Marketing Best Practices on July 16th, 2026
The measurement problem is sitting underneath the creator economy. Marketers continue describing creators as a media channel even as the most capable creators perform work that once belonged to research, creative, brand, social, product marketing, community, events, and commerce teams.
The category is expanding beyond influencer marketing because creators offer more than rented attention. They bring accumulated audience understanding, recognizable judgment, production capability, distribution, cultural context, and a direct feedback loop with the people brands want to reach.
McKinsey described creators as a new growth engine after Cannes Lions 2026, noting that more than 500 creators attended the festival and that creator activity now reaches across discovery, consideration, conversion, and loyalty. (mckinsey.com)
The creator is not literally replacing the entire marketing department. The more useful point is that creators increasingly reveal how fragmented marketing work fits together.
They understand an audience, develop a point of view, choose a format, make the asset, distribute it, interpret the response, and adjust the next release. Most brands divide that loop among six teams and a quarterly planning process.
Influencer marketing was built around rented distribution
The traditional influencer campaign is straightforward.
A brand identifies creators with access to a desired audience. It negotiates deliverables, sends a brief, approves the work, publishes during a campaign window, and evaluates reach, engagement, clicks, or attributed sales.
That model remains useful for launches, promotions, events, and moments requiring concentrated attention. Its weakness is that it treats the creator primarily as inventory.
The brand develops the strategy. The agency selects the roster. The creator translates the approved message into a platform-native asset. Once the campaign ends, the relationship often goes quiet until another budget appears.
Marketing Brew recently interviewed Collectively CEO Natalie Silverstein, who contrasted that campaign model with a creator-first approach. In her description, creators are embedded continuously across the go-to-market system, from flagship partnerships to affiliates, rather than assembled for an isolated activation and dismissed six months later. (marketingbrew.com)
The difference is structural.
A campaign asks, “Which creator can distribute this message?”
A creator-first system asks:
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Which creators understand this audience?
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What are they seeing before our research captures it?
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Which ideas can we develop together?
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Where should creator judgment influence the product or positioning?
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How can one relationship accumulate trust over time?
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Which commercial model gives both parties a reason to keep investing?
That approach requires more than a larger influencer budget. It changes how the company creates marketing.
Creators operate unusually close to the audience
A good creator has an ongoing research environment.
Every video, newsletter, post, podcast, live event, and comment section produces evidence. The creator sees which questions repeatedly appear, where the audience becomes confused, what language people use, which jokes travel, which objections feel sincere, and which supposedly important subjects produce silence.
Traditional research can capture some of this information. Surveys, interviews, search data, support tickets, sales calls, and community analysis remain essential. Creators add a form of continuous qualitative exposure that many brand teams lack.
That proximity creates a useful kind of taste.
Creators learn how much context an audience needs. They recognize when a term sounds too corporate, when an example feels artificial, and when a company is trying to force a story the community does not believe. They often know that a campaign will fail before the performance dashboard receives enough data to confirm it.
Brands frequently hire creators after the strategy has been completed. The company loses much of the value before production begins.
A stronger content brief can establish the business objective, product truth, required evidence, legal limits, and non-negotiable claims. It should leave room for the creator to challenge the framing, language, format, and audience assumption.
Paying for creator judgment and then requiring the person to recite company copy is an expensive way to produce a weak advertisement.
The creator now spans the full marketing journey
Creators were once treated primarily as an awareness channel because reach was the easiest value to describe. The modern creator relationship can influence nearly every stage of the journey.
Discovery
Creators introduce products and problems in the language of an established audience. The brand enters a conversation rather than trying to manufacture one from a cold media placement.
Education
Long-form videos, newsletters, podcasts, tutorials, demonstrations, and live streams can explain complex products with more depth than a standard advertisement.
Consideration
Creators compare alternatives, demonstrate tradeoffs, answer audience questions, and show the product inside a real workflow. Their material can become part of the buyer’s evaluation process.
Conversion
Affiliate links, creator storefronts, promotional codes, embedded commerce, webinars, product launches, and platform shopping features can produce measurable action.
Retention and community
Creators can help customers learn the product, discover additional use cases, participate in events, and remain connected to a broader community around the category.
