Getting brand success out of creator partnerships
Agency experts share advice on how brands can work successfully with creators, to meet both audience and brand expectations in this fast-developing space
For anyone who’s ever sat in front of the telly feeling a little cheated when a YouTuber pops up on the panel of their favourite comedy quiz show, here are some numbers: Ofcom research from last year found that 34% of YouTube viewing time is now on a TV set and that less than half of 16-24 year-olds watch broadcast television each week.
Recent WPP Media research has found that 81.4% of total UK ad revenue in 2025 will be via creators and user-generated digital platforms. And, of course, it’s not just YouTube. Seventy-nine percent of UK TikTok users have discovered a new brand on the social platform and 54% have used it to make a direct purchase, according to a report published earlier this year by commerce agency Velstar. Meanwhile, Statista predicts that spend on creator marketing will exceed £1bn in the UK by the end of the year and Goldman Sachs predicts that the global creator economy will be worth $480bn in 2027.
Creators are now firmly part of the mainstream and increasingly embedded in many a marketing mix. And, if Thomas Walters, chief innovation officer at influencer marketing agency Billion Dollar Boy is to be believed, we’re witnessing something of a golden age for the sector. It’s exciting stuff: “Everyone has the opportunity to get their work seen and so many more people have the chance to express their creativity in all kinds of different ways.”
What Walters and his colleagues at Billion Dollar Boy do is matchmake creators and brands – with plenty of the latter now highly attuned to the challenges and opportunities of creator partnerships. “It really helps when you see more conservative industries taking a leap of faith,” Walters says.
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Walters cites the work of beauty, wellbeing and, most notably, high-end brands like Loewe and Dior as examples of established, boldface names that partner successfully with creators. “It’s really interesting if you think about how image-controlled these companies have historically been. For Dior’s first collection under Jonathan Anderson, there was livestreaming content from creators attending the show.
“They had creators from BookTok there as an extension of the creative, because Dior had bags on show inspired by Dangerous Liaisons and Dracula. And then if you look at Marc Jacobs and what they’ve done, it’s borrowing the comedic, entertaining nature of creators and letting them run riot and being quite trend-led.”
However, away from the air-kissing glamour of Paris Fashion Week, there are still concerns around trust. The luxury sector, spoilt as it is with larger budgets and a ready, cult-ish audience, will always have an advantage over, for example, the average high street bank when it comes to creator partnerships. Brands can be reluctant to put their faith in a talent, no matter how many followers or levels of professionalism.
@marcjacobs The Tote Bag, made from scratch by @Nara Smith ♬ original sound – marcjacobs
“The biggest challenges are around releasing creative control to somebody else, and also trying to ensure that you get attribution back to brand,” explains Harvey Cossell, chief strategy officer at creative agency We Are Social. “Marketers have traditionally been in full control of the message, how it’s portrayed, how it’s laid out, how it’s presented to the consumer.”
Control can, of course, be relinquished to varying degrees whenever an external party is involved, be that a PR campaign or an old school celeb endorsement. However, for creators to be successful, they have to very much be themselves if they’re going to differentiate, innovate and cut-through. Should the messaging feel too contrived there’s a very real danger of coming across, in Cossell’s words, like a “disco dad”.
The biggest challenges are around releasing creative control to somebody else, and also trying to ensure that you get attribution back to brand
Brands will need to loosen the reins a little. “It’s about ensuring that you’re being very considered in the way you use these platforms, and the functionalities within them and the personalities that are on those platforms,” says Cossell. “So that you’re leaning into the native nature of those platforms, you’re recognising that when you’re communicating through any of those formats, or through any of the personalities in those spaces, that you’re doing it in such a way that you’re getting that attribution back to brand.”
Heineken used creators in a campaign earlier this year. Dude with Sign (Seth Phillips, being exactly that, to some eight million followers), Lil Cherry and Paul Olima were enlisted for Social Off Socials, a witty short created with Le Pub that imagined a world where online influencers were being totally ignored (the horror!) while everyone was connecting in real life at a local bar.
