Why your brand has probably been doing creator marketing wrong
A lot of creator-led content is failing to drive brand outcomes, argues Fabulate’s chief product and strategy officer, Nathan Powell. The issue is brands are forgetting some of the advertising fundamentals when it comes to branded content made by creators.
What if your creator campaign is working, just not for your brand?
You’re getting views. The content feels authentic. Comments say “this doesn’t even feel like an ad.” But your brand? It’s forgotten before the viewer scrolls past.
Brands have been told to trust the creator. Step back. Ditch the branding. Let them do their thing. And so they did, and ended up with a tidal wave of creator content that looks native, feels good, but often quietly fails to deliver meaningful brand outcomes.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most creator marketing is being done wrong. Not because creators are failing. They’re brilliant at growing their own audiences. But because we’ve forgotten the rules of advertising the moment we swapped a director for a ring light.
We’ve confused authenticity with effectiveness. Vibes with value. And most importantly, we’ve forgotten that once you’ve paid for it, creator content isn’t just content. It’s also an ad.
And ads need to work. They need to drive an outcome.
Somewhere along the line, we were told creator content should feel organic. That adding structure or brand direction would somehow spoil the magic. But when that content gets boosted, promoted, or built into a campaign (as most now do), it stops being organic.
It becomes a paid ad. And paid ads need to perform.
The latest data from TikTok and System1 confirms this. Creator-led videos outperform traditional TV cutdowns on attention, achieving over 7 percent average 6-second video-through-rate compared to just 5 percent for TV ads. That is a meaningful lift in attention.
But here’s the kicker. They underperform on fast fluency, the measure of how quickly a viewer recognises the brand. TV cutdowns achieve double the brand recall within two seconds compared to creator-led ads.
So while creators are keeping audiences watching, people aren’t remembering who the ad was for. That’s a major branding fail.
Nathan Powell
CreativeX recently analysed over 100,000 creator ads across Meta platforms. What they found wasn’t just inconsistent execution. It was a systematic failure in applying basic creative principles.
Only 51 percent of creator ads featured branding in the first three seconds, the critical window for recall. Just 3% followed platform-safe zones, meaning logos and calls-to-action were often cropped or missed entirely. As a result, an estimated 45% of media spend on these ads was wasted. Not because the distribution failed, but because the creative simply wasn’t built to perform.
Creators are absolutely making content that audiences remember. It’s just not the brand they remember (anyone else see a problem here?).
We’ve all confused attention with effectiveness. And without clear brand direction, even the most engaging creator content risks becoming a great ad for the creator, not the brand.
And yet, this data shouldn’t surprise us.
Anyone working in the creator space knows that great creator content doesn’t just entertain. It performs.
That is why smart operators ensure creator briefs prioritise early branding, distinctive brand assets, and a consistent thread of message fluency across every video. Agencies and brands need to work with creators as strategic partners, not just talent, and build every campaign with performance in mind.
The research simply validates what we’ve already been delivering. Social content that gets remembered and drives results.
We also need to recognise that we have been chasing the wrong numbers.
Likes, shares, comments. They look great on the dashboard and in a client report. They suggest engagement, buzz, cultural relevance. But they don’t build brands.
Engagement is good – but what if it’s not for your brand?
But they’re signals for the algorithm, not proof of effectiveness. They help content travel, but say nothing about whether someone remembered your brand, understood your message, or felt anything meaningful.
They might earn reach. But they don’t earn real business results.
Our industry needs to treat creator content with the same rigour as any other media investment or channel. The approach has to prioritise brand fluency, emotional impact, and watch time over vanity metrics.
From embedding brand threads across content to ensuring creators are briefed with real strategic intent, effective creator-led content will have a clear methodology around the very same principles this latest research now confirms.
The real drivers of effectiveness are grounded in the fundamentals of advertising theory: how long someone watches, whether they remember your brand, and most importantly, how they feel while watching.
Because the longer someone engages with your content, the more likely they are to recall it, act on it, and attribute it to your brand. Attention drives memory. Memory drives action.
That is not new thinking. That is marketing 101.
System1’s research, built on decades of emotional testing and more than 50,000 ad studies, shows a clear pattern. Emotional response and early brand recognition are the strongest predictors of long-term market share growth.
On TikTok, where every swipe is a choice and every second counts, entertaining content with early, distinctive branding consistently outperforms. It doesn’t just get views. It gets remembered. It earns attention and leaves a branded memory.
Yet, too often, we celebrate creator content that feels right because it’s native or aesthetic. Even when the data shows it does nothing for recall or purchase intent.
That’s the trap.
Because the truth is, creator content has more in common with TV ads than we like to admit.
Influencer marketing. What is being marketed?
So what needs to change? Here’s what the smartest brands in the world are doing to fix the gap:
- They don’t hand over control. Smart brands co-create. Creators are collaborators, not freelance directors. They are briefed like a creative agency, with clarity, not vagueness.
- They brand early, and they brand fluently. That doesn’t mean plastering a logo. It means embedding brand assets in a way that feels native and builds memory.
- They reward attention with meaning. Entertaining content is vital. But when that entertainment carries the brand message, you get both impact and recall.
- They optimise for effect, not aesthetics. The best-performing content isn’t always the slickest. It’s the clearest, most emotionally resonant, and most recognisable.
- They measure what matters. They move past surface-level engagement and track metrics like 2-second brand recognition, view-through rates, and emotional impact.
The thing for brands to remember is that creators aren’t the problem. They’re the opportunity.
But to unlock their potential, our industry have to stop romanticising authenticity at the cost of effectiveness. Creator content needs structure. It needs direction. It needs to perform.
We need to equip creators with the structure to succeed. From branded storytelling threads to embedded assets, from audience insights to creative guardrails, we need to make sure every piece of content has both heart, authenticity and also real world impact.
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