The following excerpt originally appeared in ADWEEK. Read and watch the full interview only on ADWEEK Leadership Voices. 

Ryan Stern still remembers the moment that sparked Collectively. She and her co-founder, Alexa Tonner, kept hearing the same odd request from big advertisers: they didn’t want to buy ads anymore—they wanted to buy content directly from creators. The trouble was, there was no real pathway to make that happen. “We think there’s something here,” Ryan recalls thinking. “Clients wanting to buy content directly from creators, but they don’t have a pathway to do that. Let’s just go for it.” That instinct became the foundation of an agency, and the payoff came fast: the day Collectively sold its first $1 million program, a milestone Ryan still lights up describing.

Ryan sat down with ADWEEK for their Leadership Voices segment to talk about what makes Collectively unique as the first influencer marketing agency in an industry they helped shape, what our practice offers, misconceptions in the creator marketing industry, and the pillars of our culture at Collectively. Watch the full interview.