Creator marketing has moved well beyond buying reach and hoping for engagement.
As brands invest more heavily in creators, the questions are becoming more sophisticated: How do you build genuine brand affinity? What should you actually pay creators for? How do you measure their impact? And where should AI fit into the picture?
These were some of the questions explored in our latest APMA webinar, Creator Commerce in Practice: What Brands Are Learning and Where They’re Stuck, hosted by impact.com.
The session brought together Laura, who leads social media and influencer marketing at B&Q, and Julia, Head of Influencer at Moburst, alongside impact.com’s San Serene, Regional Vice President of Creator, EMEA.
Rather than polished case studies, the discussion focused on the reality of running creator programmes today: what is working, where brands are still struggling and what needs to change.
Here are some of the biggest takeaways.
Stop buying reach. Start building affinity.
For a well-known retailer such as B&Q, awareness isn’t necessarily the challenge.
Most UK consumers already know the brand. The bigger challenge is making B&Q the brand people prefer when they start their next home improvement project.
Creators can play an important role because brands aren’t building that relationship from scratch. They’re tapping into a relationship that already exists between a creator and their audience.
As Laura explained, the trust a creator has spent years building can, over time, be transferred to the brands they genuinely advocate for.
But the important words here are over time.
One-off creator activations are unlikely to build meaningful brand affinity. Instead, brands need consistent partnerships that allow audiences to repeatedly see a creator using and talking about a product or brand.
Julia made the point that brands often ask creator campaigns to deliver too much at once: awareness, engagement and immediate conversion.
“I would rather have three stories than one reel.”
The principle is simple: frequency matters.
Consumers rarely see a product for the first time in a 30-second video and immediately buy it. Expecting creators to consistently generate that behaviour creates unrealistic expectations and can lead brands to undervalue activity that is having a genuine influence earlier in the customer journey.
The best creator brief might be a much shorter one
One of the clearest pieces of advice from the session was around briefing.
Brands understandably want to protect their messaging, but overly prescriptive briefs can remove the very thing they are paying creators for: their creativity and understanding of their audience.
B&Q’s approach is to keep briefs relatively loose. The essentials are there – the product, core messaging and clear brand guardrails – but creators are then given the freedom to decide how best to communicate with their audience.
As Laura pointed out, successful creators are effectively “data scientists” for their own audiences. They’re constantly looking at their insights, understanding what performs and adapting their content accordingly.
Brands need to trust that expertise.
It also means resisting the temptation to make the brand message the opening line.
Particularly with organic creator content, audiences need a reason to keep watching. Creators need space to set the scene, tell the story and earn attention before introducing the commercial message.
Don’t choose creators on follower count
Follower count remains one of the easiest creator metrics to understand – but it can also be one of the most misleading.
Algorithms have fundamentally changed how content is distributed. A creator with a huge following may only reach a fraction of that audience, while an account with a relatively small following can generate millions of views.
B&Q therefore looks much more closely at average reach and engagement across recent content than headline follower numbers.
Laura gave the example of a creator with approximately 800,000 followers whose typical content was reaching between 50,000 and 100,000 people.
Her analogy was simple: if an agency printed 800,000 flyers but only 100,000 made it through people’s letterboxes, you wouldn’t expect to pay for 800,000 deliveries.
Creator marketing shouldn’t be treated differently.
Brands should be asking: what audience am I realistically buying access to?
Break creator costs into what you’re actually buying
That naturally leads to another challenge: creator pricing.
Rather than looking at a creator’s fee as one large number, Julia recommended breaking it into separate components.
There is the production value: what does it actually take to create the content?
There is distribution: what audience has the creator built and what reach are you buying access to?
And then there are usage rights: what does the brand want to do with that content afterwards?
Thinking about pricing in this way makes negotiations more transparent and helps brands work out what they genuinely need.
If you primarily need high-quality content to use in paid media, for example, you may not need to pay the premium associated with a creator’s large audience. A smaller creator or UGC specialist with strong production skills and appropriate usage rights may be a better investment.
If the objective is trust, advocacy or changing brand perception, however, the creator’s relationship with their audience becomes much more valuable.
Influencers and UGC creators aren’t interchangeable
This distinction was another important theme.
Creator content is often discussed as if it were one thing, but different creators perform different jobs.
If you need an asset, UGC may be exactly what you need.
If you need to access an established community and borrow some of the trust that creator has built with their audience, that’s where an influencer partnership becomes valuable.
