Creator-driven ad spending is attracting increased financial scrutiny and forcing marketers to reevaluate measurement approaches. Past reliance on vanity metrics such as follower counts and basic engagement is giving way to emphasis on bottom-of-funnel outcomes like customer acquisition, conversions, and revenue attribution. Some brands treat creator marketing separately and use ad tech to measure views, clicks, conversions, and ROAS. L'Oréal pushed for measurement standards as early as 2017, and Bombas saw 5.3 times more ROAS when working with hundreds of YouTube creators. Structural and political data silos and fragmented standards continue to impede definitive proof of business impact, prompting experimentation.
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.
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