Believable beats famous

We’ve all done it. The brand wants reach, so we go looking for the biggest name the budget allows. Big name, big audience, job done. Right?

Not quite. A big name gets you seen. It doesn’t get you believed.

People trust a creator when it feels like they’d pick your brand even if nobody paid them. That’s what you’re really buying. And there are two ways to get it.

The first is fit. The brand already belongs in their world.

The second is love. Their audience has watched them rave about the product before, unpaid. That’s what makes a surprising pairing work. A rugby player gushing about a face cream? Odd. A rugby player who’s been posting about that face cream for two years? Now that’s a story.

So here’s what you must do. For every creator you recommend, explain why they’re believable, and link to content that proves they can deliver: posts that performed above their own median, where you can see our brand fitting in. If you can’t show both, don’t shortlist them.

How to read this: the share of viewers who could correctly say who the creator was, on average, by creator size.

Creator size	Followers	Viewers who recognised them
Micro	10k to 100k	8.0%
Mid	101k to 300k	8.5%
Macro	301k to 1m	10.4%
Celebrity	1m+ or off-platform fame	23.5%