McKinsey’s description of creators as a full-funnel growth engine reflects this wider role. The useful operational implication is that creator strategy should not sit entirely inside the awareness budget. Creator work can support research, demand generation, enablement, product adoption, customer education, and loyalty. (mckinsey.com)
Creators are also becoming product companies
The expansion runs in both directions.
Brands are bringing creators deeper into marketing operations. Creators are moving beyond sponsorships into businesses they control.
UTA’s creator leadership recently described a shift from negotiating individual brand deals toward helping creators build broader enterprises, including intellectual property, teams, services, and physical product lines. The objective is long-term ownership rather than permanent dependence on sponsored distribution. (theverge.com)
This evolution makes sense. A creator with audience trust, distribution, customer knowledge, and a recognizable point of view already possesses several components of a company. Product development becomes a way to capture more of the value the creator has been generating for other brands.
Traditional companies should pay attention because creator-led products often begin with an advantage marketing departments spend years trying to build:
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A known audience
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Direct customer feedback
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An established communication style
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Repeated distribution
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Cultural relevance
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A founder people already recognize
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Immediate product-story material
The product may still fail. Creator affinity cannot repair weak manufacturing, operations, pricing, customer service, or repeat purchase. The starting position is nevertheless powerful.
Creators are learning to own the product. Brands need to learn how to treat creators as more than packaging around someone else’s product.
B2B creators may matter more than follower counts suggest
The creator conversation is often illustrated through beauty, fashion, food, entertainment, and lifestyle categories. The same structural change is occurring in B2B marketing, although the creators may be called analysts, operators, educators, founders, newsletter writers, podcasters, consultants, or subject-matter experts.
A B2B creator does not need millions of followers.
A person followed by several thousand RevOps leaders, security engineers, finance executives, developers, or procurement professionals may influence a commercially significant market. The audience can be small in consumer terms and exceptionally valuable in business terms.
LinkedIn CMO Jessica Jensen said at Cannes that users identifying as creators on LinkedIn had increased 90%, and the platform has launched a marketplace intended to connect creators with brands. The growth reflects a wider understanding that professional expertise can become media and distribution rather than remaining inside a job title. (businessinsider.com)
B2B companies can work with creators on:
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Category education
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Product demonstrations
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Research interpretation
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Customer interviews
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Executive conversations
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Webinars and live events
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Benchmark reports
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Implementation guides
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Tool comparisons
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Practitioner communities
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Sales enablement
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Product feedback
The creator may influence fewer total people while reaching a larger share of the actual buying ecosystem.
This is where the storyteller role in marketing and creator strategy begin to overlap. Companies need credible individuals who can interpret a technical or operational subject for an audience without sanding away every trace of personality.
Creator-first does not mean creator-controlled
Brands should give creators meaningful room without abandoning responsibility.
The company remains accountable for product accuracy, regulatory requirements, customer promises, data protection, and material claims. A creator cannot independently decide that a financial product guarantees returns, a health product cures a condition, or an AI system performs a function it does not support.
The operating model needs clear boundaries.
The brand should define
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The business objective
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The product truth
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Mandatory disclosures
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Prohibited or unsupported claims
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Legal and regulatory boundaries
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Customer data restrictions
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Commercial terms
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Success measures
The creator should shape
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Audience framing
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Language
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Format
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Story structure
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Delivery
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Cultural context
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Publishing rhythm
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Community interaction
Both should develop
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The central idea
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Product use cases
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Research questions
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Feedback loops
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Long-term content themes
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Event concepts
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New product or feature opportunities
The strongest collaboration is neither a blank check nor a tightly controlled script. It is a clear shared field in which each party contributes the knowledge the other lacks.
The brand can destroy the thing it is buying
Creator partnerships fail when companies optimize away the source of value.
A creator builds trust through repeated choices. The audience understands what the person recommends, rejects, finds funny, takes seriously, and considers worth discussing. That pattern becomes a reputation.
A brand can weaken the reputation by requiring unnatural language, excessive frequency, irrelevant products, or claims the creator would never make independently. Once every post becomes commercial, the audience begins reading the relationship differently.
