Giulia Mazzei on Why Brands Keep Bringing Agencies In Too Late

Featured in Net Influencer

Written byGiulia MazzeiEMEA | Influencer Marketing Director

With global experience across EMEA, North America and APAC, Giulia Mazzei specialises in influencer marketing and creator partnerships. She joins from Swarovski, where she was Global Head of Influencer Marketing after beginning her career in the brand’s global communications team for Atelier Swarovski, leading international PR strategies and high-profile activations with leading designers. Her experience spans brand communications and influencer strategy, and she is recognised for building collaborative relationships and delivering programmes that combine creative impact with measurable commercial results.

Giulia Mazzei crossed from client to agency in January 2026, joining London-based agency Greenpark as Influencer Marketing Director after more than five years leading Swarovski’s global influencer function. From the other side of the brief, the pattern she observed as a brand leader looks exactly the same. Agencies are brought in after the strategy is set, asked to execute rather than advise, and brands rarely invest in the in-house expertise needed to use them well.

“Brands tend to bring in agents and agencies too late in the game into their own strategies,” she says. “While really agencies and brands should work as strategic partners, especially when it comes to Influencer Marketing.”

At Swarovski, Giulia launched the brand’s first coordinated influencer strategy post-pandemic, leading a multi-million-euro program spanning Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), North America, and Asia Pacific (APAC). At Greenpark, which has expanded from content SEO into what it calls creator intelligence, linking Influencer Marketing to AI visibility and discoverability, she now applies that operating experience to clients whose brand-agency relationships she argues remain structurally underbuilt.

Influencer Marketing Earns Its Own Budget, or It Stays PR’s Dependency

When Giulia took on the influencer function at Swarovski, the channel did not yet have its own strategic mandate. “It had always been like PR’s little sister,” she says. “Hand in hand, but never its own growth engine.” Her task was as much internal as external: to build the case that Influencer Marketing warranted its own budget line and a seat in planning conversations, rather than remaining a layer added onto events or press campaigns.

The argument was made through returns. By aligning creator output with measurable brand performance and growing the budget as results justified it, she made the channel visible as a lever in its own right. “My main objective was to prove that Influencer Marketing was effectively a growth engine,” she says, “and not something that you just add on to projects here and there.”

That framing shapes how she advises clients at Greenpark. The channel’s effectiveness, she argues, depends on treating it as a dedicated strategy with its own measurement and infrastructure, not a supplement to what PR and events are already doing.

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