The Heineken Company’s social media and content lead Jimmy Hughes advises brands to always look to the longer term when it comes to partnering with creators, to encourage and build advocacy, brand loyalty and create a relationship and trust that allows the creator to react at speed to cultural moments. “This approach also enables better integration across the consumer journey and opens up opportunities for exclusivity and economies of scale,” Hughes says. “It also allows the creator to really get to know the brand and become an authentic advocate.”
The accent is very much on the brand to formulate a clear understanding of what it’s trying to achieve. Hughes explains that, while wanting the creator to be their usual distinctive, mischievous selves, brands should always establish a framework. “Make sure they hit a few key things in the brief,” he says. “We always have our brands show up in the first ten seconds and in any concept we ask the creator in a sentence to share how the concept ladders back to our brief. This means we’re all aligned and can deliver the best possible creative for both the creator and the brand.”
Cossell adds that there is a need to always pay close attention to the vision, particularly when it comes to attribution: “What you shouldn’t be doing is abdicating the responsibility of your marketing to creators and influencers. It’s recognising that they are an important mouthpiece for you, but you need to brief them in the right way, and you need to make sure that they’re making content that is not just serving their own brand as influencers or creators, but is also serving the brand that is basically footing the bill for that content.”
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Both agencies use internal platforms and data to identify the right brand-creator partnerships. Billion Dollar Boy utilises the data collated from 11 years of creator and influencer campaigns to provide benchmarks and guidelines for what’s possible and, crucially, who can best work with whom. Walters strongly advises that brands should take the time to pore over a creator’s internal analytics, particularly those that show impressions, view counts and view-through rate, before going into any partnership. Various tools exist to help out with this; Billion Dollar Boy has its own Companion platform, while the agency’s Safe Match concept looks through influencer’s posts and uses AI to red-flag any potential risk.
“We don’t start with data, we start with the strategy, we start with the creative idea, and then our team starts casting on the basis of whether there’s a good creative fit,” Walters explains. “Are they going to be able to bring the platform to life? Data’s an important step, but it’s not the only step.
Reaching audiences through personalities has been a thing since time in the memorial. It’s just this is how it is done in the 21st century
“And ultimately, human insight matters. We have experience of working with so many creatives, and so many talent agents that we have the knowledge that can then be layered on, too. There’s a yearning and a want from a lot of these talents to understand better what brands are looking for and what drives them. As soon as we get brands and creators together in the room, the insights that both parties together gather are gold dust and the work is so much better as a result.”
Finding a creator that shares the same values or is already a fan of the brand (the great North Star) can be an absolute blessing. Cossell talks of tapping into niche-interest communities via a creator, but how niche is, for example, Sainsbury’s? Anything, Cossell counters, can be a specialist concern; borne out by a quick scroll through Reddit posts extolling the supermarket’s doughnuts and surprisingly stern TikTok reviews of its Taste the Difference range.
“If you’re trying to better culturally connect with audiences and build a solid cultural foundation for your brand, influencers represent a fantastic opportunity,” he insists. “They can go to the heart of these communities and maximise their cultural footprint. What we’re doing as marketers is spending more time looking at shared values or shared belief systems between consumer and brand.”
That’s increasingly reflected in how success is being measured. Walters agrees that there’s been a shift in focus, from a honing-in on follower numbers to figures measuring stickability, shareability, reach and relevance. “Impact is increasingly important for all media channels,” Walters says. “Some brands really want to understand how we measure impact, ROI and effectiveness. It continues to be a big topic of conversation.”
Cultural currency is an oft-stated brand ambition (no one wants to be so brazenly unrefined as to openly target an uptick in sales). “The brands that are continuing to win with cultural currency are those that are operating with creator instincts, that understand the need to be socially native and fluent in that conversation and react at speed,” Walters adds. “Creators, influencers, whatever you call them, have always been the ones on the ground driving culture.”
So, is this a golden age, the big moment for creator-brand partnerships? “We’re seeing a lot of different parts of the industry start to bleed into each other and that’s a sign that the space is really matured and is being taken seriously,” says Walters. “It’s also a sign that recognises that influence, and reaching audiences through personalities, has been a thing since time in the memorial. It’s just this is how it is done in the 21st century.”