Amy Lanzi has warned that over-commercializing creators can alienate their audiences, even as agencies and brands race to integrate creator operations more deeply. (theverge.com)
Recent Kantar reporting also points to growing fatigue around sponsored and AI-generated content, especially where marketers prioritize immediate clicks over long-term brand building. The evidence comes from the Indian advertising market and should not be universalized, but the warning is broadly useful: creator volume does not guarantee creator effectiveness. (economictimes.indiatimes.com)
The creator’s credibility is not an inexhaustible media budget.
Build a creator portfolio instead of a creator roster
A roster is a list of names. A portfolio describes the job each relationship performs.
A mature creator system may include:
Flagship creators
A small number of highly aligned, long-term partners who help shape major ideas, products, events, and campaigns.
Practitioner creators
Subject-matter experts with concentrated credibility inside a particular function, industry, or buyer community.
Customer creators
Actual customers who teach, demonstrate, review, and build around the product.
Affiliate and performance creators
Partners whose primary role involves measurable acquisition or commerce.
Executive and employee creators
People inside the company who can build public expertise, explain product decisions, and participate credibly in the category.
Community and emerging creators
Smaller voices with strong audience relationships, unusual formats, regional relevance, or early cultural influence.
Each tier needs different economics, support, approval, and measurement. Treating the entire portfolio as a set of interchangeable sponsored posts creates confusion and resentment.
Measure creators according to the work they perform
A creator who helped identify a customer need, shaped the campaign, hosted an event, produced educational material, and drove product trials should not be evaluated solely through last-click conversions.
Measurement should reflect the relationship.
| Creator role | Useful measures |
|---|---|
| Audience research | Repeated questions, language insights, product feedback |
| Creative development | Concepts adopted, asset performance, reuse across channels |
| Distribution | Qualified reach, completion, saves, shares, audience fit |
| Education | Watch time, content depth, return engagement, product understanding |
| Conversion | Trials, purchases, meetings, qualified leads, affiliate revenue |
| Community | Replies, repeat participation, event attendance, retention |
| Product development | Feature insights, use cases, product adoption, launch response |
| Brand building | Recall, branded search, association, consideration, sales recognition |
Attribution remains imperfect. A buyer may watch a creator repeatedly, search the brand later, and convert through a different route. Teams should combine trackable response with surveys, sales-call evidence, branded demand, assisted journeys, and audience research.
Lead journey tracking becomes useful when creator traffic reaches the site. Marketing and sales teams can see whether those visitors read comparisons, inspect integrations, return later, and become qualified opportunities rather than stopping at referral volume.
A practical creator-first operating model
Start with the audience problem
Define the community, question, tension, or behavior the company wants to understand. Do not begin with a follower threshold.
Find demonstrated alignment
Review the creator’s historical work, audience interaction, commercial behavior, expertise, and values. A polished media kit cannot replace fit.
Involve creators before production
Invite selected creators into research, positioning, product demonstrations, and concept development. Pay for strategic participation rather than disguising consulting as “relationship building.”
Establish durable themes
Build around several subjects the creator and brand can explore over time. Avoid forcing every relationship into a product announcement.
Create a clear commercial model
Use retainers, project fees, licensing, affiliate revenue, performance incentives, product participation, or equity where appropriate. The model should reflect the value and risk each party contributes.
Preserve platform and audience fluency
Let the creator adapt the idea. A good AI-assisted content strategy should also preserve the creator’s voice rather than generate generic platform variants around it.
Connect creator work to owned assets
Give interested people a useful destination: a guide, product page, case study, event, assessment, research report, or trial experience. Creator distribution creates more value when the company provides a coherent next step.
Build a feedback loop
Share performance, customer behavior, sales outcomes, and product learning with the creator. Use those insights to improve the next release.
The creator is showing brands how marketing should work
The most capable creators operate with a continuity many marketing organizations have lost.
They remain close to an audience. They develop ideas through repeated contact. They produce in formats people choose to consume. They distribute through relationships they have earned. They receive immediate feedback and adjust without waiting for an annual planning cycle.
Brands should not imitate every creator behavior or turn every employee into an influencer. They should notice the integration.
Research, creative, media, product storytelling, community, and commerce work better when they learn from one another quickly. Creator-first marketing matters because it brings those functions closer together around an actual person and an actual audience.
The creator is becoming the marketing department because the marketing department became too fragmented to behave like one.