Grace Andrews, a British creator marketing strategist, has some unusual advice for brands. “I'd tell you to unlearn everything about measuring clicks and discount codes. 80% of what a creator is actually worth never shows up in either,” Andrews wrote.
In her view, a creator's value shows up elsewhere: in a group chat a few days later, in search, or at a shop shelf when a customer picks her product over a competitor's.
Andrews wrote as a contributor to the London agency Charlie Oscar's “Find Your Nerve” report. The 80% figure is her own estimate with no measured basis. The argument beneath it, however, rests on data that a brand director can find outside the report. A code and the last click capture the bottom of the purchase funnel. The rest happens in private channels, in search and on the shelf, where no UTM parameter reaches.
Where a creator's value disappears from the dashboard
A large share of recommendations never pass through a public, measurable link. According to a survey by GlobalWebIndex and We Are Social, 63% of people already preferred in 2019 to share content through private “dark social” channels, while 54% named open social networks. The survey covered a sample of more than 3,000 adult internet users in the US and Britain. Most often these were private messaging apps. A recommendation that a creator sets off and that ends up in a family group never makes it into an ad platform report.
What is measured by something other than a click points to the brand footprint. Nielsen evaluated roughly 200 influencer campaigns through its Brand Impact service and found that four in five viewers recalled the brand from influencer advertising.
An ad featuring a creator lifted both brand affinity and purchase intent by 9 points compared with unexposed consumers. According to Nielsen's Trust in Advertising survey from 2021, 71% of consumers trust advertising and influencers' opinions. These are brand and trust effects that conversion metrics do not capture.
Why the dashboard does not show this layer was explained by Hannah Cooke, head of client strategy at Charlie Oscar. “For most of the 2010s, click attribution made it look like search and social were doing the heavy lifting,” she said in May 2026. In her view, last click stopped measuring reality. “Cookie deprecation, iOS changes, walled gardens, AI-driven media buys. Last-click started measuring less and less of what was actually happening.”
Brand drives thirty per cent of paid search
Modelling the entire marketing mix puts a concrete number on what the click misses. In its ROI Genome report from November 2022, Analytic Partners calculated that 30% of paid search is driven directly by brand and upper-funnel marketing. The same analysis states that brand messaging outperforms performance messaging in 80% of cases, and that upper-funnel creative is roughly 25% less effective in the short term but about 60% more effective in the long term.
The budget ratio that follows from this has been known in the industry for two decades. In their work The Long and the Short of It, Les Binet and Peter Field set the optimum at 60 to 40 between brand building and sales activation, and in the later study Effectiveness in Context they refined it to 62 to 38. Creators' work falls precisely into brand building, which activation metrics systematically undervalue.
Budgets still flow to performance
According to the report The Voice of the Marketer, which WARC published in December 2025, only 19% of brand marketers expect higher budgets in 2026. When budgets fall, 42% of them reach for performance marketing and only 29% for brand building. Short-termism was named the industry's main problem by 55% of respondents, against 25% in 2022.
The same WARC report names the cycle a “doom loop”, that is, “the negative cycle that arises from a mix of faulty metrics, wasted spend and diminishing returns”. A faulty metric drives money into the measurable lower funnel, results weaken and the pressure for measurability keeps growing.
Casting by follower count runs into the data
Andrews sets the role a creator is to play against follower count. In her view, micro-creators convert because trust lives inside real communities, macro-creators build salience and celebrities work better for launching a product than for sustaining it. “Safe content rarely gets seen, let alone remembered,” she adds on content with no point of view. “The brands pulling ahead are the ones with the nerve to have a point of view.”
Independent measurement of creator quality confirms this logic from the other side. In its analysis of creator ads, System1 reports that only 27% of creator ads clearly link the content to the brand, and describes this link as both the biggest weakness and the biggest opportunity. Andrew Tindall of System1 names creative quality in the same piece as the biggest driver of ROI. Follower count is missing from that list.
The gap between what looks good and what works was quantified by Kantar. In its Creator Game Plan report from June 2026, it found that only 6% of creator content delivers both strong engagement and strong brand impact. “High engagement and genuine brand effectiveness more often than not do not align,” summed up Vera Sidlova, global creative director at Kantar. Engagement is the most visible thing about creator content, but it says the least about brand impact.
The European regulator pushes for transparency
While brands wrestle with how to measure a creator's value, the European regulator is concerned with how to make it visible. The European Commission and consumer authorities of 22 member states, Norway and Iceland reviewed the posts of 576 influencers and announced in February 2024 that 97% had published commercial content, but only 20% systematically labelled it as advertising. The authorities selected 358 accounts for further investigation.
Independent monitoring confirms this. Together with 14 consumer organisations in 12 countries, BEUC went through roughly 650 posts and videos across the main social networks and, in a report from December 2025, documented “widespread use of hidden advertising practices”.
The fragmented rules across consumer, digital and audiovisual regulation are to be unified by the forthcoming Digital Fairness Act, in which the Commission has signalled its intention to address deceptive influencer marketing. Hidden advertising is already banned in the EU. A European brand must disclose the commercial nature of a collaboration with a creator under the rules already in force, regardless of how it measures the creator's contribution.
Measurement is moving from the click to the model
The measurement market is responding to the shift. CreatorIQ is building an enterprise platform that adds reach, conversion, ROI and brand sentiment to attribution, and says itself that creator marketing “also builds trust, awareness, and long-term brand affinity”. Analytic Partners offers mix modelling that puts a number on the upper funnel next to weekly ROAS. Nielsen measures brand impact with a test against a control group. What they have in common is that they do not look for a creator's value in the last click.
The promo code stays in reports because it is easy to read. But the money and the tools by which a creator's value is calculated are shifting from what is easy to click to what can be modelled.
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