Despite Australia’s influencer economy closing in on the $1 billion mark, many brands and agencies are still treating creator marketing as an add-on rather than a core part of campaign planning.
Even though creators do make it into the mix, success is often measured through traditional ROI frameworks that do not fully reflect how creator-led work actually performs.
Rachael Webb
In an interview with Mediaweek, Rachael Webb, head of brand and partnerships at Sticki and DataSauce, said creator marketing may now be accepted inside most media plans, but many brands are still being brought in too late, limiting both creative impact and long-term commercial value.
Originally discussed during a panel at AiMCO Summit, Webb said creator marketing still sits in a difficult space between cultural influence and hard commercial measurement, with marketers often being asked to prove impact through frameworks that do not fully reflect how creator-led work performs.
“There’s still a vague grey area between organic content that appears online about a brand and whether you can actually trace conversion back to it. No one is really owning the full purchase funnel or clearly identifying what drove that purchase,” Webb said.
“That’s where the accountability theme comes in. A CFO in a boardroom wants to know the direct bottom-line impact of a campaign, while an influencer manager is often trying to explain that the value goes beyond just immediate revenue.”
Creators still arrive too late
Webb said the biggest missed opportunity remains the late introduction of creators into campaign planning.
“They get added at the end, then given a pool of budget for a one-off campaign. But by the time you find creators, brief them, develop concepts, produce the content, post it and gather insights, the moment has already passed.”
She said that approach creates short bursts of activity without long-term brand memory.
“What that creates is a campaign cycle of peaks and troughs. From both an ads and organic influencer performance perspective, that does not build memory or connection.”
“The missed opportunity is not building creators into the core campaign structure. Always-on creator strategies matter, whether that’s monthly or bi-monthly UGC, supported by micro and mid-tier influencers, with macro creators brought in for major launches or big awareness moments.”
Why brands stay stuck in one-off mode
According to Webb, two factors continue to hold brands back: budget pressure and operational uncertainty.
The first issue is the budget.
“Because influencer marketing often sits in a grey area from an ROI perspective, it can be harder to secure funding for always-on creator work than it is for something directly trackable like paid ads.”
Webb says the second issue is resourcing.
“A lot of people know they need a more structured creator strategy, but they do not know how to build or scale it.”
Webb said many teams still struggle with usage rights, negotiations and workflow, even when internal appetite exists.
Testing is where brands learn
For Webb, creative testing remains one of the clearest indicators of whether brands are actually progressing in creator marketing.
“Before you start briefing a campaign, you need to know what you’re actually trying to get out of the channel,” she said.
“There are so many things you can test: creator size, content length, creative angle and more.”
She said the biggest risk is relying only on past performance.
“If you keep doing the same thing without looking outside your own past performance, you can end up with blinders on. Then when it stops working, you have to start again from scratch.”
Webb said the biggest change over the past year is that brands no longer need convincing that creator marketing belongs in the mix.
“Most people already know that it does. The challenge now is that they are still unsure where to invest and how to structure that investment,” she said.
“The shift has been from proving necessity to solving execution.”
Top Image: Sticki