Creativebrief brought together a panel of industry voices this week to answer a question that's been sitting under a lot of marketing budgets: are brands still underestimating what creators can do?
Our own Chloe Singleton, Group Media and Influence Director at eight&four, was one of the contributors. Her answer was clear. The debate about whether creator marketing works is over. The real question now is whether brands are actually making the most of it.
"The days of questioning whether creator marketing works are behind us," she writes. "The real question is whether brands are making the most of what they offer."
Chloe pointed to this year's Cannes as proof of how far the conversation has moved, with more than 500 creators on stage and brands like Unilever building entire World Cup campaigns around a 50,000-strong creator ecosystem. Her wider point is about mindset, not budget. Creators have long been treated as a way to extend reach or churn out content. Increasingly, brands are waking up to something more valuable: their expertise, their cultural proximity, and their understanding of the communities they speak to.
For Chloe, the biggest strides happen when brands stop treating creators as a channel and start treating them as a strategic part of how campaigns are shaped from the outset. That's where the magic happens.
Chloe's comments appeared alongside perspectives from Socially Powerful, Simply Social, GBM Group, Jungle Creations and Hypetap.
Read the full piece on Creativebrief.
