What Air Gets Right About Creator Partnerships

Air describes itself as a creative operations platform for organising, approving, and scaling creative work. The easy marketing route would be product walkthroughs, feature announcements, and the usual stream of polished customer quotes. Air does those things, but it has also built a much stranger public personality around the people who make creative work.

That is the part I have kept watching. Air’s audience includes designers, filmmakers, creative directors, and marketers. Rather than trying to imitate that audience from the outside, the company works with creators who already have a place in it.

I cannot see Air’s briefs, commercial terms, or campaign results, so this is not a claim that every partnership worked. It is an observation about the work Air has chosen to put into the world, and the way it has structured those relationships.

The clearest example is Kareem Rahma. Air appointed the comedian and creator as its first Chief Imagination Officer, a deliberately over-the-top title that suits both Kareem’s humour and Air’s brand.

The relationship was visible before the appointment. Kareem served as creative director and starred in Air’s first commercial alongside The Rizzler, with Anthony DiMieri credited as director and Air as producer. Air later appointed Kareem as Chief Imagination Officer and involved him in Creative Air, a podcast and e-book project about making creative work.

Air could have paid for a post and asked Kareem to explain the product. Instead, it gave the partnership a premise he could do something with. The Chief Imagination Officer role created space for a podcast, publishing, and a commercial without forcing every piece of work into the same format.

Most brands do not need to invent a job title for a creator. The useful lesson is the continuity. If the fit is good, there may be more value in a recurring idea than in asking one post to introduce the partnership, explain the product, and deliver a result all at once.

Air also partnered with Austin Augie, the filmmaker and photographer behind AU Studio. One of the posts that first caught my eye followed Austin travelling and documenting the journey. Air was present, but the work still looked like Austin’s.

That sounds obvious, but it is where creator partnerships often get awkward. A brand chooses somebody for their eye, humour, or way of telling a story, then edits those qualities out through a rigid brief. The final post may be accurate and on-message, yet feel unlike anything the creator would normally publish.

I do not know how much creative control Air gave Austin or Kareem behind the scenes. The finished work suggests that their own formats and taste survived the approval process. That is a more useful standard than claiming the creator had complete freedom, because every paid partnership has boundaries.

Those boundaries still matter. The brand should be clear about factual claims, legal requirements, deadlines, and anything genuinely non-negotiable. Outside of that, there needs to be enough room for the creator to make the idea their own. Otherwise, you may as well hire an actor to read the copy.

The pattern I see in Air’s work is not simply “use well-known creators”. Kareem and Austin have distinct creative practices that make sense beside a product built for creative teams. Their audience size is useful, but the idea does not depend on reach alone.

For a B2B brand, I would start with the overlap between the creator’s normal work, the people who follow it, and the problem the product solves. A smaller creator with the right audience and a format that suits the product can be a much better partner than a larger account that needs to force the connection.

• Look at what the creator makes when no sponsor is involved. That is the format and taste you are hiring.
• Ask whether the people who follow them could plausibly care about the problem you solve.
• Find a premise with room for several outputs, rather than beginning with a list of product talking points.
• Agree on the real boundaries before production starts, then keep the approval process as small as you can.
• Decide how you will measure the partnership before anything goes live.

Giving a creator room does not mean crossing your fingers and hoping the work lands. Before launch, decide what the partnership is meant to change. For an awareness idea, that might be qualified reach, engagement from the right audience, branded search, or direct traffic. A product-focused piece may be judged more closely on sign-ups, demo requests, or another conversion.

Use more than one signal where you can. Tracked links and landing pages show direct response, while a how-did-you-hear-about-us question can catch people who saw the work and returned later. Brand search and site activity around publication dates add useful context. None of these proves that a creator caused every movement, but together they give you something better than a screenshot of impressions.

Our influencer marketing measurement guide covers the full creator, activity, cost, and outcome framework, and the ROI guide explains how to handle attribution without pretending it is perfect.

If you are thinking about trying this, start at the scale your brand can support. Find a customer or creator with a genuine connection to the problem, give them a useful idea rather than a script, and measure what happens. Air’s example is interesting because the creator’s taste remains visible. That is the bit worth borrowing.