Influencer marketing used to be the squishy line on a media plan. Marketers would choose who to work with based on follower counts and gut feel.
But now influencer is a performance channel – and creators are media channels in their own right, with loyal audiences, CPMs and measurement expectations to match.
“If I’m a creator, I want to be my own media company,” says Ryan Detert, CEO and co-founder of AI-powered influencer marketing platform Influential, on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
Creators are on multiple social platforms and their name, image and likeness can be extended to digital, podcasts, out of home and even CTV. “That person becomes an industry unto themselves for their community,” Detert says.
This mindset is resonating with brands and holding companies, including Publicis, which bought Influential in 2024 for $500 million. (Publicis really has been on a tear recently.)
Influential is now plugged into Publicis’s broader stack, including Epsilon’s identity data, so that creator campaigns can be planned and measured alongside other media. Rather than treating creator spend as a separate, unaccountable bucket, it helps marketers manage creator campaigns using the same machinery that supports digital and TV: test-and-control studies to prove sales lift, data that can feed into marketing mix models and footfall attribution for QSR and retail.
If the creator category wants serious money, Detert says, it has to live by the same data-driven rules as pretty much everything else on the media plan.
AI is a big part of how that happens.
Influential leans on AI to understand audiences, match brands with the right creators, scan content and timelines for brand safety and suitability issues and tie organic and paid impressions together so creator activity can be compared to other channels.
It’s all in service of aligning spend with where people actually spend their time, Detert says.
“We have an entire generation that grew up on YouTube,” he says. “They’re not going to watch traditional TV or movies.”
Also in this episode: why holding companies are consolidating their creator capabilities, why Detert thinks live content and live shopping are the most underrated opportunities in North America, what large language models mean for the future of creator-driven recommendations and how Detert’s Big Brothers Big Sisters experience still informs his worldview.
