfect milk nail already looks almost unreal — too glossy, too smooth, too perfect. Now put that in Vita's hands. "The craziest thing about being creative... these aren't my nails." Are they printed? Are they real? Is the polish real, but the hand is paper? The format is built for this.

Tell me about a creator you love and any dream collab you have in mind. Email me at [email protected], to be featured.

See you next time!
Eleni Zoe xx
Brand @ Modash. Say hi on LinkedIn