A few years back, when I was a fresh graduate looking for a job, a posting from Fourth Floor caught my eye. It said they (now we, of course) were an advertising company, specifically working in branded influencer content in the world of gaming on YouTube and Twitch. I must have known those three elements would come in handy in life at some point, otherwise why else would I have already spent so much time consuming them? So naturally, I applied.

After a relatively smooth first interview, I was tasked with finding the perfect content creators for two mock campaigns, and justifying my choices. At the time, this was one of the most interesting and exciting bits of work I had done in months, as it had me actively thinking about the content I was consuming, engaging with it in a new way, and deconstructing just what made it compelling and kept me coming back for more.

Over two and a half years later, that excitement hasn’t subsided. And there’s a uniquely Fourth Floor reason for that.

In the early days of a growing company, your day-to-day is mercurial and you need to be adaptable. But while at the time I thought that was just a natural, temporary aspect of the adolescent stages of a business, it’s something that’s stuck around and become hard-coded into our company values.

I’ve worn many hats, from data research, to delivery, to production, to operations and sales. I’ve made beautiful spreadsheets with automated data-fetching, and also tried to schedule five days worth of forklift-truck training into three hours so that we could get some YouTubers to race them.

In the beginning, naturally, that was unavoidable. But that early, dynamic and adaptable ethos still informs Fourth Floor’s culture of community and collaboration, even as we’ve grown substantially and drawn up distinct lines and more formal hierarchies. The spirit of the start-up lives on, and I’m still allowed to try new hats.

That’s because it’s a big part of our company ideology to put people where they’re best suited, as we evolve as individuals and as a business. So much so, in fact, that we’ve now designed a whole new internship programme around letting people explore exactly that.

In my case, at the end of last year it became pretty obvious that my previous role in operations - while exciting - eventually took a backseat to my newfound passion for discovering and meeting new clients and creators. My superiors and I had a talk about that in one of our regular check-ins, and now I work in partnerships!

And there’s good reason for us to keep on our toes. To a lot of us, influencer marketing and branded content seems like the most obvious thing in the world, but it’s still a very nascent field to some, requiring a great deal of guidance to navigate successfully.

We’re lucky to have been born out of a founding culture that understands what content creators go through on a day-to-day basis. We were built around the empathy and perspective required to get right what many less insightful agencies were doing wrong. But with the industry and media we work in still growing and evolving at such a rapid rate, we have to evolve to match, and remain on top of our ability to deliver the right content that works.

Clients have become pretty used to ‘Let’s Plays’ and basic ad integrations, but the full potential of our field goes so much deeper than that. Coming up with a creative idea that really resonates, and shows that working with creators can be a fun, innovative marketing process, is a huge highlight for me. This is truly a wide open, fast-progressing, multiplatform creative medium, where you can produce something that you can hold up and be proud of every day.

“How about we make them climb a 50-foot tall sheet of ice?”

“What if we push them down a pitch-black hole in a cave on a bungee cord?”

“It’s like the Bake-Off, but they don’t know how to bake” Putting creators in compromising situations always seems to go over well, and the versatility of YouTube as both a branded content platform and community hub gives us a perfect environment in which to innovate.

“Creators”. That’s an important word. We don’t actually like using the term “influencer” if we can help it, because the people we like working with really are creators. The I-Word just doesn’t properly encapsulate the breadth and impact of their work, and it’s important to make the distinction. “Influencer” has mainstream connotations of product placements dropped into pretty-but-shallow imagery on successful but otherwise unconnected Instagram feeds. We deal with creators, content, and campaigns that have more audience value than that.

Creators make something compelling and unique from nothing, and spend a whole lot of time thinking about how to charm and entertain their audience. And that requires the specific, forward-looking, agile mindset I mentioned earlier.

We resolutely believe that great branded content only happens when you derive the most value for all three stakeholders - the creator, their audience, and the client. Much of the industry still seems to be learning how to do this, but our foundation and philosophy put us in a unique position as we push things forward at the true interface between creators and clients.

We win when both sides win, so we have a duty to to make sure that we’re all creating the mutually best outcome possible from working together. While sometimes navigating that road can require careful balance, when it all comes together and you hear “That was really great! I really enjoyed it, and so did the audience”, it makes every minute spent making it happen worthwhile. Whatever other KPIs are involved, that reaction is the core result we always aim for.

I tell my friends often that I love what I do, and I worry that it sometimes comes off as naive or boastful. The ‘problem’ though, is that it’s true, so there’s really no way around it. This industry necessitates that I’m constantly adapting and resilient, and Fourth Floor’s approach to those necessities gives me the tools and knowledge to do so, and makes the whole experience rewarding. While I know there must be many other people in many other jobs that feel the same way, I consider myself pretty darn lucky to have stumbled into a medium this dynamic at a company calibrated to match.