Performance Focused From Day One

Wren approaches influencer marketing differently from most brands.

For them, creator marketing is not primarily a branding exercise. It is a performance acquisition channel designed to efficiently acquire new customers at scale. Over time, the team tested multiple platforms including YouTube, podcasts, newsletters, Instagram, and Twitch. But one platform consistently outperformed the rest:

“YouTube has had by far the largest ROI.”

Before partnering with Makrwatch, Wren had already tested roughly 50 YouTube sponsorships internally. The results gave the company conviction that creator marketing could become a meaningful growth channel.

The challenge was scaling it.

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Scaling Faster Than Internal Teams Could

As Wren increased investment into creator marketing, operational bottlenecks started to appear. Booking sponsorships internally was time consuming, difficult to scale, and constrained by bandwidth.

Makrwatch was initially brought in through a pilot program focused on YouTube creator marketing. The goal was simple: determine whether the channel could scale efficiently.

The impact became visible almost immediately.

“Within a month or so of bringing on the Makrwatch team, it was clear they could operate at a faster cadence than we could internally.”

Internally, Wren had been booking around a dozen sponsorships monthly. With Makrwatch, that quickly expanded to 30+ deals per month.

This increase in execution speed allowed Wren to scale experimentation, test more creator niches, and dramatically expand the volume of sponsorships without expanding the internal team.

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Building Infrastructure for Scale

One of the biggest onboarding challenges was data integration.

Wren had already built internal tooling and Retool dashboards to track sponsorship performance. Rather than forcing a separate reporting structure, Makrwatch developed a custom integration that connected campaign data directly into Wren’s systems.

This allowed the team to maintain centralized performance visibility while scaling creator marketing operations externally.

For Wren, this level of operational alignment stood out immediately.

“Makrwatch diligently built out a custom integration with our database and Retool web app, so we could still see accurate data in our own tools.”

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Going Beyond Obvious Creator Niches

Wren already had a strong understanding of some audience segments that resonated with their product, but many potential niches remained untested.

Makrwatch focused heavily on experimentation and scalable testing, helping Wren identify high performing creators across a broader range of YouTube audiences.

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“When we brought Makrwatch on we had a general idea of the audience niches that would work for Wren on YouTube, but we had not extensively tested those niches.”

What differentiated the partnership was not only the ability to find creators, but the ability to test efficiently at scale.

“Makrwatch was simply the best agency for testing these niches effectively at a low cost.”

According to Wren, the combination of strong negotiation, fast lead generation, and rapid outreach execution made experimentation significantly more scalable than it had been internally.

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Acting as an Extension of the Wren Team

Wren operates in a category that often requires deeper conversations with creators. Topics like climate change and carbon offsets naturally lead to difficult questions during negotiations and sponsorship discussions.

One of the biggest differentiators for Wren was how deeply Makrwatch invested in understanding the brand itself.

“With a bit of training, the Makrwatch team were able to answer these questions as well as the internal Wren team and better than any other agencies we’ve worked with.”

That alignment became one of the reasons Wren continued expanding the partnership over time.

“I have worked with a dozen agencies in my capacity as Head of Growth and Partnerships at Wren, and I can say with confidence that Makrwatch had the best understanding of the Wren brand of any agency we worked with.”

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Unlocking Relationships and Larger Opportunities

As a relatively new advertiser in the YouTube ecosystem, Wren had not yet developed strong relationships with creators and talent representatives.

Makrwatch’s existing network accelerated that process.

“Makrwatch’s relationships unlocked a few larger creators we wouldn’t otherwise have been able to work with.”

This allowed Wren to scale faster while maintaining access to creators across multiple audience sizes and niches.

The structure of Makrwatch’s pricing model also played an important role.

“Makrwatch’s per video fee model made it profitable to book much smaller creators than it would have been internally.”

This gave Wren the ability to scale sponsorship volume efficiently while continuing to test creators of different sizes.

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Expanding Beyond YouTube

Although YouTube became the primary acquisition channel, the partnership extended beyond a single platform.

Makrwatch also helped Wren accelerate testing across newsletters, Instagram, Twitch, and podcasts.

For each expansion, Makrwatch conducted detailed audience and niche research before presenting strategic recommendations.

“Every time we tested a new channel with Makrwatch, the team conducted detailed research on audience niches that Wren could target on that platform.”

This structured experimentation helped Wren move faster into channels they otherwise would not have had the bandwidth to test internally.

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Results

What started as a pilot quickly evolved into a long term partnership that fundamentally expanded Wren’s creator marketing capabilities.

Through faster execution, scalable experimentation, operational integrations, and deep brand alignment, Makrwatch helped Wren transform YouTube into a scalable customer acquisition engine.

Most importantly, the partnership allowed Wren to scale creator marketing without sacrificing the performance focused approach that defined the company from the beginning.

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