Read The Creator Economy’s Coming-of-Age Moment, a special package that breaks down the stakes facing influencers and the brands that work with them today, and how they can evolve to meet the market.
Last year, James Nord saw a white space in the creator economy.
As the founder and chief executive of Fohr, an influencer marketing platform that pairs brands with creators, Nord has seen firsthand that while fashion has become reliant on creators to bring in new customers, it can be difficult to determine which ones would produce the best results.
So in December, Fohr rolled out a new tool that uses an AI-enabled probability model to tell brands exactly which creators and styles of content resonate with their target audience before they produce anything.
“Influencer [marketing] needs to move into a more performance-focused space in advertising, so that the money brands are spending is working harder for them,” Nord said.
The creator economy has come a long way from the days when follower count and likes were the primary metrics for measuring success. As influencer marketing has grown in importance, so too has the number of data sources. In addition to analytics from social media giants, such as impressions, engagement and age demographics, several third-party platforms sell proprietary insights. Fohr touts its predictive technology, among other services; social media management firm Dash Social has a total social impact score that measures brands’ social media performance across platforms against their competitors; and AI influencer-marketing startup Statusphere, which announced an $18 million Series A in January, matches brands with creators based on how they’ve rated content from similar influencers. Affiliate marketing platforms like ShopMy and LTK, too, have ramped up their own data offering.
But taken altogether, these data points can be overwhelming to parse through. As well, not all brands are fully convinced that newer offerings, such as predictive technology, are worth the investment.
“[Predictive technology] can add a layer of consideration to how we’re selecting who we’re working with,” said Amanda Amar, vice president of global brand strategy, social media and public relations at footwear and accessories label Aldo. “But I trust my team’s intuition much more.”
There’s still room for the data offerings in creator marketing to develop further. But today’s offerings do give brands more options to figure out what works well and why. Being able to more closely examine what styles of content and channels are working is helpful in justifying a continued investment in the space.
“As an industry, we tend to [look for] a silver bullet, whether it’s a channel or a metric or a content type that we’re like, ‘This is a thing everyone needs to be doing now,’” said Maggie Hickey, executive vice president of marketing at Dash Social. “The big shift that we’ve seen from five years ago is that there’s no silver bullet.”
Finding the Metrics That Matter
Today, many brands increasingly favour working with smaller creators who have greater sway among their highly locked-in audiences. Not only are they more effective at converting new shoppers, they’re also particularly appealing to younger consumers, who perceive them as more authentic than those with massive followings.
But because those micro or nano influencers don’t have the biggest reach, brands have to figure out how to measure their value beyond the number of likes or views on a post.
The popularity of short-form tutorial and testimonial-style videos — think “get ready with me” and unboxing clips where creators honestly review products — is making it easier to see what packs a punch, and why. In the last year, Aldo has ramped up its video content, which gets 40 percent higher engagement than still images, in part because analytics such as watch time and completion rate tells the footwear maker exactly what holds viewers’ interest, Amar said.
“The measurement has really shifted from exposure to attention,” Amar said. “Saves, shares, rewatches, now matter more than impressions.”
What channels brands choose to focus on also shapes the metrics they should be considering. Digital-native jewellery maker Mejuri often displays creator-led content on its site, where it closely watches how that content impacts time spent, exit rates and the journey from the homepage to product pages, said Majed Masad, the brand’s co-founder and president.
Another major shift came from the arrival of creator monetisation platform ShopMy, which provides influencers with affiliate links so they can earn a cut of sales from the products they recommend. It allowed brands to see which creators are driving them the most traffic and sales, and what products they’re selling. LTK, the incumbent in the space and ShopMy’s primary competitor, had historically not made that information available and followed by revamping their own data offering in 2024. The changes have set a new standard for the sort of numbers brands expect to know about creators before inking a partnership with them.
To keep up with the changes, influencer marketing platforms are promising brands in-depth analytics they can use to replicate their successes. Statusphere’s technology, for instance, analyses details such as what style of voiceover or specific phrases make creators’ videos perform better, said Kristen Wiley, the company’s founder and chief executive. In one instance, the eight-year-old startup was able to tell a hair care client that when influencers organically featured its diffuser in their videos, they performed better, and recommended the brand require future creator partners to feature the device in their content, Wiley said.
“Those are the actionable data-driven ways to do influencer marketing versus trying to optimise for vanity metrics,” she added.
How Data Impacts Brand and Creator Relationships
Understanding if and how creators drive a brand’s business is imperative as influencers, who recognise they’re the linchpin of every company’s marketing strategy, increase their price tags. Nord said one of Fohr’s brand clients recently sent an influencer with 20,000 followers a $2,300 offer for a post and received a $40,000 counteroffer.
“A big part of the problem is the top 10 percent of influencers are charging as if they’re in that one percent,” Nord said.
Knowing the type of creator and content that performs best for a brand helps them partner with the right people at the right price. It also crystallises how creators can effectively adopt a brand’s ethos in those partnerships, while retaining the qualities that make their audiences love them, Hickey said.
The RealReal, for instance, used Fohr’s predictive technology for its closet refresh campaign last December, which featured sponsored posts from Gwyneth Paltrow and influencers Becca Bloom and Eli Rallo. The predictive model guaranteed 6.4 million views across all short-form videos where its influencer partners found funny ways to show they were ready to “let go of 2025” and “make room for 2026,” which helped the company simplify the content instructions it sent to everyone, said Caroline Gardner, head of brand marketing and experience at The RealReal. The campaign went on to generate 21.6 million views across all creators’ video content, she added.
“Having the actual real data on both sides creates transparency,” Hickey said. “It creates a more equal relationship between the creators and brands, so they both can make the right decision.”
Better data gives brands the assurance they won’t hemorrhage money by increasing their influencer budgets. Even legacy brands are going all in on creators as they see higher returns than print editorial and lookbooks. In the last year, Hervé Léger shifted 30 percent more of its marketing spend to creator partnerships as it reported a steady uplift in sales from tie-ups with influencers like Marissa Spagnoli, whose two sponsored videos were among the brand’s best performing ads in 2025, said Melissa Lefere-Cobb, the company’s division head and senior vice president.
For its 40th anniversary this year, Hervé Léger is working with creators to promote a 10-piece capsule collection of its signature bandage dresses inspired by iconic celebrity moments — such as Victoria Beckham wearing a purple and silver number at Marc Jacobs’ Spring/Summer 2008 runway show, Lefere-Cobb added.
“We spent a lot of time thinking about lookbooks and more traditional fashion photo shoots,” Lefere-Cobb said. “What’s increasingly more important, and really driving revenue, are reels and videos.”
There’s a myriad of ways to assess how creators impact a brand’s business. The deftest strategies are ones where brands identify data that tells them what’s driving engagement and how they can replicate it to connect with more potential consumers.
“One of the things that’s really holding brands back is this impulse to try and put boundaries around what is effective,” Nord said. “If something is really resonating, the algorithm is going to serve it to more people. We look at what is working as a north star.”