Bryce Coombe.
Bryce Coombe, Managing Director, Hypetap
A narrative gained traction in the trade press recently suggesting that paid creator partnerships are failing to deliver the same dividends as traditional brand building. Citing a recent global efficiency study, a headline metric broadly stated that less than three in ten creator campaigns outperform traditional brand-led advertising
At surface level, it sounds like an issue with Influencer as a channel.
But the reality is the channel isn't failing; the way it is being briefed and managed is.
Poor performance, according to the study, are fundamentally due to an execution and briefing failure, likely driven by non-experts. The reality of Influencer is far more encouraging for brands willing to rethink their approach.
This week’s commentary talks about how the heavy lifting from the top 10% of creators deliver 4x the lift of the rest while an underperforming majority bunches at the low end (The Creator Effectiveness Playbook, WPP Media/System1/TikTok).
But delve deeper and it becomes obvious this isn’t driven by a flaw in the creator ecosystem, but is driven by generalised, non-specialist teams pasting legacy media thinking onto a highly nuanced medium.
When brands utilise generalists or partners like Creative, PR or Media that aren’t Influencer specialists, the quality of the work craters. Poor briefs or “norms” from other channels being forced into Influencer are actually the biggest drivers of poor performance. For example, according to the same report, forcing a creator into artificial script-reading triggers an 8.8% drop in audience emotional connection, while clogging the screen with heavy text overlays further drops performance by 12%
To close this performance gap, the industry must replace old-school habits with a disciplined, specialist approach. You can’t treat creator marketing as a digital billboard or an ad-hoc add-on to a media plan and expect it to build a brand.
As with creative briefs and media briefs, influencer briefs also require an intelligent strategy where the brief defines the value to the audience and integrates the product and talent’s role. The best performing campaigns rely on defining this in two stages, first the strategy and second the creative brief.
- The strategy should identify the human need the brand addresses and then matching with a creator whose established world feels credible and consistent with that need.
- The brief then translates that into creative quality by ensuring the work remains engaging while landing distinct brand assets and feels in context with the creator’s organic content.
Navigating this ecosystem requires a specialist partner who understands platform behaviour, community and influencer nuances, and the threshold where branding aids recognition rather than interrupting the feed.
At a top-line level states the report, creator-led assets naturally outperform traditional advertising, driving 23% higher brand memory lift than brand-made ads in short-form environments. That’s good news and highlights the value of creator marketing. The report also cites that when a specialist brief successfully integrates platform-native entertainment with clear, early visual and audio brand recognition early, the return yields a 196% performance increase. Also, good news.
But most importantly, a recent econometric study, Beyond Engagement: Understanding Influencer Payback, IPA UK, reveals the true long-term value of the channel.
The report states in comprehensive cross-industry testing, creator marketing was proven to deliver a long-term business growth multiplier of 3.35 (. This sits comfortably ahead of legacy brand-building benchmarks, outperforming Linear TV (3.27), Broadcaster Video-on-Demand (2.56), and standard Paid Social (1.98) (Beyond Engagement: Understanding Influencer Payback, IPA UK)
I’m often reminded of a saying I heard in advertising many years ago “Just because I own scissors, doesn’t mean I cut my own hair”. This principle is true across all specialisations including Advertising, Media, PR and Influencer.
Engaging and working with an Influencer specialist to ensure the strategy, brief and execution are aligned ultimately drive a better outcome in a channel that is the most potent long-term brand equity driver for any modern marketer.