Ayaan Mohamud.
Ayaan Mohamud, RVP Marketing APJ, impact.com
When Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, landed in Melbourne earlier this year wearing a Friends With Frank jacket and Rolla's Jeans, both pieces sold out in nearly every size within minutes. Her outfits appeared on OneOff, an AI-powered fashion discovery platform that converted what she was wearing into shoppable affiliate links the moment she stepped out of the car. Discovery to purchase, in a single click, with the person who influenced the sale (in this instance the Duchess) taking a direct cut of it.
A few years ago, that transaction would not have been possible. Getting to that single click took a decade of commercial and technical change.
The creator is the new sales associate
Commerce and marketing used to operate in separate rooms. The creator's role was to make the brand look good via an approved caption and a polished image. Shoppable feeds, personalised affiliate links and in-app checkout changed that, collapsing the distance between a creator's recommendation and a completed purchase.
The creator is now something closer to a sales assistant for the digital age, the kind of role once played by trusted floor staff in a department store. Consumers want creators to be prescriptive. They want to know whether something is worth the money, how it fits, what it works with and whether it delivers in real life. They want judgement as much as styling, and that judgement has to feel personal, authentic and independent of the brand. Brands that understood this loosened the creative reins, and in turn, creators grew selective about the brands they work with.
At our last iPX Sydney event, Milly Bannister, founder, advocate and creator, summed it up: "I would never recommend anything to the people who follow me that I wouldn't recommend to a friend. They have to be value aligned, and I feel responsibility for the experience of that product in the hands of people who follow me."
New commercial models
The commercial infrastructure around creators changed to match, and tracked links, promo codes and authenticated attribution now give brands a clear view of which creators drove which outcomes. Rather than a straight move to performance pay, though, the model that works is a hybrid, with a base fee that recognises the effort of content creation, with commission on top that scales with results. Creators are a measurable channel, but they also drive value across the full funnel. As Milly Bannister put it, "You're a demographer, a strategist, a salesperson, not just a storyteller," and the rewards need to reflect that.
That accountability changed what brands looked for in a creator. When influence was impossible to track, brands defaulted to reach as the metric they could measure, working on the assumption that a bigger audience meant bigger impact.
Attribution ended that assumption. A creator with 10,000 genuinely engaged followers can move more product than a celebrity with millions of passive ones, particularly when that smaller creator has built real trust within a specific audience. Taste, context and a willingness to give an honest verdict are what convert, and the vanity-metric model never rewarded those qualities because it could not see them.
Modern furniture brand Castlery saw this play out directly. By building a creator and affiliate programme with proper attribution, the brand engaged more than 300 influencers in under six months, doubled traffic during peak sales months and grew average order value by 12 per cent within a year.
The next evolution is already forming
Just as this model is bedding in, the ground is shifting again. For decades, the retail challenge was getting your product onto the shelf. Then came the digital version, which was getting found in search. The next version is getting into the AI's consideration set before the consumer even starts looking, and creators are now central to solving that problem too.
AI filters brand recommendations before the search begins, drawing on the accumulated body of content associated with a brand across the web, including reviews, discussions, third-party mentions and authentic creator commentary. Every time a creator talks credibly about a product, that content adds to the signal AI uses when deciding which brands belong in the answer.
Which means the role creators play has expanded again. They are no longer just a conversion tool or a performance channel; they are AI visibility infrastructure. The brands that built genuine creator programmes find that same content shaping how AI surfaces them. The brands that ran one-off campaigns and measured only clicks are becoming harder to find in ways that compound.
Creator commerce taught brands to treat influence as a commercial channel. The next lesson is that the same investment now determines whether a brand gets found before the sale begins.