Creator Marketing Is Evolving, But Has The Measurement Stack Caught Up?

Influencer marketing is usually first on the chopping block when budgets tighten, and the reason is rarely about creative performance. The decisions that determine which channels survive a budget cut are made within marketing mix models. The channel that brands routinely call their fastest-growing growth driver is the same one that those models almost always leave out. That gap is what separates the brands pulling ahead from the ones still arguing about whether creators work.

Jennifer Quigley-Jones is the Founder and CEO of Digital Voices, the influencer marketing agency acquired by PMG in January 2026 to anchor its global creator practice. After driving creator strategy at YouTube, Quigley-Jones launched Digital Voices in 2017 with a £500 personal investment and grew it into a 70-person operation across London, New York, and Costa Rica, working with brands like Adobe, DoorDash, General Mills, and Unilever. She also founded the Global Influencer Council, a peer body for senior practitioners shaping how the industry standardizes measurement. Her core argument is that the ROI problem in influencer marketing is really a measurement infrastructure problem, and the brands that have built that infrastructure are running away from the ones still treating creators as a tactical line item.

"80% of brands that use MMMs do not include influencer marketing in the model, which means they aren't properly attributing commercial impact to one of today's most powerful channels," says Quigley-Jones. The number, confirmed by WARC research across 50 major global brands, exposes a blind spot in how budget conversations are conducted. If a channel isn't in the model, it doesn't appear in the attribution conversations that determine next quarter's spend. That absence reads to a CFO as optionality. The channel becomes vulnerable to cuts because nobody can see what it is contributing, even when the underlying performance is strong.

Tactic versus strategy

Companies consistently generating returns from creators treat the channel the way they treat any other meaningful growth investment, with patience, frameworks, and willingness to test. The ones struggling to see results treat it as a quick performance lever. That difference shows up in budget patterns long before it shows up in measurement.

"The brands that succeed with creators view partnerships as a long-term strategy that they're willing to test, learn, and invest in. Influencer marketing is one strategy with many tactical options. Successful brands try to find the tactics and avenues that work for them while remaining fundamentally committed to the strategy of working with creators," Quigley-Jones says. Underperforming brands tend to deploy random budget bursts across multiple agencies and judge the entire channel against a single, often poorly tracked, sales metric.

Cultural moments are where this divide gets most expensive. Brands that drop in late, hoping a single piece of content can ride a trend, almost always find that the moment has already passed them by. The activations that drive results were built months earlier.

"Sponsoring a one-off event at the height of its popularity is not the same as spending six months producing niche content tailored to that audience, engaging in the comments, and hosting smaller activations one to three months before the event," Quigley-Jones explains. The investment timeline most brands apply to creators is simply the wrong one.

Cross-channel integration changes the math

What happens after the campaign ships is what separates high-performing creator programs from the rest. Brands that treat creator content as a one-time deliverable leave most of the value on the table. Companies generating real returns are designing partnerships with multi-channel reuse in mind from the start.

"Integrating creator content into other media channels drives success for two reasons. In a saturated space, it makes your campaign spend go further and makes the campaign and partnerships more cohesive," Quigley-Jones says. Cohesion matters as much as cost efficiency. Audiences who see the same creator across paid social, OOH, and email register a different signal than audiences who see one-off sponsored posts.

The longer-term version of the same principle drives even stronger returns. "Multiple studies prove that audiences prefer long-term partnerships with creators, and these partnerships drive stronger commercial results," she adds. Repeat exposure to a creator advocating for a brand reads as endorsement. Single-shot partnerships read as ads.

The clearest example Quigley-Jones cites of measurement working end-to-end is Coach's response to BookTok. The brand identified a fast-growing community on TikTok built around reading culture, then designed a product, book charms for handbags, specifically for that audience. Every step of the funnel became measurable.

"That way you can measure the increase or decrease in share of voice, the volume of content, comment sentiment, all the way through to product sales," Quigley-Jones says. Coach built a product around an existing audience behavior, which is exactly why the campaign was measurable end-to-end and why it converted.

Most off-the-shelf measurement tools were not built for this kind of community-led work. Quigley-Jones advises marketers to adapt existing platforms or build lightweight tracking layers that capture what matters, including share of voice, comment sentiment, attendance at brand events, sales from custom collections, and traffic to community-specific landing pages. Companies investing in this infrastructure are the same ones whose creator budgets keep growing.

The case for brand guidance

The most counterintuitive part of getting creator marketing right is also the part most brand teams resist hardest. The instinct to control creative output, perfected over decades of paid advertising, actively undermines the channel that depends on creators having genuine relationships with their audiences. The magic of the channel sits in everything a traditional ad ops team would consider a problem.

"Lots of the magic of creator marketing lies in the variety of customer communities creators engage with, the unexpected CTAs that drive commercial results, the absence of logos, the lack of brand control," says Quigley-Jones. Successful programs have learned to set boundaries instead of writing scripts.

Companies consistently generating returns from creators treat the channel like any other meaningful growth investment. Their teams build frameworks, run tests, and accept that returns take time to surface. Underperformers, on the other hand, treat the channel as a short-term performance play. That difference shows up in budget patterns long before it shows up in measurement.

"Brands should see their role as setting boundaries, defining the do's and don'ts, establishing the overall campaign goal, clarifying how to pronounce the product name, sharing information, and deciding how to use the content, rather than directing every aspect of a creator's content as if it were a commercial," she explains. Teams still asking for storyboards and scripted brand mentions are paying premium rates for content that performs like a 1990s TV spot.

Saturation is coming, and it changes the rules

Looking ahead, the creator space is going to get more crowded, not less. Quigley-Jones argues that the brands defining the next several years will establish category authority through scale, depth, or creativity that competitors cannot replicate. Spending more without those advantages will only get more expensive.

"Successful brands will stand out by having a stronger, deeper, and longer history with a specific community. They are investing in the long-term to build impenetrable relationships, to be seen as the OG," she says. That kind of position gets earned over years of consistent presence in a community, and money cannot accelerate it beyond a certain point.

The other route through saturation is creative boldness. As audiences grow more skeptical of polished, predictable brand content, the standard for what cuts through keeps rising. "Brands will need creative and unexpected partnerships, whether that's playful owned social creative, unexpected campaigns, or bold activations. The bar for creativity will rise as skeptical consumers will be more difficult to impress," Quigley-Jones says.

Three things separate the brands winning with creators from the ones still on the sidelines: measurement infrastructure, long-term commitment, and the discipline to step back from creative control. Companies that close those gaps, in that order, are quietly building real advantage. The rest are still debating whether the channel works.