From Hype to Impact: A better IDeA for measuring Creator & Influencer Effectiveness

The creator economy is booming. Kantar’s Media Reactions study shows 61% of marketers are planning to increase investment in creators and influencers —making it the top-ranked channel for future budget growth. Our Blueprint for Brand Growth supports this being a sound bet. Creators help  predispose more people to your brand and also help you to be more present offering new ways to tap into purchase journeys, especially in the emerging space of social commerce.  Yet, as investment surges, a critical challenge remains: meaningful measurement. While Kantar’s evidence shows that, when executed well, creator content can outperform traditional branded digital content (delivering over 2 times the impact), proving ROI is still a major hurdle. The latest data from the IPA reveals that influencer and creator campaigns can drive short ROI on a par with other major channels, but it’s long-term ROI is particularly impressive. Interesting though the variation in results is vast, with extremes and outliers of performance far more common. 

Why does this variance exist? In the rush to leverage the clear potential of creators, brands can lack clear strategic intent of they how plan to use creators and influencers. Recent success stories show creator content that links back to the brands broader strategic platform is the most successful. These brands not only use creators to reach new audiences but also tap into their power to add a cultural vibrancy to the campaign that helps drive incremental impact. 
 

A masterclass in getting it right: Desperados’ Beer with Latin Vibe 

Exploring Heineken’s ‘Beer with Latin Vibe’ campaign for Desperados provides a blueprint for success. The campaign set out to energise the brand by tapping into culturally vibrant themes and connecting with Gen Z’s passion points—music, fashion, and dance. It’s leveraging a diverse collective of over 70 creators, each contributing unique content across platforms and experiences. A crucial ignition point for the campaign’s success came with from their collaboration with Ovy - a Grammy award winning Latin music producer. He created a track and accompanying music video which powered the momentum of the campaign into culture and across creators. This track contains a looping audio hook that stood out and helped the content feel culturally vibrant and authentic. While some may consider this an incidental detail, Ovy insisted (to the marketing teams initial protestation) that the ‘guao guao’ audio cue in the track was essential to help the content stand out and act as a trigger to connect the campaign. He was right. The track alone has picked up multiple awards, in addition to the campaigns stacked cabinet awards including a Cannes Lion and Kantar Creative Effectiveness award. In market, results so far are impressive with +15% increase in purchase intent and a +27% increase in brand recall. 

  

An IDeA for more meaningful measurement: Giving Desperados the confidence to succeed 

You would be forgiven for thinking that your specific category or brand framing may limit your ability to replicate Desperados success. You may be feeling that both the strategic and tactics that underpin this are unreachable today, and wonder where do I get started?  

Well the answer may be closer to home that you think. Strong consumer insight work supported by an adapted measurement toolkit played a key role powering this success story. Kantar was proud to partner with Desperados and Heineken throughout this journey.  

From this case we’ve identified 3 key questions that can help you drive a step change in creator led effectiveness. 

• Inspire: Do you have a culturally vibrant platform idea? 
  
  Powering the success of the ‘Beer with Latin Vibe’ was a hard won insight about how GenZ socialise differently and how this could be linked to the brand’s Latin DNA. Having ‘cultural vibrancy’ at the heart empowered creators to collaborate and provided the campaign with powerful momentum. 
  
  
  
• Develop & Evaluate: Can you pinpoint which creator content is effective and why? 
  
  Desperados ensured that the Masterbrand film that helped announce and amplify the campaign was optimised to deliver its objectives fully. This campaign succeeded through a powerful combination of organic and paid working in synergy unified via by a strong overall campaign idea. 
  
  
  
• Attribute: Can you attribute creator campaigns to impact on equity and sales? 
   
  We helped Desperados think different about campaign measurement and elevated beyond behavioural metrics by attributing campaign exposure to lifts in brand metrics talking a common language of brand value creation to gain added credibility. 
  

 

Beyond the Hype: your next steps  

In the creator and influencer ‘gold rush’ we’ve seen the ROI brands achieve vary more than other media. Desperados showed ‘Beer with Latin Vibe’ helps by setting a high bar for how creator-led campaigns can drive powerful and long-lasting brand building effects, but only if you start by asking the right questions. IDeA provides a blueprint for more meaningful measurement of creator and influencer campaigns. If you’re ready to unlock the full value of your creator partnerships, get in touch to learn more.