Sam Regan Asante On Guiding AMV's Creator Offer

When choosing to leave the world of publishing to join adland and Omnicom’s AMV BBDO last year, Sam Regan Asante knew that he wasn’t going to join an agency that still treated social as “an afterthought” - he needed to go somewhere that was embracing a social-first, creator-led thinking. 

The former Joe Media CEO and Unilad founding team member helped launch Native@AMV in the spring of 2025 with the aim of treating social as a core driver for clients’ business growth. That vision was key. 

As the head of Native, Asante cites the “impeccable creativity and craft” that has seen the agency produce famous work for Maltesers, Sheba, Guinness, and Currys in particular – long running brand work that both engages and connects with audiences. 

“When I saw the work AMV was producing, I was blown away. What really convinced me, though, was the leadership team’s belief that the definition of craft is changing — that it’s being democratised on social. They’ve fully embraced an always-on, creator-led approach, and they see it as fundamental to helping clients solve real business problems. I didn’t want to join an agency where social was an afterthought; here, it’s treated as a core driver of growth,” he explains. 

The biggest success of year one for Asante is building a confident, high-performing team, and proving that Native’s always-on, reactive model works. Its creator-led campaigns — including a standout project for Tinder — he believes have shown how giving creators freedom leads to stronger engagement. 

He argues that in today’s attention-saturated world, social content must hook quickly, deliver clear value, and respect that audiences filter out anything that feels irrelevant or overly branded.

This positivity about his experience doesn’t come from ‘sipping the Koolaid’ he adds, but stems from he now sees the value in making sure that he has “a tight strategy up front” which wasn’t the case in previous roles. That is what the foundations of Native have been built on while helping to guide creators to meet brand-led briefs without restricting their creativity. He also cites Group CEO Xavier Rees as being a supportive force in his career shift this last year. 

Facing the challenges 

Despite Asante’s evident positivity towards his maiden year in advertising he also admits to experiencing an adjustment, moving from a publisher mindset obsessed with immediate metrics to a creative-agency model that demands deeper strategic thinking, he admits. He comes from a world where brand platforms are also not front of mind. 

And while there is a change of approach at the agency, he ensured that social still provides the real-time qualitative and quantitative feedback that marketers value. Native@AMV is now focusing on combining performance insights with the wider agency group’s strategic rigour to build stronger brand platforms and solve clients’ business challenges more effectively.

“One of the key things I believe in, is that if you grow up as part of Gen Z or Gen Alpha, where you're constantly being advertised to and you're constantly being sold to, you just learn to filter it out,” he warns, adding that it’s not down to their attention spans but “to a consideration problem” with so much content being produced constantly. To overcome that, storytelling hooks and value exchanges are even more important than ever for brands – an issue, Asante say, he is always thinking about. 

Brands also face big challenges when it comes to showing up in culture through an always on, reactive social presence, and building effective creator partnerships at scale.

Asante says that to meet those, marketers must define when to react, what aligns with their brand point of view, and how to manage creators end-to-end — from selection and vetting to production, measurement, and reporting. As creator tiers now drive everything from aspiration to social proof, brands need structured processes to scale this work sustainably and ensure it delivers real impact.

He namechecks Native’s work with Pepsi and Mars in setting up end-to-end processes from finding the right creator partners (including vetting them from a brand safety perspective) to reporting on their final work.

“If you want to be ‘always on’ and have a steady drumbeat of activity, and you also want to scale that, then how do you scale that and make sure that you've got the measurement and everything covered up, because it can be quite time consuming?" he poses as another quandary more brands are facing.

Asante also explains that a decade old insight from a meeting with Universal Music executives reshaped his thinking: brands aren’t just competing within categories, but for people’s time and attention across all media. In a world where everything is a competitor, the most successful social first brands build a distinctive brand world that people want to engage with — even creating content around it themselves. That’s why user generated content has become powerful social proof, showing that a brand has real cultural momentum.

Developing brand trust in the creator space

One of Native’s account wins in this last year has been the paid social for Currys, generating product-led content that aims to remain entertaining and rooted in the culture of the organic brand output under the ‘Beyond Expectations’ brand platform.

Asante believes that Currys’ has developed an understanding of platform specific behaviour and the need to earn attention which allows for briefs that are very different from traditional above the line work — and far more effective on social.

He explains that the Currys’ Sells What Now? always on campaign required fast, hook-driven creative landing specific product messages while delivering ROI on significant paid spend. It built on the organic social that builds cultural warmth and primes audiences, while paid builds on that familiarity — making people more receptive to product led content because it still feels native to the brand’s established tone and behaviour. That project featured 52 assets being released over 52 weeks last year.

Meanwhile, effective social measurement remains a major issue in the creator space — meaning the agency has its own way of reporting ROI to clients. Native uses weighted engagement — valuing shares and saves far more than likes — to understand real impact and cultural traction. By correlating in platform performance with brand lift results, Native can make agile decisions about what’s working.

The business has also begun using new creator measurement tools that allow brands to access authenticated backend data, enabling scalable, end-to-end reporting for both brand channel and creator-led activity. These bespoke dashboards then give clients real time visibility without manual reporting.

“On one side, we use proxy metrics — the in platform signals we can align to specific objectives. Then, when brand lift studies come in, we compare the top performing posts and look for correlations between those platform metrics and the brand lift data. That helps make smarter, more agile decisions based on what we know has worked historically.

“We also use weighted engagement, because platforms like Instagram and TikTok value shares and saves far more than likes. A share usually means someone is talking about your content privately — in DMs — where the real conversations happen. Most people rarely comment publicly, but they’ll share something with friends if it resonates. That ‘dark social’ behaviour is hard to measure, but incredibly valuable, which is why shares and saves carry so much weight in our framework.”

And all of this may become even more crucial with the rise of AI influencers, the use of which could see brands risk feeling inauthentic and misleading for people, Asante believes. For now, it’s not a space he’s keen to tap into, though he accepts there may be limited use cases for some brands.

In his first year, Asante has learned a great deal about leading an advertising business — and his move couldn’t have been better timed. As brands chase cultural relevance and creator driven reach, demand for Native’s model is only set to accelerate across the AMV Group.