Talent Collectives
Sinan Sahin: Sintillate Talent Wins Best Talent Management Agency Award 2022 for Impressive Wellness Campaigns
Today, we’re speaking with Sinan Sahin, Founder of Sintillate Talent, and Marianne O’Reilly, Talent Manager at Sintillate Talent, about winning Best Talent Management Agency at the 2022 Creative Industry Awards. Sintillate Talent also has an exciting new campaign, The True Story Campaign, which will be held throughout January to highlight mental health in the social media and influencer industry.
Sintillate Talent is a multi-award-winning international influencer and talent agency representing individuals in 18 countries. They provide global brands with talent for PR events, online campaigns, productions, and more.
Recently, Sintillate Talent won Best Talent Management Agency 2022 at the Creative Industry Awards and Best Influencer Marketing Campaign for Sintillate Talent’s awareness campaign on cervical cancer. Sintillate Talent was also recognized for the third time for ‘Supporting Mental Health Across Social Media.’
Winning Best Talent Management Agency 2022 at the Creative Industry Awards
Sintillate Talent won Best Talent Management Agency 2022 at the recent Creative Industry Awards held on October 22nd, 2022. The Creative Industry Awards celebrate talented and creative individuals and notable contributions of innovative companies throughout the UK. Guests at the 2022 Creative Industry Awards included well-known entertainers, such as Kadeem Ramsey, Ashley Walters, and Jasmine Jobson.
Sinan Sahin, Founder of Sintillate Talent, shares, “It was a massive achievement to [receive] an award and recognition of that caliber in the UK. It just shows us that the work that we have set about doing, the goals that we set ourselves from the very beginning, really have come through. What I think has helped us win this award particularly is the fact that we’ve always stuck to our values.”
The Sintillate Talent team also focuses on helping their talent create effective campaigns that improve the world. For example, they recently did a campaign about cervical cancer to raise awareness, which was a significant part of why they won this award.
Marianne O’Reilly, Talent Manager at Sintillate Talent, adds, “I think it’s bringing people together to raise awareness about topics that are really important and affect a lot of people. [Pap] smear tests affect every woman in the world.”
Raising Awareness About Cervical Cancer
Sinan stresses that showing vulnerability in campaigns is powerful because audiences relate to issues and challenges that influencers they follow share about.
Vulnerability makes powerful campaigns, like the cervical cancer awareness campaign, more effective because other women can resonate with an influencer speaking about how this has affected their life or why it’s important to be tested.
Marianne herself participated in the cervical cancer campaign. She shares that they advertised the campaign to their talent within group chats. Anyone interested was able to participate in the campaign, which was run by one of Sintillate Talent’s Project Managers, Becca.
Marianne explains, “She [Becca] made a group chat where everyone could share ideas and talk about the best ways that we thought we could get the message across…We set a deadline, and everyone had to post at the same time to make the most impact.”
Some of the inspiration for this campaign came from the shocking realization that so many young women, including some of the talents at Sintillate, didn’t understand why having regular pap smears to test for cervical cancer was so important.
According to the CDC, 13,000 new cases of cervical cancer are diagnosed each year, and 4,000 women die yearly from this disease in the United States alone. Pap smear tests are the primary way of testing women for signs of cervical cancer and save many lives when doctors can make diagnoses early on.
Sinan shares, “The feedback we’ve had has been significant, and even the number of views and reach and exposure we got from that campaign alone was larger than we do for our normal campaigns when we’re promoting products.”
The True Story Campaign
In January, Sintillate Talent is launching The True Story Campaign. This campaign focuses on people within the social media industry’s challenges online, including trolling, self-esteem issues, comparison traps, and mental health struggles.
Sinan shares, “We have to use our voice more productively to make changes, and [we’re] asking people to talk about their stories, like a brand product. Talk about your story because you know your story better than anybody else. We’re asking people to be brave [and share], not just people within our agency.”
During his speech at the National Social Media Awards, Sinan shared that 47% of influencers struggle with mental health. Mental health struggles affect so many people’s lives and businesses, but many hesitate to talk about it online until something tragic, like somebody taking their life, happens.
Sinan explains, “We have to be more proactive rather than reactive and start using our voice earlier on.”
The campaign will also stress that being an influencer is not always glitz and glamour.
Sintillate Talent has also reached out to other agencies about this campaign. Influencers don’t have any set boundaries for expressing their stories either. Influencers simply need to add #truestory during January to a post sharing their side of the story to participate in the campaign.
Mental Health in the Creator Economy
Sinan expresses that mental health online hasn’t improved in the last few years, especially after the pandemic’s effects and younger generations began spending countless hours on newer apps like TikTok.
Another issue that severely impacts audiences and influencers mentally is the rise in more advanced editing apps.
Marianne shares, “There’s this new app going around where you can literally change every feature on your face, and I’ve personally seen a lot of influencers using it, which I think is quite damaging… and the more that they’re [younger generations] on social media and not out in public and around normality, I think can really have an impact on people’s self-esteem.”
Adapting to New Creator Marketing
Sinan shares that he would love to continue seeing brands be more flexible with how creators showcase their products during campaigns.
He explains, “What we find is brands are starting to allow the content creators to be creative, and you use their own imaginations, their creativity, their innovation to send the right messages in the way that relates to their audience, so we find that the brand is moving towards allowing more control over messages being sent, even if it’s selling a product.”
Unfortunately, many influencers are stuck in old marketing ways where they didn’t have control over campaigns and presentations. Sinan shares that brands and agencies need to step up and encourage influencers to take control and express messages in their own way.
Future Plans for Sintillate Talent
Sinan shares that recently, they signed talent from Australia, making Sintillate Talent a six continent-worldwide agency.
He shares, “We’ve recently launched our new website, which makes the process for people who are interested in working with us a lot more simple, a lot more modern… For us, next year in 2023, it’s really to engage more on the international scale.”
He concludes that Sintillate Talent is looking to work with other agencies and more collaboratively within the industry rather than looking at others as competition. The lives of people online and their mental health are far more critical on a larger scale.
