Influencer marketing got complicated. Good.

Judging influencer marketing awards is a completely different experience from running the campaigns. I am judging award entries quite a bit, and each time I read the entries cold.

No context, no backstory, nobody in the room to explain what they meant. Just what the team wrote down and what the numbers say.

And somewhere around the 30th entry, a pattern shows up. You can tell almost immediately which teams decided what the work was for before they started, and which ones picked creators they liked and reverse-engineered a story afterward.

The ones that got it right are rare. I found myself genuinely excited reading them, which is not something I expected to feel about submission forms. For a long time, none of this needed much thought. Find a creator, send the product, get a post back, count whatever numbers came with it. Done. That still works for one campaign with one goal. It stops working the moment a brand makes it the default for everyone it works with, and most brands did exactly that for years. I ran campaigns that way too, back when the whole industry was making it up as it went along.

Creators aren't people with follower counts attached anymore. Their role in the marketing mix changed, and the way brands value them has to change with it.

Do you want reach, or do you want a partnership?

Simple question. Your answer decides everything that comes after it.

You'd be surprised how many brands never answer it. They go straight to a list sorted by follower count and try to work backward into a strategy from whoever looks good on paper.

If you want reach, say so. Creators deliver reach beautifully. Find people whose audience matches yours, run the campaign, read the numbers, move on to the next one. That's a legitimate way to work and there's nothing embarrassing about it. Here's where it trips people up. A creator who is excellent at putting your product in front of a lot of people isn't automatically excellent at getting those people to buy it. Some are. Plenty aren't. I've watched brands hire for awareness while privately expecting sales, then blame the creator when the sales don't show up.

A partnership is a different kind of work and it only pays off if you give it time. Someone who has used your product for 8 months has more to say about it than someone who unboxed it yesterday. That's just how people work.

There's no universal way to do this anymore. Some brands want reach, campaign by campaign. Others are building small creator groups they'll work with for years. Both are fine, they're just not the same job, and I don't think they should be measured the same way. So before you compare follower counts or decide whose feed looks best, answer the question. And be honest about the answer.

Nobody's going to scold you for lying about it. You'll just trip over it three months later.

The creator shop doesn't exist

There's no store you walk into, find the one, and walk out knowing you got it right. I wish there were.

The industry has made selection look easy. Follower count, reach, engagement rate, all lined up so you can rank people against each other. Those numbers tell you something real. They just don't tell you the thing you need to know. Being picky is what closes that gap. It's slow, unglamorous work and there's no shortcut around it.

At minimum, does this creator make sense for what you're trying to achieve? Are they right for the part of the customer journey you're trying to influence? Do the people following them look anything like the people you want to reach? And would they ever talk about your category if nobody paid them?

You can't instruct your way to credibility

You can write "make this feel natural" into your creative direction as many times as you like. The content will not come back feeling more natural.

Authenticity isn't something a creator can be told to perform. Either the conditions for it exist before the camera turns on, or they don't. Most of those conditions are set much earlier than people think, back when you were deciding who to approach in the first place. Credibility here comes from experience with the product. The person posting needs to have lived with the thing. Used it, formed opinions, gotten irritated by the one feature nobody mentions in the marketing.

When a follower asks "will this work for me?" in the comments, they can answer, because they know their audience and they know your product. Compare that with someone who got the box yesterday, skimmed your instructions, and is now working out how to talk about it at all.

Even real experience won't survive a script. Legal requirements and product accuracy are non-negotiable, and the creator has to know what the campaign is supposed to do. Past that, if you write every sentence and every beat, it will sound like you wrote it. Because you did. Their audience can tell.

Clear guardrails on the what and the why, creator owns the how. I call that structured freedom, and it's the only version of this that holds up.

That's the contradiction at the center of a lot of programs. Brands want the credibility of a creator's voice, then try to control the exact thing that makes the voice credible.

Measuring it like a grown-up channel

You can't tell whether influencer marketing worked if you never decided what you wanted it to do.

Views, likes, engagement and follower growth are all useful numbers, depending on the job. If you're buying attention, they matter. If you're trying to sell something, they matter a lot less than the deck suggests. The trouble starts when the same handful of numbers gets used to judge every collaboration, no matter what that creator was hired for.

This is where the channel has to grow up. If creators are a real part of the marketing mix, we should be able to talk about their contribution the way we talk about every other marketing investment. What did we spend, what came back, and what did it do for the business. Those questions are worth more than a slide celebrating 300,000 views.

Long-term partnerships make this harder, and I'd rather say that out loud than pretend otherwise. You're building familiarity over months. Squeezing that into a single campaign report gives you a picture that's technically accurate and mostly useless. The reporting bubble has to go too. If influencer marketing competes for the same budget as everything else, it gets held to the same standard as everything else.

That's already starting. Google recently introduced platform properties in Search Console, so creators can see how their content on Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube performs in Google Search and Discover. Work that used to disappear into a platform silo now turns up somewhere marketers already understand.

Someone eventually walks into a finance meeting and explains what the money did. A number that looks strong on a slide and can't answer that question is worth nothing.

Creators are showing where they weren't before or will never be physically

Look at where creators are turning up, who's working with them, and what companies are willing to pay to keep them.

At this year's Cannes Lions, creators had their own stretch of beach, complete with a stage and an editing suite. They were in the conversations about advertising and creativity, not watching from the sidelines.

Disney and TikTok have a deal to bring selected creator-made videos onto Disney+, using characters and stories from Disney, Pixar, Marvel and Star Wars. Creator content is becoming part of the entertainment itself.

Then there's YouTube and Netflix, now paying the same creators to pick a side. As Netflix moves further into creator-led programming, YouTube is reportedly offering some of its biggest names multimillion-dollar incentives to stay exclusive. Platforms are bidding for creators directly.

Three very different situations, all pointing the same way. Creators are becoming part of the industry rather than a service the industry buys from. They can be talent, experts, media personalities, entertainment partners, long-term commercial partners. The role goes well past ticking a post off a scope of work.

What a creator has that an LLM model doesn't

AI-made content cheap. That part is settled. A brand can generate copy, images and video without a creator involved anywhere in the process.

So if you can make the content yourself, what exactly are you paying the creator for?

You're paying for a relationship with an audience, an understanding of that audience built over years, credibility earned somewhere real, and actual experience with your product that produced an actual opinion. None of that comes from generating another piece of content.

A creator who has lived with a product knows what they like about it, what irritates them, how they use it in real life, and what their audience is going to ask.

AI can produce a polished video. It has never used the product, never formed an opinion about it, and never run out of it at 2am. Content is content, whoever made it. Influence is something else, and it comes from a real connection between two people.

That's the part AI can't copy. If it ever learns how, we're all in trouble.

Where this leaves you

What's expired is the idea that this is a simple transaction. Find creator, send product, get post, count views, move on.

The creator, the audience, the relationship and the business result don't collapse into one sponsored post and a handful of metrics anymore.

Your job now is to work out what role a creator is playing for you, what that role is worth, and how to measure it honestly. That's harder than it used to be, and it's also the reason this work is finally worth taking seriously.

If you want an outside read on where your program actually stands, that's what the Influencer Marketing Health Check is for.

Let's influence.