Consumer trust has shifted from brands to creators and communities. What do you think today’s consumer actually expects from a brand now, and how has that changed what Findise builds for clients?
I think the consumer today expects a brand to behave like a person they can check up on. Not perfect, just checkable. They will watch the reel, then go to the comments, then open the creator’s profile to see if she actually uses the product, then search the brand name and read the one angry review. All in ninety seconds. If any of those steps feel off, the sale is gone.
So, the expectation is proof, not polish. And the brand has to show up in the comments itself. A creator saying “this is good” is the invitation. The brand replying to “does it work for oily skin?” at 11 pm is what closes it.
That changed how we build things. Six years back a campaign was a big film plus media. Now we build a chain of small proofs: creator content where the product is being used, not held; briefs that allow the creator to say the one honest thing (“the fit is slightly slim, size up”); and a comment and DM plan for the client’s own team, because a campaign with no one answering is just noise with a budget.
ROI has always been the hardest number to pin down in influencer marketing. What’s Findise’s framework for proving a campaign’s return, and what do most brands get wrong when they try to measure it themselves?
The biggest mistake is measuring after the campaign instead of deciding before it. Most brands book creators first and ask, “so what did we get?” later. Then the answer becomes views and reach, because those are the only numbers left.
Our rule is simple: before the first creator is signed, the client and I agree on one job for the campaign. Reach, belief, or sales. One. Then we instrument that one thing. For sales, every creator gets a unique code or link, and we track it for 30 to 60 days, not three days. For belief, we watch brand-name searches and the quality of DMs. For a store launch, we compare weekend footfall against the previous four weekends.
Then we put it all against blended cost, creator fees plus product plus our time, and compare it with what the same money does in paid ads. Sometimes influencer loses that comparison, and I tell the client. That honesty is why the next campaign gets approved.
One thing brand miss completely: the content itself is an asset. Creator videos reused as paid ads regularly beat studio creative at a fraction of the cost. If you don’t count that, you’re undercounting the return.
Personalization at scale is the promise of AI-driven marketing. What does that actually look like inside an influencer campaign, and where’s the line before it starts feeling manufactured rather than authentic?
Inside a real campaign, AI does its best work before the creator and after the post, never in the creator’s mouth.
Before: it helps us find creators whose audience actually matches the buyer, not creators who just look at the part. It lets us write thirty briefs that each respect that creator’s own style, instead of one brief pasted thirty times. After: it reads thousands of comments and tells us what people are actually asking, which becomes the next week’s content and the sales team’s FAQ.
The line is very clear to me. The brand owns the message. The creator owns the words. The moment the brand writes the creator’s sentences, the audience knows. Twenty creators saying the same line on the same day is not a campaign, it’s a jingle, and people scroll past jingles. We’ve had clients ask for “consistency” and I’ve had to explain that consistency of message is good, consistency of language is death.
So: personalize the targeting, personalize the brief, personalize the follow-up. Leave the human part human.
Findise works across a huge range of industries. Is there a universal influencer marketing playbook that works everywhere, or does every sector need its own rulebook entirely?
The spine is universal. The rulebook is not.
The spine, in every sector we’ve touched, is four things: the right creator (audience match over follower count), an honest brief, measurement decided upfront, and one clear ask at the end of the video. Miss any of these and jewellery, food, fashion, or software all fail the same way.
But what earns trust is completely different from sector to sector. In jewellery, trust comes from the occasion and the family, the mother in the frame, and price transparency, because nobody buys gold from a stranger dancing. In food, it’s the first bite and the repeat order; one video does nothing, the third order does everything. In a B2B software company, the “influencer” is often the founder himself on LinkedIn, and the cycle is months, not a weekend.
The mistake I see most is copying formats across sectors. A trending audio that sells lipstick will make a financial product look unserious. We keep the spine and rebuild the rules every time.
How do you decide the right mix between macro-influencers, micro-influencers, and niche creators for a given brand, and has that formula changed in the last two years?
We pick by job, not by budget. Macro creators buy you a moment: a launch, a store opening, a reason for the trade and the press to take notice. Micro creators buy belief, because their audience actually replies to them. Niche creators buy the actual buyer, the person who was already searching for this category.
Two years ago, our default was one macro plus ten micro. Today it’s often zero macro, twenty-five to thirty micro and niche, with usage rights written into every contract. The reason is that reach no longer has to come from the creator’s followers. It comes from taking the two or three creator videos that clearly work and putting paid media behind them. That’s cheaper, more measurable, and the content is already proven.
Macro still has a place, and for some FMCG launches we’ve deliberately gone with recognisable TV faces because credibility had to arrive fast. But it’s now a decision we make, not a default we start from.
