Are we buying influence or creativity?

I’ve been turning the word ‘influencer’ over in my head lately, mostly because I’m no longer sure it describes what brands are actually looking for. 

 The old model was fairly simple. Find someone with a big enough following, check their audience looks roughly like yours, hand them a product and pay for access to the people watching them, with reach, engagement, impressions and hopefully some sales at the end of it. It worked, and in plenty of cases it still does, but after years working in PR and marketing, I care a lot less about how many people follow someone and a lot more about why they follow them. 

That distinction matters because once you understand why someone has an audience, you start making very different decisions about what they can actually do for a brand. 

Having an audience and knowing how to hold one aren’t the same skill

Influencers and creators tend to get lumped together as though they’re doing the same job, when the value they bring can be quite different. 

Influence comes from the relationship someone has built with an audience, while creation comes from having something worth watching, reading or sharing in the first place. There’s obviously plenty of overlap between the two, and some of Australia’s best-known creators are hugely influential while plenty of influencers are excellent content makers. 

Look at where their value starts

Take Brooke Bellamy, founder of Brooki Bakehouse. There was a bakery before there were millions of people watching, and when the business was still finding its feet, Bellamy began filming behind-the-scenes ‘day in my life’ videos showing the early starts, baking and reality of running a bakery. That content helped people discover Brooki, which has since grown from its original 41-square-metre Fortitude Valley store to 13 Australian locations and a social community of more than four million. The business gave her something interesting to show people, and her ability to turn that into content helped scale it. 

Jane Lu is a similar example, although the substance behind her content is quite different. Her sizeable personal following sits on top of Showpo, her role on Shark Tank Australia and years of experience building a business, which means there is plenty for her to talk about beyond whatever happens to be trending that week. She shares the wins, but also the mistakes, money, management and the less glamorous parts of entrepreneurship, and that gives people a reason to keep listening to her podcast – The Lazy CEO. 

In both cases, the audience grew around something they were already doing. 

Compare that with someone like Tammy Hembrow, whose enormous influence has been built around her personal brand, with fitness, fashion, family and lifestyle at its centre, or Josh Heuston, who built an audience through fashion and modelling before his acting career took off. People are interested in what they wear, where they go and what they use, and for the right brand, becoming part of that world can be incredibly valuable. 

Neither model is better than the other, but I wouldn’t hire them to do the same job, and that is where I think the distinction becomes useful for brands. 

Follower count is the wrong opening question

When an influencer or creator brief lands, one of the first questions is often how many followers someone has. I understand the instinct because it’s a clean number, it fits neatly into a spreadsheet and gives everyone something tangible to compare. 

A story in one of Australia’s biggest publications isn’t automatically a better result than one in a smaller title that reaches exactly the people you need to influence, just as a television audience of a million means very little if almost none of them care about what you’re selling. We’ve always made those judgements in PR, so I’m not sure why we sometimes forget them when social media enters the conversation. 

And now there’s some fairly compelling research behind that thinking. 

The 2026 Creator Effectiveness Playbook from WPP Media, System1 and TikTok analysed more than 1,200 paid TikTok ads with a combined 23.6 billion impressions. Among its findings, follower count was not a reliable predictor of creator recognition, while entertaining content from smaller creators could deliver brand-memory results comparable with much larger creators. Its advice for brands is particularly useful: when forced to choose, prioritise brand fit over creator fame. 

That makes sense to me because before I look at follower numbers, I want to know what the brand actually needs this person to do. Perhaps we need access to their audience or their credibility, perhaps we need someone who can make content people genuinely want to watch, or perhaps we’re trying to introduce a brand to a community we haven’t been able to reach ourselves. 

Once you start there, the numbers have much more meaning, and sometimes the person with 30,000 followers becomes a far smarter investment than the one with 500,000. 

Creators have changed what brands are actually buying

This is the part of the shift I find most interesting because creators have expanded what a brand can get from the relationship. 

Traditional influencer marketing was largely about distribution. The content obviously mattered, but much of the value sat in the audience someone had already built and the brand’s ability to access it. With creators, the content itself can become the asset, which opens up a much broader conversation about where that content can go and what else it can do. 

And perhaps one of the best examples of where that can ultimately lead is happening right now. 

Alix Earle built her profile through candid ‘Get Ready With Me’ videos and the sense that her audience was being invited into her life rather than watching a polished production. That creator-led following eventually gave her enormous influence, and now the format has travelled far beyond TikTok, with Netflix launching Earle Meets World on 4 September, an unscripted series taking audiences further into her family, friendships and life behind the social profile. 

That progression says a lot about where this space is heading. Earle created content people chose to watch, that attention built influence, and the influence has now become valuable media in its own right. By that point, arguing over whether she is a creator or an influencer almost misses the point. 

Sometimes the smartest thing a brand can do is get out of the way

There’s an uncomfortable truth in all of this for those of us working in marketing teams, because we do love a brief. 

 We have key messages, brand guidelines, mandatory inclusions, approved terminology and usually a queue of people who would quite like to have a look everything before anything goes live. Much of that is necessary, particularly in PR where reputation is always somewhere in the background, but there comes a point where too much control starts working against the reason you hired a creator in the first place. 

 The Creator Effectiveness Playbook puts some evidence behind this too, finding that creative quality was the strongest predictor of Brand Memory Lift, explaining 54.6 per cent of the outcome. More sales-heavy techniques, including hard calls to action and loading content with words, facts and figures, actually reduced emotional response. 

 It’s a useful reminder that if you’ve chosen someone because you like the way they speak to their audience, rewriting everything they say makes very little sense. Give them the objective, make the non-negotiables and brand boundaries clear, then leave enough room for them to make something that still sounds and feels like their content. 

 Their audience knows the difference, often far more quickly than we give them credit for, and when a piece of content suddenly sounds like it came from a marketing department rather than the person they chose to follow, the value of the partnership starts to disappear. 

The influencer isn’t going anywhere

None of this means influencer marketing is on its way out, and I’m always wary when marketing declares one thing dead simply because something new has arrived. 

 There will continue to be enormous value in people who have built genuine trust with an audience, and for many campaigns, that relationship is exactly what a brand needs. What creators have done is add something else to the equation by giving brands the opportunity to buy not only access to an audience, but an idea and a piece of content that can have a life well beyond the original post. 

 Increasingly, the best people in this space can offer both, which is why I don’t think the useful debate is really influencer versus creator at all. The better question is the one I’d want answered before we start looking at names, follower counts or engagement rates: what do we actually need this person to do? 

 Work that out first and everything that follows, from who you choose to how you brief them and what you measure at the end, becomes a lot clearer. The right partnership starts with the right brief.  

If you’re looking at creators or influencers for your next campaign, contact us about making your campaign work harder.