With creators, marketers are back at a familiar crossroads: measurement headaches.
That moment always comes whenever ad dollars pile up around a particular part of the market — and with it, the scrutiny of finance directors.
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 Arthur 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 a