Can we all put engagement rate to bed finally? Creator marketing’s new metric is brand memory

New Delhi: Creator marketing is entering a new phase where likes, views, follower count and engagement rates may no longer be enough to prove effectiveness. At Cannes Lions, the session “The Creator Effectiveness Playbook” moved the creator debate from “Can creators build a brand?” to “How can creators build my brand?” System1 Chief Growth Officer, Advertising, Andrew Tindall, and brand strategist and creator Eugene Healey argued that creator marketing has to move from vanity metrics to brand memory, with a stronger focus on creativity, emotion, brand fit, early branding and better briefs. Tindall made the sharpest intervention on engagement rate. “I’ve got all the engagement data for these campaigns, and there’s zero relationship between engagement rate and brand memory lift,” he said. He added, “Can we all put engagement rate to bed finally, please?” Much of influencer and creator marketing is still bought and judged on reach, likes, comments, shares and engagement rates. Tindall argued that these metrics do not necessarily show whether a creator campaign is helping consumers remember the brand. He said marketers who still need an engagement signal should look at what he called “deep engagement”, or the ratio of comments to likes. But even that, he said, is a weaker signal than creative quality. “If you need to look at some kind of engagement, right, look at the ratio of comments to likes on your content. It explains brand memory a little bit, but here’s the kicker. Creativity explains five times more brand memories,” he said. Tindall said creator effectiveness depends heavily on emotion and early brand recognition. “Not all impressions are equal, but not all seconds of attention are equal,” he said. He added, “If you can get an emotional creator campaign, you get exponential results.” For brands, the question is no longer whether creators can work. It is how to choose, brief and use them in a way that makes the brand memorable. One of Tindall’s strongest points was that brand fit matters more than fame. “Brand fit, an authentic fit between a creator and a brand, is twice as important as how famous that creator is,” he said. He added, “We must start our strategy and our briefs with brand fit, not how many followers do you have.” That shifts the creator selection process away from follower count and reach alone. Brands need to ask whether the creator’s world, format, audience relationship and point of view can naturally carry the brand. Tindall also said brands must learn how to brand early without killing authenticity. “How do we brand early? Say it and show it. Very simple. It should go into all of your creative briefs moving forward,” he said. According to him, saying the brand name can be an effective branding device in creator content, especially when combined with visual brand assets. “Saying the brand name we found is an incredibly powerful way of creators branding. However, you guessed it, if you say it and show it, it’s best,” he said. The session also introduced the idea of “social devices”, or repeatable creator formats that build recognition over time. Tindall described a social device as “a repeatable creative framework that compounds memories over time.” For brands, this means the brief should not force creators into the brand’s world. Instead, brands should enter the creator’s already recognisable format. “The brief now needs to be not forcing our brand world onto social, but brands entering these social devices,” Tindall said. Healey then brought the creator’s perspective. A former brand strategist and lecturer, he said his own creator work has been a way to understand how new media is changing brand building. “I really wanted to understand how media changes the way or new media is changing the way that brands are built,” Healey said. He said he sees his own work as explaining culture through brands. “What I consider what I do is I reveal the world and the culture to my audience through the lens of brands,” he said. For Healey, the lesson from creator marketing is not that brands should surrender control completely. It is that they should brief creators with strategic clarity instead of script-level control. “Brief for strategic context, not execution,” he said. He said the best briefs do not simply tell creators what to say. They explain the strategic challenge, the campaign context, the desired audience, the tension to be solved and the resources the creator can use. “What is the strategic challenge that we are trying to work through with this piece of context? What is the context? So, not just what we want you to do, but what is your role within the context of the broader campaign? What is the desired audience? What is the tension that we want to solve?” he said, describing the kind of brief that works for him. Healey warned that many brands fall into two poor briefing habits. Some try to control the creator too tightly and turn the creator into a scripted brand asset. Others give vague briefs without strategic direction. Referring to overly controlling briefs, he said, “Effectively, they’re trying to make a piece of brand communications out of you as a sock puppet.” At the other extreme, he said brands approach creators with little more than “hey, we like your vibe” and leave the creator guessing what the brand actually wants. Healey said this does not work because creators have trained their audiences to expect a certain pattern. If branded content breaks that pattern, the audience can immediately detect it as advertising. “If they detect a disruption in the pattern, they will know it’s an ad and instinctively, people don’t like ads,” he said. That is why, he argued, creator content should look and feel as close to the creator’s non-paid content as possible. Healey also made a clear distinction between celebrity marketing and creator marketing. “With creator marketing, you are not just buying a distribution channel, you are buying a very distinct perspective,” he said. He added, “You are the brand being taken into the creator’s world, not the creator being sucked up into your world.” Healey described a brand as “the total of cognitive and emotional associations that people hold about an entity.” For him, creator effectiveness depends on whether those associations can be built repeatedly over time. He said creators have shown the power of repeated, recognisable formats in environments where audiences are distracted. “In a way, this very new lesson is actually a very old lesson, which is the power of compounding consistent creativity,” he said. Healey used his long-running partnership with brand tracking platform Tracksuit as a case study in long-term creator effectiveness. He said the partnership covered around eight videos over 14 months, along with PR hours, strategic consulting and event appearances. According to Healey, the content was not built around direct selling. Instead, he used Tracksuit’s brand data to validate the theories and cultural observations he was already exploring in his content. “What is really important, again, is that Tracksuit is sold in naturally, contextually as part of the story that I’m trying to tell in a way that is actually enhancing the audience outcome because it provides hard data to support the hypotheses,” he said. He said the partnership delivered millions of views, tens of thousands of page hits and strong pipeline value. “In our first year, we delivered 10 times retainer value in attributed pipeline,” Healey said. The relationship later deepened further, with Healey becoming an investor in Tracksuit. He said this reflected the belief that creators work best as long-term brand builders rather than short-term performance channels. “Creators actually function best as long-term brand building, not short-term demand capture,” he said. For brands, the message from the Cannes session was direct. Creator marketing cannot be treated as a quick engagement hack. It needs the same discipline as any other brand-building investment: clear strategy, brand fit, memory-building assets, consistency and long-term measurement. For marketers, the Cannes message was clear. Stop choosing creators only by follower count. Stop measuring only likes and engagement. Stop over-scripting creators. Start with brand fit. Brief the strategic problem. Enter the creator’s world. Build memory, not just reach.