This becomes particularly important when brands start boosting creator content through paid social.
As Laura explained, part of the value of influencer content is that it naturally appears in front of the audience that already knows and trusts that person. Once the same asset is pushed to completely new audiences through paid media, that advantage can diminish.
Brands therefore need to think carefully about whether they’re paying for the content, the creator’s audience, or both.
Stop chasing every trend
Should brands be jumping on every TikTok, Instagram or AI-generated trend?
No, particularly if it takes three weeks to get it approved.
Julia’s view was that the biggest mistake brands make with trends is often operational.
“If it’s happening this week and it takes you a week to build a brief, another week to get it approved and another week to hire a creator, you’re not on trend anymore.”
For brands that want to participate in social trends, responsiveness needs to be built into the process. Ideally, content should be live within days, not weeks.
But format is less important than another question: what do you want someone to feel?
Humour was highlighted as one particularly powerful – and often underused – way for brands to create memorable connections.
Similarly, Stories shouldn’t be dismissed because of their shorter lifespan or lower headline reach. Their less polished, more intimate format can create a stronger sense of authenticity and generate highly engaged responses.
Creator measurement has to move beyond last click
The conversation inevitably turned to measurement.
Creator activity rarely fits neatly into a last-click attribution model. A consumer might discover a brand through a creator, see it again elsewhere, search for it later and ultimately convert through another channel entirely.
That doesn’t mean creator activity wasn’t influential.
Brands therefore need to assemble a wider range of signals to understand incrementality and creator impact.
These might include changes in organic website traffic, app store searches, brand search, engagement, reach and other indicators alongside direct conversions.
And there’s now another emerging signal to consider: visibility within LLMs and AI-powered search.
The panel discussed seeing YouTube content in particular appearing as a source within LLM-generated answers, with early signs of other social content beginning to influence results too.
That creates an interesting new role for creator content.
Creator activity may not simply influence the person watching a video today. The content itself could become part of the information ecosystem that influences what AI platforms recommend tomorrow.
For brands, the advice was to understand what questions consumers are asking AI about their category, identify gaps in the content that currently exists and ensure creator content contains clear, relevant language around those topics.
AI should remove the admin – not the human
AI naturally ran throughout the conversation, but perhaps the clearest consensus was around where not to use it.
Creator marketing works because it’s human.
Trying to automate the final creative output risks stripping away exactly what makes creators valuable: personality, credibility and genuine human connection.
Where AI can make a substantial difference is behind the scenes.
Julia described it as a group of digital ‘minions’: if it’s moving information around, sending reminders, managing approvals or handling repetitive administration, it’s a strong candidate for automation.
That becomes particularly important as creator programmes scale.
More creators traditionally means more contracts, more approvals, more content to review, more chasing and more administration. Automating those processes frees teams to spend more time on the work that requires human judgement.
B&Q is also using technology to support creator vetting and brand safety. Rather than teams manually scrolling through years of historical posts, tools can help identify potential risks before a creator is contracted.
The principle throughout the discussion was consistent:
Use AI to superpower people, rather than trying to replace them.
What should brands do differently?
For brands reviewing their creator strategy – particularly as activity ramps up around peak trading periods – there were some clear practical lessons from the session.
First, move away from one-off collaborations. Repeated exposure, longer-term relationships and cross-platform activity are much more likely to build recognition and trust.
Second, be clear about the job you’re asking creator marketing to do. Awareness, content creation, brand perception and conversion are different objectives and may require different creators, formats and measurement.
Third, pay for the value you’re actually receiving. Look beyond follower counts and understand production, realistic reach, distribution and usage rights separately.
Fourth, give creators room to create. Protect the brand with clear guardrails, robust contracts and appropriate vetting, but don’t remove the creator’s own voice in the process.
And finally, automate the administration, not the relationship. AI has enormous potential to make creator programmes more scalable, but human judgement, creativity and trust remain fundamental.
Perhaps the most useful advice from the whole conversation came towards the end of the webinar: brands should look inwards before they look outwards.
Before choosing creators, platforms or formats, understand what your brand stands for, who you’re trying to reach and what you’re actually trying to achieve.
Creator commerce is becoming more sophisticated – and more closely connected with affiliate, paid social, search and the wider marketing mix.
The brands that succeed won’t necessarily be those working with the biggest creators or producing the most content. They’ll be the ones that understand what role creators are playing, what value they’re creating and how that influence fits into the wider customer journey.
