Brands keep pouring money into creator marketing, but bigger rosters are not automatically producing better results.
That is the warning coming from Unilever as companies race to sign more influencers, increase campaign output and push creator content across every major social platform.
The mistake is easy to make. A brand works with 20 creators, sees encouraging engagement and decides the next step must be 200 creators.
Unilever argues that this confuses activity with progress.
During a discussion involving Unilever US Personal Care Chief Growth Officer Casey McCartney and Traackr founder Pierre-Loïc Assayag, the two executives said mature creator programmes are built around quality, repeatability and useful data. Simply adding more names to a spreadsheet does not create any of those things.
Unilever Challenges the Creator Volume Mindset
Creator marketing budgets have grown quickly, and so has the pressure to operate at scale.
That usually leads brands towards a familiar formula: recruit more creators, commission more posts and increase the number of campaigns running at once.
The numbers look impressive in a presentation. The internal reality can be much messier.
Every one-off partnership brings fresh outreach, contract negotiations, product delivery, approvals, briefing and payment administration. When the next campaign arrives, the entire process starts again.
McCartney said scale has little value when it is based only on transactions. A company with a large enough budget can pay hundreds of creators, but that does not mean it has developed a strong creator marketing operation.
The harder work happens before the campaign launches.
Brands need to know which creators understand their products, which partnerships have performed consistently and which people can be trusted to respond quickly when a cultural moment appears.
That kind of system cannot be built through a last-minute influencer search.
Long-Term Creator Relationships Make Campaigns Faster
Dove was highlighted as an example of what repeatable creator marketing can look like.
The brand has spent years developing relationships with creators whose content, interests and audiences already align with Dove’s wider positioning.
That means the company is not always starting from zero.
When a relevant social conversation develops, Dove already has people it knows and can work with. Briefing becomes easier. Approvals can move faster. The creator also has a better understanding of the brand than someone hired for a single sponsored post.
It sounds obvious, but plenty of creator campaigns are still assembled only after the campaign brief has been approved.
By then, deadlines are tight and brands often fall back on whichever creators are available rather than those with the strongest fit.
Unilever’s wider marketing approach now places creators closer to the centre of brand building. The company describes them as co-authors rather than simple distribution channels, reflecting a shift towards campaigns built with communities instead of messages handed down to them.
Vaseline Turned Existing Conversations Into a Campaign
Vaseline took a slightly different route.
Instead of asking an agency to invent another polished product message, the brand watched what people were already doing with the product.
Social users had been sharing unusual Vaseline tips and beauty hacks for years. Some were practical. Others were questionable.
That behaviour became the basis for Vaseline Verified.
Unilever scientists tested popular hacks, while creators helped explain which uses worked and which did not. The content came from genuine consumer behaviour rather than a brand trying to manufacture a trend.
It also gave creators something more interesting to work with than a standard list of product benefits.
Unilever later reported that the campaign contributed to a 43% sales uplift. The company has used the case to show how social listening, scientific credibility and creator participation can connect cultural relevance with commercial results.
A 150-year-old skincare product suddenly felt native to modern social media.
That did not happen because Vaseline hired the largest possible number of influencers. It happened because the brand noticed a conversation that already had energy behind it.
Creators Are Not Just Paid Media Placements
Unilever executives have repeatedly pushed back against treating creators like advertising inventory.
That approach reduces people to reach, impressions and cost per view. It also encourages rigid briefs in which the creator is expected to repeat a brand-approved script with only minor changes.
Leandro Barreto, Unilever’s Chief Marketing Officer for Beauty and Wellbeing, argued at Cannes Lions 2026 that creators carry ideas because those ideas matter to them and their communities—not simply because a brand paid for a post.
That does not mean commercial agreements disappear. Creators should still be paid properly, contracts still matter and brands still need clear disclosure and safety standards.
The point is that payment alone cannot create trust.
A creator who has no natural connection to a product may deliver the agreed number of views. The content can still feel flat. Audiences have become fairly good at spotting work that exists only to complete a contract.
Longer relationships give creators more room to understand the product, challenge weak ideas and find angles that fit how their communities actually communicate.
AI Can Scale Good Decisions or Multiply Bad Ones
Artificial intelligence is already being used to identify creators, analyse audiences, prepare briefs and automate outreach.
The temptation is to automate everything immediately.
Traackr’s Assayag warned that this can make a broken process worse. Poor creator selection does not improve because an AI tool can produce the list faster. Weak outreach remains weak when it is sent to thousands of people instead of 50.
Automation increases speed. It does not automatically improve judgment.
The more useful starting point is creator intelligence.
Brands need reliable information about previous partnerships, content performance, audience relevance, brand safety and relationship history. Once that foundation exists, AI can help teams make recommendations and manage programmes at a much larger scale.
Unilever has also described AI as an enabler of its social-first strategy, using the technology to sharpen execution and scale culturally relevant ideas rather than replace the creators producing them.
There is a less glamorous side to this too: clean records.
Every campaign result, creator interaction and content insight could become useful proprietary data. Brands that fail to retain that knowledge may find themselves repeatedly paying to rediscover information they once had.
Creator Marketing Is Becoming Business Infrastructure
The larger shift is not really about influencer numbers.
Creator marketing is moving beyond the campaign department.
Creators can influence product ideas, customer feedback, commerce, brand positioning and the language consumers use when discussing a product. That makes the function harder to isolate inside one campaign calendar.
Brands that treat creator work as temporary media buying will probably keep running into the same problems: rushed recruitment, inconsistent content and little organisational memory after a campaign ends.
The stronger programmes will look less exciting from the outside.
They will have clear processes, trusted creator communities, usable performance data and teams that know when to move quickly—and when a trend has nothing to do with their brand.
More creators may increase the amount of content a company publishes.
It will not fix a creator marketing strategy that was never built to last.