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1.2Why creators
You’ll hear the same objections again and again. Here’s what to say, and the evidence behind it. Learn these and you can hold your own in any room.
“Why not just put it on TV?”
Because creator work keeps paying back long after the campaign ends. In the biggest benchmark we have, creators had the highest long-term multiplier of any channel measured: 3.35, ahead of linear TV at 3.27, catch-up TV at 2.56 and paid social at 1.98. TV still works. Creators just pay back better over time.
IPA Influencer Benchmarking, 2025: 220 campaigns, 28 markets, £133m.
“Can't our own content team do this?”
They can make good content. But creator ads are remembered 23% better than ads a brand makes itself. Part of the reason: people choose to follow a creator, while an ad interrupts them.
WPP Media / System1 / TikTok, 2026: 337 campaigns with measured brand lift.
“It's nice for awareness, but we need sales.”
Awareness is how you get sales. 84% of purchases go to a brand the buyer already leaned toward before they even searched. Brands people lean toward sell 9x the volume and can charge 2x the price. Creators build that lean: they give people a reason to like you before they need you.
WPP Media & Saïd Business School, How Humans Decide, 2025 (1.2m purchase journeys); Kantar, Blueprint for Brand Growth, 2024.
More answers you'll need
“Let's just get a celebrity.”
Fame doesn’t guarantee recognition. Even celebrities are recognised by only 23.5% of the audience on average, and 17% of them are barely recognised at all. A creator whose world the brand fits lifts feeling by 58%. Fame lifts it by 23%. See Believable beats famous (1.3).
WPP Media / System1 / TikTok, 2026: 239 creator ads, 35,850 TikTok users.
“How will we know it worked?”
We agree that before we start. Every campaign must have a primary behaviour (stream, scroll, search or shop), one Impact metric, one Cost Efficiency metric and a baseline to compare against, all signed off before launch. See 3.2.
Humanz measurement framework.