The Era of Efficacy: The New Standard in Creator Marketing
Influencer marketing has grown up fast. The question now isn’t whether creator partnerships deliver – it’s who can prove it.
At Cannes Lions this year, influencer owned the main stage. Brands were no longer asking if creator partnerships deliver; they were comparing notes on how to scale them, creatively and profitably. After more than a decade building Hypetap, we’ve seen this shift unfold first hand. What used to sit in ‘experimental’ marketing budgets is now core to the marketing plan for some of the world’s biggest brands, as well as the most successful disruptors.
We are now in the era of efficacy: intelligent influencer marketing that’s creatively led and shown to deliver commercially.
Creativity Backed by Intelligence
Most influencer measurement churns out heaps of data but not enough intelligence. Engagement rates and reach don’t answer what boards really want to know: How do we compare to our competitors? Are we over-investing or under-investing versus our category? Is this work contributing positively to our brand health? What does this engagement mean for sales?
After 12 years of refining this for brands like Kraft Heinz, Depop and Colgate Palmolive, we know that efficacy lives in the detail:
“We’ve built Hypetap Intelligence to be diagnostic, not just descriptive”, explains Founder, Detch Singh. “Connecting sentiment with purchase behaviour, benchmarking performance across your category and optimising while campaigns are live. That kind of insight allows for optimisations that can create 12-18 month leads competitors won’t easily close.”
Flexible enough to create. Safe enough to scale.
Working with five creators is different to confidently deploying fifty. The challenge scales fast – and with scale comes scrutiny. One creator may look like a good fit today, but what about historically? Have they worked with competitors or used profanity or hate speech in a piece of content you haven’t seen? Multiply this across dozens of partnerships – and manual vetting becomes impossible to get right 100% of the time.
Our three-stage safety model was designed for exactly that:
- Pre-campaign vetting: Visual recognition and speech-to-text AI to analyse complete creator histories (contextual relevance, competitor conflicts, historical controversies, data and analytics).
- During-campaign: Real-time monitoring that flags risks and content approvals processes that work with a range of regulatory teams if required.
- Post-campaign: Performance data that improves creator selection, successful narratives and maintains standards.
More than 10 billion data points power these protocols: technology that helps great operators make informed decisions without dictating (or worse, killing) creativity.
Full-Service Means Full Impact
The best partnerships work on alignment, not control. When brands script every line, they get content that feels like traditional advertising. Working with creators isn’t a casting exercise. When we provide clear strategic direction but trust their creators to bring their voice, people engage with it. That balance takes experience – and a partner who’s detail driven enough to get it right.
Hypetap is often mistaken for a tech platform. We’re a full-service agency with a data and technology backbone – a mix of rigour and creativity designed to turn influence into impact. For global brands, like Kraft Heinz – managing dozens of creators with us – that blend makes programs simpler to run and safer to scale.
The Competitive Divide is Widening
When we brought Hypetap to the UK from Australia, we brought over a decade of methodology refined across major campaigns. One thing is clear: as the global market continues to mature, brands can no longer treat investment in influencer marketing as a gamble. Because without a proper measurement infrastructure in place, without performance benchmarks, they simply won’t get budgets to compete.
Hypetap delivers data-driven influencer programs that prove ROI, not just reach. Our platform blends deep analytics with expert strategy, ensuring every creator partnership is compliant, cost-efficient and directly tied to your business outcomes.