Influencer marketing has a measurement problem.
Brands can count views, likes, comments and shares within minutes of a campaign going live. Those numbers look convincing in reports. They are easy to screenshot, easy to compare and even easier to celebrate.
The uncomfortable question comes later: did anyone remember the brand?
New research from Kantar suggests that much of today’s creator content struggles to combine audience engagement with genuine brand-building value. Only 27% of the content examined achieved medium-to-high engagement alongside medium-to-high brand impact.
The number becomes even more sobering at the top end. Just 6% of creator content delivered both strong engagement and strong brand-building potential.
That is fewer than one in every 15 posts.
Influencer Content Can Perform Well Without Helping the Brand
A creator video can attract thousands of comments while doing very little for the company paying for it.
That sounds contradictory, but it happens regularly.
People may remember the joke, the dance, the story or the influencer’s personality. They might send the clip to a friend. The brand itself can disappear somewhere between the opening hook and the final call to action.
Kantar’s Creator Game Plan research looked at more than 15,000 pieces of branded creator content published across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube Shorts. Its findings expose a gap between platform performance and marketing performance.
High engagement does not automatically mean strong brand impact.
Some content works brilliantly for the creator because it matches their normal style and gives followers something entertaining. Yet the sponsored product feels like an interruption. It arrives late, receives a brief mention and never becomes important to the story.
The post performs. The partnership does not.
Engagement Rates Are Only Part of the Picture
For years, influencer marketing reports have leaned heavily on visible metrics.
Views show reach. Likes suggest approval. Comments signal activity. Shares can indicate relevance.
None of those measures are useless. They simply cannot explain everything.
A viewer might engage with a post without noticing which company sponsored it. Someone may leave a comment about the creator’s outfit while ignoring the product placed on the table. A viral video can produce enormous attention without improving brand recognition, consideration or purchase intent.
Kantar warns that brands relying on engagement rates alone may miss the information needed to judge whether a collaboration actually worked.
This is where creator marketing becomes harder than buying reach.
A brand needs content that people enjoy, but it also needs audiences to connect that enjoyment with the right name, product and message. Push the branding too aggressively and the video starts looking like an advertisement. Hide it too carefully and nobody remembers who paid for the content.
There is no neat formula.
The Brand Needs a Real Role in the Creator’s Story
Weak influencer content often treats the product like a compulsory guest appearance.
The creator delivers their usual format, then pauses to mention a sponsor. The tone changes. The audience senses the script. Twenty seconds later, everything returns to normal.
Strong creator partnerships tend to work differently.
The product has a reason to be there. It helps solve a problem, drives the story or becomes part of an experience the creator would plausibly share anyway. Brand cues appear early enough to register, but they do not crush the creator’s voice.
That requires more than sending a rigid brief and asking for three revisions.
Brands need to involve creators while developing the idea, not after every important decision has already been made. Creators understand their audience’s humour, habits and tolerance for advertising. Marketing teams understand the campaign objectives and the brand assets that audiences need to notice.
The useful work happens where those two perspectives meet.
Brands May Be Choosing Creators for the Wrong Reasons
Follower count still dominates too many influencer decisions.
A large audience looks reassuring in a media plan. It creates the promise of immediate scale and gives campaign presentations a bigger headline number.
Reach, however, cannot fix a poor brand fit.
A creator may have millions of followers but little natural connection to the product. Their audience might enjoy the content while distrusting the promotion. In other cases, the partnership feels so random that people focus on the sponsorship fee rather than the brand message.
Smaller creators can sometimes offer something more useful: cultural fit.
Their communities may share a specific interest, profession, location or lifestyle. That gives the creator a clearer reason to discuss certain products and gives the brand a more believable place within the conversation.
The right creator is not always the person who can reach the most people. It is often the person who can make the brand feel least out of place.
Long-Term Creator Partnerships Could Improve Brand Recall
One-off sponsored posts remain common because they are simple to buy.
A company selects an influencer, approves a video, collects the numbers and moves on to the next campaign. The relationship ends before the audience has much chance to associate the creator with the brand.
Longer partnerships create a different effect.
