The tea business has always required a certain faith in distant operations — someone, after all, has to be in Sri Lanka watching the leaves. Now Lipton, the Unilever brand that has been putting tea in American iceboxes since long before iced tea was a cultural signifier, has extended that principle to its social media presence, outsourcing the work of seeming local to people who actually are.

After a two-year trial, Lipton has formalized an arrangement with Billion Dollar Boy, the influencer marketing agency, to operate what the agency calls "Social Hubs" — a program in which creators in seven markets produce content for both Lipton's channels and their own, functioning as a kind of franchise system for cultural relevance. The markets are France, Turkey, Belgium, Spain, the Netherlands, Poland and Saudi Arabia, which is to say, places where Lipton would rather not build permanent social media teams but would very much like to appear fluent in the local vernacular.

"We are a lean organization," said Emrah Oner, Lipton's digital marketing director. Mr. Oner said the company had grown too dependent on the traditional paid-owned-earned framework and wanted to shift toward what he called a "social-first, audience-first" approach. (The phrase has a certain circularity to it, but the sentiment is clear enough.)

The model is not, as Gabrielle Wallace, a senior account director at Billion Dollar Boy, acknowledged, "revolutionary." What it offers instead is flexibility — the ability to scale from three creators in a quiet month to 50 during a campaign push, without the overhead of employment.

Thom Walters, the agency's chief innovation officer, described the early methodology with admirable candor: "We basically just threw things at the wall, saw what stuck, and built things out from there."

One thing that stuck was a campaign called "Tea Shake," built around a Turkish snack that combines iced tea with ice cream. A TikTok video of a Turkish creator preparing the concoction outperformed expectations sufficiently that what began as a single post became, in Mr. Oner's words, "a summer-long campaign."

Not everything worked. An April Fool's effort last year, in which Lipton announced on March 18 that it was discontinuing its peach tea flavor, drew complaints to Britain's Advertising Standards Authority. Mr. Oner said the response was "mostly neutral and positive," though the timing — two weeks early — suggested a certain overconfidence in the audience's appetite for brand pranks.

Lipton said the program delivered three times the reach of equivalent traditional advertising spending last year, with 924 million combined views across TikTok and Instagram. The company is targeting two billion this year and plans to expand to Australia and New Zealand.

Joey Chowaiki, chief operating officer of the agency Open Influence, called the approach "a natural evolution." The interesting tension, he noted, is that it occupies uncertain territory between traditional agency support and the in-housing trend that has preoccupied marketers for the past several years.

Which is perhaps the point. Lipton has found a way to be local without being present, nimble without being exposed, and culturally fluent without having to learn the language itself. It is, in its way, a very old model — the tea trade has always depended on reliable agents in distant ports.

Original story published in Digiday: "How Lipton is using local creators instead of building in-house social teams"