Media Buying Briefing: Agencies turn creators into test labs for campaigns and product innovation

By Michael Bürgi • April 27, 2026 •

Ivy Liu

This Media Buying Briefing covers the latest in agency news and media buying for Digiday+ members and is distributed over email every Monday at 10 a.m. ET. More from the series →

Creators, whether they meant to or not, have found themselves at the forefront of media channels and marketing execution — all of it in remarkably little time. They’ve also helped to make social media a far more valuable channel than it had been, certainly since the pandemic made all of us pay far more attention to it than before.

Because of these factors, some marketers — with the help of their agencies — are tapping into creators as a sort of test lab for trying out new campaigns. Horizon Media’s one example, through its Blue Hour Studios, which is working with advertisers like SharkNinja to pressure-test and adapt campaigns on the fly, using creators in the beginning stages — even letting them have a say sometimes in product development as well as campaign development.

Instead of relying solely on traditional research, social listening, or post-campaign measurement, Horizon and clients like SharkNinja are starting to treat creators as an always-on signal layer: interpreting audience behavior, pressure-testing ideas, and informing creative direction before anything goes to market. In this model, creators aren’t just executing briefs – they’re helping write them.

“The marketing funnel has certainly changed — the importance of brand relevance looks different than it has before, and what that means for a brand in terms of ultimately driving purchase,” said Sarah Bachman, evp and head of Blue Hour Studios. “We’re really thinking about how we can use creators and influencers to be an engine to help drive virality in support of different product launches, and having a really close eye on making sure that we get outsized impact of that content, and look at the full, full ecosystem of the Creator space.”

For SharkNinja specifically, Bachman said ”We have a lot of benchmarks established and a lot of rigor that is going into how can we predict the performance of this content and make sure that we are accurately pulling together the right list of people to represent this product launch.”

Stacy Carpenter, head of global social at SharkNinja, believes this is part of the evolution of marketing in a creator-driven world, but one full of nuances that need to be understood along the consumer’s purchase path.

“Not every viral moment is meant to convert – and the brands who understand that are the ones driving the most content efficiency,” said Carpenter, who is joining a panel with Bachman as well as influencer Kat Stickler and Amazon Ads’ Jay Symonds at Possible this week. “Virality lives in an ecosystem: there’s culture and entertainment, there’s co-creation and credibility, and there’s conversion. The brands asking the second and third questions – why did this pop, what does it tell us, where does it live in that ecosystem – are the ones who turn moments into momentum.”

The idea behind using creators at the forefront of marketing might be limited to those marketers willing to adapt product on the fly. Carpenter pointed out that SharkNinja aims to solve real consumer problems better than its competitors. “Social doesn’t overshadow that,” she said. “It supercharges it. When the product is genuinely great, social becomes the engine that proves it – through creators who’ve lived it, content that earns trust, and signals that tell us where to go next.”

Amazon Ads’ Symonds, who heads the home and sporting goods categories, and has seen some pretty bad products in his day, said that an influencer or creator can only help as much as the product is great. But they can certainly help consumers find it and adapt it.

“I believe that brands should do more sort of focus group testing in this, in this manner,” said Symonds. “You’re able to see a sort of very quick correlation between is this performing? Is this resonating with the consumer? An influencer can get their audience to consider buying a product, but there’s still going to be that exploration, discovery journey for that consumer to say, alright, I really like it.”

Putting the creator at the forefront of the marketing effort represents sort of a sea change in broader marketing discipline. Stickler, an influencer with 10 million TikTok followers and 4.1 million on Instagram, argued it’s mutually beneficial.

“Bringing creators in at the earlier stages is a win for everyone involved,” she said in an email. “Creatively that all leads to stronger work from creators. It shows a deeper respect for their craft because it acknowledges that they’re not just distribution channels but creative partners with real strategic value. The strongest campaigns happen when brands trust creators not just to deliver the message, but to help shape it from the beginning.”

And agencies are taking note, especially when one looks at acquisitions made by the holding companies in recent years, be it WPP buying Goat, Publicis buying Influential or Omnicom launching Creo.

“In a world where every marketer is fighting for consumer engagement and time spent, creators are the new media company,” said Matt Barash, chief commercial officer at Nova Studio, and one of the sharpest observers of the changes in the media business.

Barash contrasted this approach with legacy marketing, which has usually been: put together a brief, build content, launch said content and then learn and adapt.

Today creators enable something altogether different, in a way that continues to make classic ideas of the purchase funnel all the more archaic. “Now they can look at the signal, they can optimize signal, they can validate the signal, and then they can look for greater scale,” he said. “The creator sits closest to that signal, and they can help to influence what lands with the consumer in a very different way than the legacy mindset or approach.”

“Social is this great R&D lab where you can see in real time how effective certain storylines are, and how you can build marketer presence or different themes that resonate with with an audience into the storyline to keep those audiences engaged. But also understand what they’re leaning into in real time, and perhaps what might not be landing, and why.”

Color by numbers

I don’t remember 2024 as a particularly calm year, but for some of us it was, relatively speaking, an annus mirabilis. According to a survey of 200 agency executives by Basis Technologies, 70% of ad agency professionals say their jobs are more difficult now than they were two years ago. And to dig a little deeper into those cheery numbers:

87% of those surveyed said they thought the traditional ad agency business model would collapse in three to five years. Among senior ‘decision makers’, it’s 92%.

54%: the number of execs that say clients relationships are more strained than before, owing to higher scrutiny, “higher client expectations” and shorter deadlines.

60% of agency professionals say they use AI daily, up from 16% in 2024; 90% believe the technology threatens their businesses’ revenue model. — Sam Bradley

Takeoff & landing

Account moves: WPP Media and its agencies won a few regional clients recently, including picking up Chinese EV maker BYD in Australia, as well as Wavemaker picking up Red Bull media duties in India … Virgin Australia put its media business, currently handled by Omnicom’s PHD, up for review. On the positive side for Omnicom, Initiative in China extended its partnership with Chinese food and beverage firm Uni-President.
Personnel moves: Dentsu named John Stauffer its practice president of business transformation – International Markets, adding to his current role of chief strategy officer at Merkle … Razorfish hired Renee Borkowski as evp of transformation, a return for her from stints at Accenture … Independent agency Influencer added to Jenny Penich’s current duties of North American president — she was also named global CMO … Fellow indie Novus hired its first CTO in Olivier Pepin, who comes from a chief architect role at MRM.

Direct quote

“If your assumptions are wrong, AI compounds the error. If your measurement is weak, AI makes you feel more confident about the wrong insights. If your theories about growth are made up, AI will industrialize them. So yes, learn AI fluency. But do not confuse learning the machines with knowing truth.”
— Greg Stuart, global CEO of the Marketing + Media Alliance, in a speech he will give to open the Possible conference.

Speed reading

If you missed last week’s Sports Marketing Playbook virtual event put on by Digiday, you can read some of the highlights from it here.
Tim Peterson dug into the potential — and potential privacy dangers — of the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement’s updated identity solution.
Digiday’s crackerjack research team surveyed agencies on their thoughts and concerns this year, from economic worries to AI’s impact. Read the survey results, written by Catherine Wolf, here.