Repeated appearances can make the product feel familiar rather than inserted. The creator learns how to discuss it naturally. The brand gains a better understanding of which formats work with that particular community.
Kantar has previously highlighted the importance of relevance, resonance and audience affinity when selecting influencers. Those qualities are difficult to build through isolated transactions.
Consistency matters too.
When creators promote a new and unrelated company every few days, followers may treat each recommendation as another paid slot. A selective creator working with the same brand over time has a better chance of building credibility around the partnership.
Not every collaboration needs a year-long contract. Still, brands should question whether a single post can realistically deliver the familiarity and trust they expect.
Creator Content and Traditional Advertising Work Better Together
The findings do not suggest that brands should abandon influencer marketing.
Creator content still has clear strengths. It can hold attention, enter niche communities and communicate in formats that feel less distant than conventional advertising. Separate Kantar research has found that influencer-led content can retain viewer attention longer than standard branded digital ads.
The problem begins when companies expect one creator post to do everything.
Kantar’s research indicates that campaigns combining creator content with branded advertising can outperform either format used alone. The two approaches serve different roles.
Traditional advertising can establish the brand, repeat key assets and maintain a consistent message. Creators can translate that message into platform-native stories that feel personal and relevant.
One creates structure. The other brings the idea into culture.
Brands lose some of that advantage when influencer activity runs separately from the wider campaign. The creator team chases trends, the advertising team follows the brand guidelines and the audience receives two ideas that barely recognise each other.
Influencer Spending Is Rising Despite the Performance Gap
The timing of Kantar’s findings matters because creator budgets are still moving upward.
According to the company’s Media Reactions research, 61% of marketers plan to increase investment in creators and influencers. That made the channel the highest-ranked area for expected budget growth.
More money will bring more scrutiny.
Influencer marketing can no longer rely on vague claims about authenticity or community. Finance teams and senior executives increasingly want evidence that the work contributes to brand growth, sales or another defined business objective.
That pressure could be healthy.
It may push marketers away from buying disconnected posts based on follower totals. Campaigns could become more selective, more integrated and slightly less obsessed with producing endless volumes of content.
Fewer partnerships may sometimes produce better results than a crowded creator roster.
What Brands Should Measure Beyond Likes and Views
Brands do not need to ignore engagement. They need to stop treating it as the final verdict.
Campaign measurement should also examine whether viewers recognised the sponsor, remembered the message and connected the product with the creator’s story. Depending on the objective, teams may track brand awareness, consideration, search activity, site visits, conversions or incremental sales.
The right metric changes with the campaign.
A product launch designed to build awareness should not be judged only by affiliate purchases. A performance campaign should not hide behind a large view count when nobody took action.
Brands also need to compare creator assets individually.
Campaign averages can hide the useful details. One creator may produce strong engagement but weak branding. Another may generate fewer interactions while driving better recall or purchase consideration. Those differences can guide future casting, briefing and content development.
The goal is not to find one universal influencer score.
It is to understand what each creator and each piece of content actually contributed.
Influencer Marketing Does Not Need More Content by Default
The creator economy keeps expanding. More brands are entering it, more influencers are becoming professional businesses and more content is being published every day.
Volume has never been the same thing as effectiveness.
Kantar’s research shows that creator content can attract attention without building the company behind it. Only 27% of the material studied reached at least medium-to-high levels for both engagement and brand impact, while just 6% performed strongly across both measures.
That should not trigger panic. It should trigger better briefs.
Brands need clearer objectives, stronger creator fit and ideas in which the product plays a genuine role. They also need measurement that looks beyond the easiest numbers on the platform dashboard.
A post can go viral and still leave the sponsor invisible.
For influencer marketing teams, that may be the statistic worth remembering.
Sources
- Merca2.0: Only 27% of Influencer Content Actually Helps Brands, Reveals Kantar Study
- Kantar: Fewer Than 1 in 15 Pieces of Creator Content Delivers Both Audience Engagement and ROI
- Kantar: From Hype to Impact: Measuring Creator and Influencer Effectiveness
- Kantar: Are Influencers Having the Right Impact on Your Brand?
