For years, direct-to-consumer marketing had a familiar engine.
Buy Meta ads.
Measure conversions.
Increase spend while the economics work.
Ruggable is moving part of its budget elsewhere.
The washable-rug brand’s chief marketing and creative officer, Lauren Sherman-Kaoud, told Digiday that Ruggable has shifted roughly 10% of overall spend away from performance channels such as Meta and toward brand channels including influencers and connected television.
The company also moved more than $1 million from performance budget into ShopMy creators during its creator-marketing push. Sherman-Kaoud said the ShopMy program generated roughly $3 million in revenue in its first month, doubled in the second month, and tripled in the third.
Those are company-reported revenue figures, not an independent incrementality analysis. They do not tell us how much of that revenue would have happened without the creator program or what the full margin was after commissions and platform costs.
The strategic move is still important.
Creator marketing is increasingly being evaluated as a media channel with measurable commerce—not a separate bucket for “influencer awareness.”
The old distinction between brand and performance is weakening
Traditional marketing teams often divided channels into two groups.
Brand builds future demand.
Performance captures current demand.
Creators can do both.
A creator post can:
- demonstrate a product
- establish social proof
- drive an affiliate sale
- become a paid ad
- generate search interest
- create reusable brand creative
- introduce the product to a new audience
One asset can move through several stages of the funnel.
That makes creator economics more complicated—but potentially more powerful.
Creator content can solve the creative problem inside paid media
Paid social requires a constant supply of fresh creative.
Even strong ads fatigue.
Brands need new hooks, settings, people, demonstrations, and stories.
Creator programs generate that supply.
If a creator asset converts organically, the brand can potentially amplify it through paid media where rights allow.
This creates a testing loop:
Creator publishes.
Audience reacts.
Brand identifies winners.
Winning creative gets paid distribution.
Performance data informs future creator briefs.
The creator is not only media inventory.
The creator is a creative-development engine.
Affiliate data makes creator programs easier to defend
Affiliate systems give brands a direct transaction signal.
That can be useful.
It can also oversimplify attribution.
A customer may see three creator posts, search the brand, visit the site twice, then click one affiliate link right before purchase.
The final creator gets credit.
Another customer may discover through a creator and buy later without the link.
The creator gets no credit.
Affiliate revenue should therefore be one input.
Brands should also look at:
- new customer rate
- branded search
- direct traffic
- lift by region
- assisted conversions
- paid amplification performance
- repeat purchase
- incremental testing
The objective is understanding what the program creates beyond tracked last-click sales.
Performance marketing has become expensive partly because everyone uses it
Auction-based advertising is efficient.
That efficiency attracts competition.
When more advertisers bid for the same high-intent user, costs can rise.
Creators offer a different route.
Instead of buying one more impression in an auction, the brand can enter an audience through a trusted person.
That is not automatically cheaper.
It can be harder to scale.
The content quality varies.
Creator relationships require management.
The channel becomes attractive when it produces a different kind of attention than another paid impression.
Businesses should compare marginal dollars
The right question is not:
“Are creators better than Meta?”
The right question is:
“Where should the next $10,000 go?”
If the next $10,000 in paid social is producing weaker returns than the previous $10,000, while creator commerce is producing stronger incremental customers, reallocation can make sense.
If the creator channel is saturated and paid search has high-intent demand available, the answer may reverse.
Marketing allocation should be marginal.
Channels change as scale changes.
Local businesses can use the same logic with smaller budgets
A South Florida business may never spend millions.
The experiment can still be structured.
Imagine a med spa spending $5,000 monthly on paid social.
It could test moving $1,000 into:
- two local creators
- one professional content shoot
- paid usage rights on the best creator asset
Then measure:
- consultations
- cost per booked consultation
- qualified followers
- branded search
- website traffic
- creative performance
That is more informative than saying “influencers did not work” after gifting one person a service.
Creator selection should begin with customer fit
A large audience does not guarantee good commerce.
For a washable-rug brand, home, design, parenting, pet, lifestyle, and cleaning creators can demonstrate the product in relevant environments.
The audience sees the use case.
A creator who has no natural connection to the category may generate reach without buying intent.
Businesses should ask:
- Does the creator already talk about this problem?
- Would the product naturally appear in their life?
- Does the audience ask for recommendations?
- Is the creator trusted in this category?
- Can the product be demonstrated visually?
- Is the audience located where we sell?
Relevance makes the creative easier.
PHQ Insights: what this means for creators and clients
For brands: Compare creator investment with other media on incremental economics, not only engagement.
For creators: The more clearly you can demonstrate commerce impact, the more you can negotiate as a business partner rather than a post seller.
For businesses: Start with controlled tests. Reallocate small amounts, measure, then scale what proves itself.
For production teams: Create ads and creator content from the same strategic shoot when possible. Strong source footage gives the marketing team more options.
Creators can also lower the cost of learning
A brand can test ten messages with ten creators.
Which product benefit appears naturally?
Which objection comes up?
Which demographic responds?
Which visual demonstration works?
Which language converts?
Those insights can improve the company’s website, ads, email, packaging, and sales scripts.
The creator program produces market research.
That value is easy to miss if the dashboard only looks at affiliate revenue.
The channel needs operational discipline
As creator spend grows, the company needs systems for:
- recruiting
- briefs
- product seeding
- contracts
- usage rights
- affiliate tracking
- payouts
- content storage
- performance
- paid amplification
The creator channel stops feeling “organic” behind the scenes.
It becomes media operations.
That is a sign of maturity, not a problem.
Incrementality deserves a control group
Creator-attributed revenue can look impressive while still overstating what the channel caused.
The cleanest question is not “How much revenue had a creator link?”
It is “How much additional revenue occurred because this creator activity existed?”
Large brands can test that with geographic holdouts, matched audiences, timing tests, new-customer analysis, or other incrementality methods.
Smaller businesses can use simpler versions.
Run a creator program in one market while holding another relatively steady.
Use creator-specific landing pages.
Compare branded search before and after.
Track first-time customers separately from existing customers.
Ask buyers how they first heard about the brand.
The measurement will never be perfect, but it becomes more credible.
That matters when creator spend begins competing directly with paid social, search, CTV, and affiliate budgets.
The goal is not to prove creators “won.”
It is to know what the next dollar is most likely to produce.
What to watch next
More brands will likely move creator spend into the same conversations as paid social, CTV, affiliate, and search.
Platforms such as ShopMy are helping by connecting content and commerce data.
The winners will not simply be brands that spend more on creators.
They will be brands that understand when creator media creates incremental demand, when it produces better creative, and when another channel should receive the next dollar.
Ruggable’s move is useful because it makes the comparison explicit.
Creator marketing is no longer asking for a seat at the media table.
For many brands, it is becoming part of the media table itself.
Sources
Primary reporting and supporting material used for this article.
