Influencer partnerships are no longer a nice-to-have, but a need-to-have growth strategy for marketers. And the key to maintaining a successful influencer program is being able to consistently measure campaign performance and prove partnerships are driving lift—from consideration to favorability to purchase intent.
From left: Influential's Faön Mahunik, Swayable's Tyler Montague and Michael Baumer, Ph.D., discussed key findings from a meta-study about the impact of creator marketing programs.
At the Advertising Research Foundation’s (ARF) Creative Effectiveness 2025 event in New York, Michael Baumer, Ph.D., VP of Data Science at Swayable; Tyler Montague, VP of Client & Research Success at Swayable; and Faön Mahunik, EVP of Strategy & Analytics at Influential gathered to discuss the power of using creative pre-testing to prove influencer impact.
They shared key insights from Swayable's AI-powered meta-study—analyzing more than 14,000 randomized controlled trial (RCT) experiments deployed on the Swayable platform—which spotlights how creator content for these clients outperforms traditional media across different generations and industries.
Key findings from the meta-study included:
1. Influencers outperform across the funnel—and across age demographics
The meta-study found that influencer content nearly doubled brand favorability compared to traditional ads. This is a key indicator of why influencer marketing is experiencing exponential growth—it’s not only driving top-of-funnel performance, but also boosting mid-to-lower funnel metrics.
The study also found that influencer content outperformed other content formats among Gen X and Boomers both driving a +7 percentage-point (PP) in lift—a +4PP and +2PP increase over traditional content, respectively.
“As you’d expect, you see better performance among younger folks compared to traditional media,” said Baumer. “Even at the older end of the age spectrum, you still see influencer content outperforming.”
While people typically associate creators with the fashion, beauty, and lifestyle space, the meta-study showed that consumer packaged goods (CPGs) is another industry where influencer content is driving higher lift than non-CPG and non-influencer content.
“We have a lot of CPG partners who we test with. And we’re starting to do a lot of testing in other spaces like pharma and finance,” said Mahunik. “Proof of lift is really required on a level of non-traditional areas where we want to leverage influencers.”
While the meta-study proves the impact of creator partnerships, it also shines light on the fact that marketing teams must be able to consistently measure campaign performance and prove success through RCT pre-testing. Doing so enables marketers to make informed creative decisions, backed up by evidence, in order to maintain agile influencer programs.
“Marketing budgets follow the evidence,” said Montague. “Being able to provide evidence of what’s working and not working—and being able to apply RCT methodology to our breadth of content—is very helpful for marketing and insights teams.”
Watch our entire ARF presentation below:
Interested in pre-testing your influencer marketing content? Book a demo with Swayable today.