Customer Story How CreatorIQ Helps Moose Toys Find Brand-Safe Creators and Make Kids “Superhappy”

As the senior manager, social and influencer strategy, at Moose Toys, Claudia Vine oversees the social media strategy and multi-tiered creator campaigns for a dozen different brands across various categories, including preschool, action figures, dolls, collectibles, youth electronics, and games. With creator campaigns for every brand, Claudia and her team activate hundreds to thousands of content creators every year to launch new collections and products. 

Creator marketing plays a central role in Moose Toys’ marketing ecosystem: “Moose Toys values creator content one hundred percent. We take creator content and use it within all of our marketing tactics. It helps to humanize the brand, it extends our storytelling, and it really creates our cohesive 360 marketing,” Claudia says.

Moreover, in the fast-paced world of consumer marketing, Claudia emphasizes that storytelling through creators has become a powerful strategy. The ability to transform a product into a personalized narrative that resonates with audiences is both an art and a skill, and Moose Toys loves enabling creators to share the brand’s story in unique and impactful ways.

Claudia credits much of the success and scale of the organization’s creator marketing program to the culture of innovation and fast-paced environment of Moose Toys: “Our creator marketing program drives significant awareness for the business. Our toys truly lend themselves to fun content, and our creator partners express the creativity and unique play patterns of our toys to our audiences in ways that feel both organic and compelling.”

In a rapidly evolving consumer market, creator marketing has become a pivotal driver of brand engagement, allowing Moose Toys to connect with audiences around the world in meaningful and playful ways. 

As a toy company with a young audience, Moose Toys needed to find brand-safe creators with aligned values to ensure safe and compliant content for its community: “We are a family company. We love to make kids 'Superhappy,' but we also want to make sure that they're consuming safe content,” says Claudia.

Additionally, tracking creator and campaign performance was difficult for the team, especially without a robust system in place. Initially relying on manual processes like spreadsheets and agent references, Moose Toys struggled with both efficient talent identification and reporting. “We were doing everything manually,” Claudia says. “We couldn’t identify and vet talent in the way that I wanted.”

Moose Toys recognized the need for a more streamlined and effective approach to managing and measuring its creator marketing program. The team needed to discover brand-safe creators and implement a comprehensive system for performance tracking. This shift would both enhance the quality of content shared with the brand's young audience and also support the scalability and success of its creator marketing efforts moving forward.

To overcome these challenges, Claudia and her team implemented CreatorIQ to seamlessly identify and vet brand-safe creators, track campaign success, and centralize program management. The platform allows Moose Toys to scale its creator program, improve reporting accuracy, and make data-driven decisions, ultimately enhancing the effectiveness of its marketing efforts.

Since onboarding CreatorIQ, Claudia says, “We've been able to identify the right creators and look at demographics, which is really key when marketing to kids, to find who we should be partnering with. We’ve been able to scale from there while tracking performance to gain critical insights.”

CreatorIQ also provides real-time insights that help the team make informed decisions quickly. “At Moose Toys, reporting is so important, and CreatorIQ has helped us with that tremendously. We don't have to wait for creators to come back and share reporting metrics from the backend of their content. We can jump into the platform and share insights with leadership so they can see our successes in real time,” says Claudia.

Before implementing CreatorIQ, Moose Toys evaluated creators based on the number of impressions and followers they had. Now, Claudia notes, the team has shifted its approach to focus on creators with true engagement who can drive EMV for the brand. 

Beyond creator discovery and reporting, CreatorIQ has helped Moose Toys’ “lean but mighty” influencer team scale its creator marketing program to a new level: “CreatorIQ helps us to elevate our marketing tactics,” says Claudia. “We're able to present creator options to our brand managers at scale for them to activate, track performance, and reactivate creators who have performed well for us.” 

With the help of CreatorIQ, Moose Toys' creator marketing program has seen remarkable success. According to Claudia, the platform enabled the company to safely scale its creator program, resulting in significant EMV growth: Moose Toys’ EMV surged 480% from 2020 to 2023.

Earned Media Value (EMV) has become a key performance indicator for Moose Toys. “EMV has always been a metric that I personally have used to measure the ROI of our creator campaigns,” Claudia says, “but I've noticed that over the last few years, Moose Toys has really embraced EMV as the main metric that we use to track performance. It's a great measure that shows we’re getting our investment back three- or fourfold.”

Claudia also shares how Moose Toys’ creator marketing program has a broader halo effect—which the team calls “structured virality”—on the business. According to Claudia, “structured virality” is when social media creators influence everyday consumers to purchase and review the brand’s toys online, and that resulting content goes viral and drives sales—a phenomenon that sold out Moose Toys’ Cookeez Makery line. ”For me, success is when I see our creators influencing everyday families to pick up a toy, buy it on Amazon, and review it online, and it goes viral,” says Claudia.

With CreatorIQ, Moose Toys is able to discover and partner with the right, brand-safe creators to tell its story in new and creative ways, driving brand awareness, engagement, and ultimately sales. Moreover, with CreatorIQ’s real-time performance tracking and metrics, Claudia’s team is empowered to certify its efforts with tangible results: “CreatorIQ validates a lot of the work that we've been doing and shows how much creator marketing is giving back to the business.”