06/26/2026
The influencer campaigns that underperform have something in common: the creator was the last call, not the first.
Emma Coker, Senior Manager of Influencer Relations, and Gaby Lamy, Director, are clear on what separates a campaign that moves product from one that just moves impressions. Creators are brand ambassadors. The brands building long-term relationships with the right ones, and bringing them into the strategy early, are the ones seeing compounding returns.
The organic and paid dynamic matters too. Paid gives you control over the narrative. Organic builds the credibility that makes people trust it. Neither works as well without the other.
And the brief? It should be a guardrail, not a script. Over-prescribed content loses the thing that makes creator marketing work in the first place: a real person speaking in their own voice to an audience that actually listens to them.
That is the difference between influence and just paid placement.