Marketers increasingly pressured to show their creator spend is worth it — with harder metrics

Creators are there now.

A few advertisers got there early — L’Oréal was already pushing for measurement standards back in 2017 — but those were edge cases. The bulk of the industry leaned on vanity metrics and called it proof of success.

That’s changing. More CMOs now admit they can’t afford to stay on that path. The more they move away from it, the clearer it gets: views and likes aren’t the finish line anymore. They’re the starting point for the harder question: does creator content actually move the business forward?

Eight ad execs interviewed for this article said the answer is yes. Proving it, however, is still a work in progress. And it will stay that way until the market clears the structural and political hurdles that keep data siloed and standards fragmented.

In the meantime, marketers are piecing playbooks — experimenting, hedging and hoping something sturdier emerges.

“This year, we’ve seen a notable shift in how marketers evaluate creator campaigns, moving away from traditional vanity metrics like follower counts or basic engagement rates toward more tangible, bottom-of-funnel outcomes such as customer acquisition, conversions, and revenue attribution,” said Layla Revis, vp of marketing for social media management platform Sprout.

How that plays out depends on how brands view creators. 

Some advertisers like apparel seller Bombas treat creator marketing separately from organic social. With ad tech platform Agentio, it’s measuring bottom-of-funnel results — views, clicks, conversions and return on ad sales. So far, the brand has found that it comes less from follower engagement, more from whether the content drives real action. For instance, it saw 5.3 times more ROAS when working with hundreds of YouTube creators from Agentio than its typical YouTube campaigns.

“We’ve had brands spend half a million dollars in under 48 hours with 40 to 60 of the best creators on YouTube,” said Arhur Leopold, CEO of creator ad platform Agentio. “That would have taken their influencer team six plus months.”

Marketers don’t usually talk about creators this way. That’s programmatic language. And that’s the shift: this isn’t just about new tools — it’s about mindset. Creators are now a legitimate, ongoing part of media plans. 

The difference is that unlike every other part of those plans, there’s still an intangible: influence itself. Measuring it was hard enough when creators were new. Now, in a saturated market, it’s harder still. 

That’s why many marketers are wary of chasing conversions alone. It risks performance myopia and creative commoditization. To them, measurement also means sentiment, watch time and share rates. The bet is that if a creator can build brand salience and equity over time, the harder metrics will follow. 

“When we talk about the measurement issue in this space we’re really talking about organic,” said Jamie Guffreund, owner of consultancy Creative Vision.

This thinking is baked into native@AMV, Omnicom’s new creator shop. The agency is stitching together a measurement stack that blends qualitative and quantitative signals — using Kolsquare for creator identification and audience analysts, Sprinkle and Sprout for social benchmarking and channel management plus proprietary tools for direct access to creator and platform data. 

It’s an effort to systematize the messy business of influence, without stripping it of what makes it valuable. 

“Being part of that conversation and building that mental availability is what we’re really focusing on,” said the agency’s head Sam Reagan Asante.

For IF7’s clients, they leverage custom studies with actual opt-in humans who are asked a series of questions, such as ‘how likely are you to purchase a product from brand X in the next 30 days?’ are shown the creator campaign content, and then asked the same question immediately following that exposure. This allows them to ideally illustrate a lift in these key metrics. We can then also look at each piece of creator content in a campaign and measure the efficacy of each using this same panel approach. 

“We’re utilizing this pre and post methodology for brand lift studies,” said Harley Block, CEO of if7.

And they’re not the only ones. 

In the spring, Whalar became the first creator agency to partner with Kantar. It now uses Kantar’s Link AI — a predictive testing tool for social creative — to forecast performance before campaigns run, then measure in-flight. With Kantar’s data, it can also factor in how external conditions shape results. 

“Kantar has been a really interesting partner for Whalar because they’ve helped validate what we’re doing and subsequently get the confidence of the C-suite now that we can measure what we get around creators with Kantar’s other solutions like econometric modelling,” said Emma Harman, co-CEO of Whalar.

Still, there’s little point in measuring how well creator content performs if the creator isn’t a fit to begin with. Marketers are starting to put just as much emphasis on measuring the creators themselves — not just their output. Call it pre-flight measurement. 

Take Horizon Media’s full service social agency Blue Hour Studios. It has developed a scoring system for creators its clients can refer to. It uses AI to determine how likely a creator’s content is to actually be seen by an audience regardless of their raw follower count. To do so, the tool looks at consistency of posting, whether audiences engage — likes, shares, comments — and how well the content travels with platform algorithms. 

The result is a single score that turns potential reach into a predictive metric, said Monika Ratner, head of growth at Blue Hour Studios. 

“There are times where a marketer might think they need to work with a parent of a young family influencer, for instance, but that might not be the right approach to actually drive purchase intent with your audience,” Ratner continued. “It might be finding somebody who’s obsessed with cat videos or working with somebody who makes really posh dinners with absurd recipes.”

These conversations were inevitable — the shaky macro climate just forced them faster. Marketers who once spent freely on creators for brand awareness — without a clear sense of ROI — no longer have that luxury.