Future of Marketing Briefing: L’Oréal builds the data backbone to its creator marketing

Think of it as a search for creator-CRM specialists but with a layer of predictive analytics and measurement tools built in to better understand what’s working, what’s not and where to invest next. 

Whoever gets the gig will work with L’Oréal’s marketers to knit together data on what the company is paying creators across brands, campaigns and platforms, and match it to sales data. This way, said the source, marketers can get a clear picture of which creator partnerships actually drive business.

It’s a move that sounds obvious given how much money brands now spend on creators, but few have the infrastructure to pull it off. Doing it right means systematizing everything: how much creators are paid, which campaigns they worked on, how those campaigns performed, what channels delivered results and whether one creator outperformed another. Most brands simply don’t have that level of organization — at least not yet. Their creator programs are fragmented — split across teams, agencies and regions with no consistent way to track performance or reconcile budgets.

“Once you have all that data gathered it allows a brand like L’Oréal’s to be able to organize it in different ways, optimize toward different goals, do media mix modeling and even eventually use AI to run predictive analysis,” said one of the sources.

Until now, L’Oréal has worked with Traackr to manage all creator data globally for several years. Over that period, L’Oréal’s work with creators has evolved into one of the biggest and most sophisticated. It now works with some 70,000 creators, from dermatologists to TikTok beauty enthusiasts, across 35 brands. It’s made $1 million in a single day on TikTok Shop, uses social listening tools to stay on top of creator trends and folds creator insights back into R&D.

Expanding the data layer beneath all of this was inevitable. Creators now play a far bigger role in L’Oréal’s marketing than they did a decade ago. Once positioned as an alternative to celebrity endorsements at the cosmetics company, they now act as ambassadors, affiliates, creative directors and even R&D collaborators — blurring the line between marketing partner, sales channel and product co-creator.

Publicis Group CEO Arthur Sadoun put it succinctly earlier this week. On the company’s earnings call, he talked up creators as being one of the big drivers of ad dollars into the business. 

The reason being that creators are no longer just brand storytellers, they’re performance drivers, increasingly paired with paid media to push commerce conversions.

That’s why Unilever can move 50% of its global ad spend to social media and creators, cutting deep into programmatic to free up the fund, per Next in Media. Virgin Atlantic, Haleon and the NFL hire creator agencies of record. Creators are a bona fide part of media plans now. And it’s increasingly why CEOs from Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, Levi’s and more are paying closer attention to the space. 

None of these moves happen unless brands have a clear strategy for understanding how (and why) creators move the needle for businesses.

Marketers tend to reach that point when spending grows large enough to demand real checks and balances — when creators stop being a test-and-learn exercise and start becoming a  core line item. 

The numbers back that up: More than half of content-driven advertising revenue will come from user-generated platforms such as TikTok, YouTube and Instagram Reels this year, surpassing professionally produced content from studios and media companies for the first time, according to WPP Media. 

Put simply, ad dollars are shifting away from studios, publishers and traditional media toward individual creators and the platforms that host them — a sign of where influence, and value, now live in the media economy.

Which brings it back to L’Oréal’s new data push. It’s really a necessity for a business with an audience as one of the main driving forces of this shift. And while “meeting consumers where they are” sounds simple enough, it’s far harder in practice. More brands are chasing the same talent, and the coming wave of AI-generated content will only make authentic, human creators more valuable — and more competitive.

“The ‘vibes-based’ era is dead: when creators generate three times higher ROI than traditional digital ads and reach 72% of Gen Z weekly,” said Arthur Leopold, CEO of creator ad platform Agentio. “CFOs demand programmatic-level attribution.”

Creators now compete directly with programmatic and performance budgets — they need to prove comparable ROAS, frequency capping, and attribution, but measurement infrastructure hasn’t kept pace with the demand from brands who are forced to work through legacy tech platforms and relationship-based services businesses that are unscalable and inadequate.

Numbers to know

• 76%: Percentage of marketers believe AI will increase total creator economy ad spend next year
• 39%: Percentage of all Amazon spend attributed to the DSP in Q3 2025 from Tinuiti clients
• 46.9%: Percentage of U.S. brand and agency marketers who plan to invest in marketing mix modeling over the next 12 months
• 69%: Percentage of brands that want to fully automate creator marketing operations

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