Most people with a TikTok or Instagram account are familiar with influencer marketing. But few may realize how quickly it has grown. What began as a new strategy on emerging platforms in the early 2010s has evolved into a core channel for brands that’s capturing a major share of ad spend globally: According to Statista, marketers spent $35 billion on creator-led campaigns in 2024. That figure is expected to reach $60 billion by 2030—matching the current figure for TV advertising spend.
Influential, the world’s largest influencer marketing agency, is leading the pack of agencies connecting brands to creators. In the largest deal of its kind, Publicis acquired Influential in September 2024 for half a billion dollars, in what has been seen as a coming-of-age moment for the industry.
The power of the creator economy is evident. But what’s fueling that power is proof that these influencer marketing campaigns actually work by driving brand lift. Influential and likeminded agencies are using rapid pre-testing to generate hard evidence of the impact of their creator content—and accelerate a significant reallocation of marketing spend across business sectors.
The job of marketers is to generate lift
The reason why businesses are investing more in influencer marketing is twofold. To start, creators already have built-in audiences who are more likely to buy a product they recommend. But simply saying that influencer marketing works isn’t enough—marketing teams must prove it drives brand lift (and through that, sales). They’re now able to do that using rapid pre-testing results from Swayable.
At this year’s SXSW festival in Austin, Influential CCO Chris Detert discussed why the company has deployed widespread pre-testing with Swayable. After launching Influential with his brother, Ryan, in 2013, they put creator marketing on the map with the first-ever influencer house at Coachella in 2014, generating high-profile coverage of now-famous creators like Logan Paul.
What the Detert brothers soon realized was that simply working with influencers to create content wasn’t enough to convince major brands to reallocate budget—demonstrating that it actually worked to brand partners was key.
"The excitement of influencer marketing in the early days was checking a box and saying you were doing something cool and innovative. That only lasted for so long,” said Detert. “The reason we’re the world’s top influencer marketing company is because of a data-backed approach. We often say it’s a marriage of data, science, and marketing that really creates the best results.”
To scale the process of proving lift, Influential partnered with the team at Swayable, which has emerged as the gold standard for proving creative effectiveness for these kinds of campaigns. Many of Influential’s top brand clients were already using Swayable metrics as their definition of success for messaging and campaign concepts. Previously, Influential’s team waited months for post-campaign brand lift studies to prove the value of the campaign content to clients. These waiting periods would cause bottlenecks that slowed the growth of client accounts and ramp-up of new campaigns.
With a systematic testing program powered by Swayable, Influential can view insights from ads they test within 24 hours. The ability to quickly (and consistently) test content through the Swayable platform has allowed Influential to accelerate campaign deployment and adopt an agile marketing strategy that wasn’t possible before.
What data-driven, agile marketing means at Influential
By conducting iterative pre-tests on Swayable’s platform, Influential can routinely analyze the types of creators and marketing concepts that positively sway target audiences. In turn, the company has developed an agile marketing framework for brands.
Influential uses this agile framework to make the most authentic match between brands and creators, as well as identify trends to use in campaigns based on their longevity—including short-lived viral moments, trends that last for a few months, and long-lasting moments that become evergreen on social media.
Here’s a snapshot of the platform’s marketing approach:
For specific campaign initiatives, Influential uses Swayable’s platform to quickly ask target consumers questions about its creative at scale using randomized control trial (RCT) methodology. This approach enables Influential to consistently track KPIs such as consideration, favorability, and purchase intent, helping the company understand the difference in attitudes between people who saw an ad versus those who didn’t.
By using pre-testing to generate lift data for certain campaigns, Influential has developed successful creator content for brands aiming to conquer the world of social and reach new audiences. Specifically, Influential used Swayable insights to develop creator-led campaigns for Campbell's and the NBA, which capitalized on viral moments.
For Campbell’s, Influential used Swayable insights to help the legacy CPG company become relevant on TikTok by identifying a Gen Z internet term to leverage: #Rizz, otherwise slang for “charm.” The brand tasked creators to showcase Campbell’s soup products as a star ingredients in #Rizz recipe videos, touted as a secret weapon to securing a second date.
The #Rizz campaign proved to be a major success: it helped modernize Campbell’s, expand its reach, and gain a competitive edge by proactively reaching audiences with timely messaging. The campaign drove a 4x ROAS return compared to CPG benchmarks, drove $2.7 million in incremental sales, and generated a 2.8% lift in offline sales.
Rapid pre-testing also helped Influential and its client the NBA figure out the smartest way to increase female viewership of basketball games: the ongoing #GRWM (“Get Ready With Me”) trend, which involves creators sharing their daily getting-ready routines with outfits and makeup. Finding the most on-brand influencers to spotlight resulted in a 15.6% tune-in lift among women across three games during the 2024 NBA playoffs—and its highest average tune-in lift performance historically for the NBA.
Detert largely attributes these campaign wins to Influential’s ability to make proactive creative decisions, informed by the insights generated from iterative, rapid pre-testing.
“We have a 91% client retention rate, largely because once we start working with someone and understand what the data says, we rinse and repeat. We’re that much more effective,” said Detert. “We have the ability to, in the middle of a campaign, change an influencer out if they’re not resonating with the audience. It’s really data science, more than anything, wrapped into influencer marketing.”
Key takeaways for using pre-testing to prove influencer impact
To build an influencer marketing program that drives consistent lift, brands must develop agile practices backed by relevant, real-time lift testing metrics. Testing, re-testing, and testing again helps brands understand the key messages, trends, and influencers that move audiences—and the concepts they should avoid. Without this evidence-driven approach, brands may lack the foresight to develop relevant creator campaigns that fuel ROI.
“Agile marketing means we need to be willing to try, fail, and try again,” said Detert. “When you’re talking about influencer marketing, you’re talking about finite moments of culture. You have to throw a lot of things at the wall and see what sticks.”
Consider these key takeaways for using rapid pre-testing to drive an agile marketing strategy:
- Using a rigorous, industry-standard proof of lift helps marketers easily get approval from business stakeholders to reallocate budget to new and innovative content formats.
- Traditionally, generating evidence of lift is expensive and time consuming. Using Swayable’s platform, the world’s leading brands and agencies gather brand lift insights in 24 hours, with even greater precision.
- Swayable metrics are the emerging standard for proving lift. They enable teams to test campaign content quickly to prove increases in metrics like favorability and purchase intent.
Interested in testing your influencer marketing concepts before launch? Book a demo to see how Swayable can help your brand become more agile.