At CreatorFest, Vera Sidlova, Kantar’s Global Creative Thought Leadership Director, spoke in a fireside chat on Scaling the Impact of Creator Marketing, which delved into how to make the right content decisions amid signal overload.
We sat down with Sidlova to learn more about how creators balance engagement with brand-building power, the tools that facilitate this and the future of influencer and creator marketing.
I'd like to kick off by hearing about your CreatorFest session and some of the key takeaways.
Vera Sidlova: In our session, we welcomed the award-winning podcast, The 90s Baby Show, and Khalid Almashgari from YouTube, and we talked about how marketers can turn away from thinking about creator marketing as something they take a coin flip on into a more of a confident decision-making approach, because they do spend sizeable amounts of money on creators these days.
We talked about the best practices that both Khalid, from a platform point of view, sees, but then the 90s Baby Show guys see from their more than a decade of experience working in the space. I think some of the key takeaways for me were one that I didn't actually see coming, but one thing that Fred mentioned was that creators want to be a part of the debrief, and I thought about how little brands currently bring them into measurement, and also we showed some data showing that not all brands measure for the right stuff.
So that's something that really stuck with me: the importance of closing the loop, not just picking the right creator, working with them in a balanced way, but then bringing them in after the collaboration has ended, and then figuring out how to work together next time, and maybe how to make that better.
I'm also interested in delving into your recent research. You've uncovered a quite significant disconnect when it comes to the creator content that's driving both engagement and brand building power. Why are social media algorithms and business ROI so misaligned, and what’s the approach to tackling this?
VS: So, what we found in our research, called the Creator Game Plan, we looked at 15,000 pieces of creator content across TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, and we measured them using Link AI to see whether they were good for sales or brand building, and in general, how they scored on key business and brand metrics.
We found that only 6% of content in the dataset was both highly engaging on the platform and at the same time building the brand, and the reason there is this disconnect, part of it is because, [with] platforms, their key reason is to promote content that we want to watch.
So the algorithms favour things that are good content that will get seen for longer by more people, and brands need to learn how to work with creators so they create content that fits that environment, but also at the same time is done in a way that promotes the brand's own goals.
I feel like adding that balance right is like walking a tightrope a little bit. Because if you kind of overbrief, you could lose the creator's authenticity real quick. But also, if you steer clear too far, the creator might create something that's very on-brand for them and very engaging, but it might not move anyone closer to wanting to learn more about your brand or closer to your brand. So, we do see that that balance is really critical.
And I was surprised how few pieces of content were good at both. Now, if we zoom out a little bit, the bigger question I had was to what extent is platform engagement a good predictor of effectiveness? Only in a third of the cases did it align.
I think that was another warning sign there, where if brands are serious about getting return on investment and brand building from their creator collabs, they need to start measuring better.
And regarding the recently released Link AI for Creators. How does that work? What are the mechanics behind that?
VS: Link AI is a solution that you can use to test any piece of creator content across the major platforms. How it works is that you simply upload the content, and you get a prediction on all the key metrics from sales to brand building, but also diagnostics that are unique to creator content.
You get cultural power: how well it's going to resonate with people in the moment. Viral power: if people are willing to engage and share it. And algorithm power: is it something that's going to travel well on the platform? This helps you measure beyond platform engagement on its own. It is important, but to get to true business outcomes, you need to measure more than that.
What you can do with that is really manifold. You can either, if you're doing a lot of creator content, you can measure it at scale, maybe feed it into your marketing mix models, but you can also use it in smaller batches.
For example, if you have a longer collab, you can test the first couple of interactions with the creator, and then say, "What have we learned?” You can bring them, as Fred was saying, into the debrief conversation. What are we learning from this? What can we do better with the next story, with the next reel? You can use it to create an effectiveness culture around creator marketing in your interactions because brands have been doing this with paid media for a long time. They have created learning and effectiveness systems and capabilities in their team. It's just time to bring creator marketing, as the spend gets bigger, into that overall effectiveness space.
On that spend piece, what do you think is the key metric that CMOs should be tracking to justify those larger creator budgets?
VS: Ultimately, I think they need a good portfolio of decision intelligence that they can use. So, if you are looking to start your first campaign, you could use something like Link AI to go beyond engagement to see which pieces of content are strong on brand building, if that's your objective. You can then use your boosting spend in the right way.
But if we go further down, you should do media effectiveness studies to figure out how creators have done in the overall mix, and then obviously, the overall marketing budget should also be evaluated.
There's no reason that you shouldn't include detail on creators in your marketing mix modeling.
I don't think there's a single metric as such, but at the different stages, you should definitely measure for sales and brand building outcomes, and it should be treated with the same level of scrutiny as other parts of your marketing spend.
There are plenty of brands for which the creator has overtaken some of the traditional channels in terms of the proportion of the overall budget. It just needs to be reflected in the measurement practice as well.
And looking into the horizon into 2027, what do you think is going to dominate conversations when it comes to influencer and creator marketing?
VS: I think we'll hear more questions about whether authenticity can be scaled and how that's done. Whether it's by working with fewer people for longer or by going micro-influencer at scale, I do feel like different brands are doing different things in the space — I feel some of those questions have not been fully answered, like what works for whom.
I do think it's going to be the hot topic when we're here a year from now: whether scale and authenticity are fundamentally at odds with one another, or whether there are ways that you can harness the power of creators at scale, and what's the right way to do it.
