Sydney, Australia — Only 6% of branded creator content successfully delivers both strong audience engagement and meaningful brand-building, highlighting the limitations of relying on platform engagement metrics to measure campaign success.
The findings come from Kantar’s newly released ‘The Creator Game Plan’ report, which analysed more than 15,000 branded creator assets across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts.
While the study found that 27% of creator content achieved medium-to-high engagement alongside medium-to-high brand impact, the report suggests many marketers continue to overestimate the value of engagement metrics without considering broader business outcomes.
According to Kantar, the findings expose a growing disconnect between the billions invested in creator marketing and the commercial results brands expect.
Irene Joshy, Head of Creative at Kantar Australia and APAC, said the research is particularly relevant as brands across the region continue increasing their investment in creator partnerships.
“While around a quarter of creator content drives effectiveness, the brand itself is too often missed. Therefore, for our region, ‘Cultural Power’ is such an important measure in Kantar’s new Creator Effectiveness framework,” said Joshy.
“It helps unlock the right balance between creator authenticity and meaningful brand connection, ensuring content feels native to culture while still working hard for the brand,” added Joshy.
To help marketers better evaluate creator campaigns, Kantar has expanded its LINK AI platform with creator-specific testing, a new capability that measures engagement, brand-building and short-term sales potential against creator content benchmarks to enable marketers to assess performance beyond traditional platform metrics.
Vera Sidlova, Global Creative Director at Kantar, said the findings should encourage marketers to adopt broader measurement frameworks beyond engagement alone.
“Our research is a wake-up call that high engagement and genuine brand effectiveness more often than not do not align. CMOs say they’re under pressure to prove their return on investment. To do this, they need better signals and more rigorous metrics for testing to understand if their creator partnerships are the right fit,” shared Sidlova.
The report also notes that creative freedom remains essential for successful creator marketing, with 61% of marketers planning to increase investment in creator content.
However, Sidlova said authenticity alone is not enough without a clear strategic foundation.
“But for all the authenticity and personality that creators offer, there’s no gain to be found in a campaign that lacks strategy, genuine audience insight and fails to add value to a brand’s long-term game plan,” added Sidlova.
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