Will Frappell is the Chief Growth Officer at Charlie Oscar, an agency whose tagline is ‘The marketing science-powered strategy, media, and creator experts’.
Charlie Oscar has been working with Asian-inspired food brand Itsu to drive results through creator marketing campaigns, and was recently appointed their strategic growth partner.
In an interview, Frappell spoke to New Digital Age about what makes creator marketing resonate in a category like grocery, how they tackle the ever-tricky challenge of social media attribution, and what it means to be an agency “powered by marketing science”.
Charlie Oscar has recently been appointed the strategic growth partner for Asian-inspired food brand Itsu. Can you talk a bit about the work you’ve done for them, particularly on the creator marketing side of things?
One of the strategy drivers for Itsu is our marketing mix modelling (MMM) proprietary product, COmpass. We’re helping to measure all of their marketing: offline, online, and creator marketing as well as their in-store trade marketing across various product lines.
COmpass helps them to understand the effectiveness of all of that media spend on sales, as well as the optimal combination of marketing channels and how they work together to drive return on investment.
That’s one side of what Charlie Oscar specialises in – effectiveness modelling and consultancy. The second thing we’re doing for Itsu is leading their creator strategy: how they use creators and content to promote their brand and their various product lines within their grocery team.
Some of the creator-focused work you’ve carried out with Itsu has had great cut-through, particularly on TikTok. What do you find makes this an effective way of making a message resonate in a category like grocery?
We’re trying to put impactful, authentic content at the heart of everything we do. Creators are a great channel for that – we can find really good creators with strong authority on food, on nutrition, on eating out, on lifestyle; and creators who are culturally relevant – talkability and cultural relevance are quite important for Itsu.
They’ve got a wide product range within grocery, including a new range of noodle pots, and they’re very much looking to disrupt that market, which hasn’t had much new product development for a while. And so creator marketing can bring in authentic, culturally-relevant, impactful content, plus organic reach from the creators themselves.
We then license that content from the creators and run it on social platforms with paid amplification.
This ensures that the content that Itsu is promoting through paid ads is relevant and authentic; and that’s where we’ve seen great results on TikTok. We ran one creator campaign just before Christmas that outperformed TikTok benchmarks on awareness and consideration.
Our COmpass modelling can then tell us what bottom-line ROI that has driven into stores. The modelling doesn’t require a click-based attribution that you would get with typical attribution solutions; it uses sophisticated modelling and regression analysis to understand the impact of marketing spend and reach on in-store sales. We can then tell Itsu what the ROI of this type of work is versus, say, out of home, and compare it with other channels that they’re running.
Does that help with attribution on a channel like social media in particular?
Yes – across our client base, we do a lot of this modelling for brands who are trying to better measure their creator and social marketing.
What we find is that 80% of the value of influencer marketing is missed by traditional measures because fewer people are clicking on ads; fewer people are using voucher codes, which is quite an archaic system now.
This means that brands generally find it hard to measure their influencer marketing and attribute ROI – this is something that MMM and the modelling that we do can help with. A lot of brands will say, “Well, creator marketing’s a big growth sector; we know we should be doing it, but it’s very hard to measure.”
It also means that creator marketing is consistently under-valued in traditional measurement.
On that note: what do you find are some of the more challenging elements of cutting through with creator marketing – particularly considering that more brands are waking up to its potential?
It’s definitely a challenge to understand the impact that it has. If you’re just running creator campaigns organically, you’ll also only get the organic reach, and you’ll be spending quite a lot of money on creators. This is because it’s quite a mature economy now and creators are, quite rightly, demanding high fees.
If you don’t then use those assets in a more integrated way across the rest of your marketing mix, you don’t really get all the value. You’re missing an opportunity if you don’t then license that content and amplify it through your paid programmes.
That’s where I think a lot of brands are struggling – they’re struggling to understand how you can get more from your paid programmes and how to accurately measure them.
Charlie Oscar presents itself as an agency powered by marketing science: what does this look like in your day-to-day work? How do you balance a data-driven approach with bringing the human element to everything you do?
We often say that everything we do is ‘underpinned by marketing science’. But more often than not, the marketing science tells us that creativity wins.
Essentially, the data gives us confidence to be more creative. We also don’t want our clients to be running any activity unless they can actually measure it.
That’s why the modelling’s great – because it means you can measure the impact of more creative workstreams on ROI; and help brands understand why they need to be investing in more upper-funnel activity, more creative – because that’s what gives you the cut-through. And that’s what gives the best return.
It is an interesting dichotomy – marketing science and creativity – but the way we do it is that we try to be as creative as we can with our planning and our execution; but we ensure we’re measuring everything to understand the effectiveness of it.
What are you focusing on as an agency for 2026 and beyond?
We’re very focused on marketing effectiveness and helping our clients understand the true incremental value of all of their marketing investment. We’re also focused on working with brands who want to go more full-funnel, who want to invest more in brand, want to understand how much it returns; and on really helping businesses grow.
We partner with brands who have either stopped growing and need to get growing again, and we can unpick that and help them to find value in their marketing mix; or brands who want to go faster.
We work with lots of growth brands who are going quickly and need to understand what’s working so that they can invest more into it. Measurement and influencer marketing are our two big pillars for this year.
More often than not, brands are realising they need to change on things like measurement – and on creator marketing – but the less nimble agencies aren’t really set up to take them on that journey. And so, as a young independent, we can move very quickly.
We’re very efficient because we’ve spent a lot of time building AI into our workflows to make us operate at speed. And so, we’re looking to partner with more brands who are looking to go on that journey and need cutting-edge, nimble agencies to help them grow quicker.
Since you mention building AI into workflows – can you give an overview of how you use this technology in the work that you do?
We use AI in two main ways. One way we use it is to make ourselves more efficient. We’ve been on a journey in the last 12 months to automate as many processes as we can to free up more time within the team.
The team is now spending less time doing tasks that we can automate and hand over to agents; and therefore spending more time thinking about client strategy. That’s an internal process and that means we can be more nimble, more strategic.
And then, we’re using AI to make the campaigns we’re running more effective. How can we use AI to improve our targeting, to improve the speed at which we’re able to optimise across platforms?
There’s definitely two pillars there: there’s the efficiency, and there’s the performance. Our current belief is: the landscape’s changing quickly; the models, the big tech players are developing so quickly that it’s too early to go all-in on one supplier, one LLM.
So, we operate with the four big ones, and we essentially pick the tech that will best address the task we’re looking to improve.
It means that our teams can spend more time being client-facing, thinking about relationships, thinking about strategy – and less time on things like reporting and manual analysis.
