Brands invest heavily in selecting the right creator and shaping the collaboration. What happens after, and who actually sees the content, have largely been left to the platform’s algorithm. Precisify, a London-based media intelligence company, is arguing that this is where the return disappears, and it has secured a data partnership to press the case.

The company announced it has joined the YouTube Creator Partnerships API, a Google program that gives a small, invite-only group of companies access to verified first-party audience data on opted-in creators. 

Christian Dankl, who co-founded Precisify in 2015 and serves as co-CEO, frames the integration as the most notable expansion of the company’s work in a decade. “We make Influencer Marketing planable, scalable, repeatable,” he says. “That was what was missing because it was a creative process.”

Precisify, which operated as Precise TV for most of its first decade before rebranding, built its business applying contextual intelligence and paid-media optimization to YouTube advertising for clients including ASICS, Breville, and Warner Bros. Discovery. The company operates offices in London, New York, Los Angeles, Sydney, and Salzburg, and secured a $26 million investment from LDC, the private equity arm of Lloyds Banking Group.

The broader argument Christian makes for the approach is rooted in market scale. U.S. creator marketing and influencer sponsorship represented $10B in annual ad spend in 2025, according to eMarketer, against a total U.S. advertising market of nearly $300B, per IAB. Creator marketing is growing roughly five times faster than the broader media industry in the United States, he says. Closing the distance between the channel’s current share and its potential, in his view, depends on whether it can be planned, measured, and repeated the way a standard media buy can.

The Algorithm Controls the Audience

Platform algorithm changes have reshaped audience delivery in ways most influencer campaign structures have not absorbed. Non-follower reach accounts for roughly 90% of total reach on TikTok and approximately 80% on YouTube, according to Christian. He says that a brand running an organic creator campaign has effectively ceded control of who sees the content to the platform’s ranking system.

“You spend a lot of time and money to select the right creator, then you spend a lot of time refining the content and your collaborations, and then you activate it, and you just don’t care who sees it,” Christian says. “That’s the reality.”

The implication is that Influencer Marketing, as it is typically practiced, lacks the planability of a standard media buy. A YouTube or CTV plan produces a projected reach curve against a defined audience. An organically distributed creator campaign produces reach determined by algorithmic factors outside the brand’s control. Christian’s argument is that paid amplification, applied to creator content the way it would be applied to any other video asset, is how brands reclaim that control.

Three Capabilities the Partnership Unlocks

Joining the YouTube Creator Partnerships API gives Precisify three capabilities unavailable under the standard public API.

The first is verified, deterministic audience data. Where creator self-reported demographics or standard API metadata approximate a channel’s audience, the Partnerships API surfaces first-party signals drawn from actual user behavior, including affinity and interest data held by Google. “As opposed to getting the data, which is private from Google, that is the actual deterministic reality,” Christian says.

The second is brand mentions. The integration includes access to audio transcripts across opted-in creators’ video libraries, covering what Christian describes as billions of videos. A brand can search that corpus for its own name, competitor names, or relevant product categories, identifying creators who have already addressed related territory organically.

The third is clickable YouTube Shorts. Christian says the integration allows Precisify to make Shorts from brand collaborations clickable, with links in both the video and the description below, a capability he describes as previously unavailable for organic creator content.

Christian characterizes Precisify as the only company in the program that comes from a paid-media and contextual intelligence background rather than from influencer agency or platform origins.

The Argument Against Organic-Only Distribution

Christian argues that the influencer industry has concentrated its expertise on the front end, creator selection, content approval, and creative alignment, while treating paid amplification as a secondary concern. He says traditional agencies are leaving return on the table for brands by not bringing the same rigor to distribution that they apply to the brief.

“The only way you can change that as a brand or an agency is to step in with a very targeted, precise, planable, repeatable, scalable media amplification,” Christian says, “to make sure that piece of collaboration is reaching the people that actually follow the call to action and go down the path of conversion.”

His recommendation for brand teams is working with a partner that handles creator selection, content, and amplification in a unified platform rather than routing each function separately. “It should be full-funnel creator marketing,” he says. “We see the awareness, the consideration, the conversions and the sales, and we want to make sure that all of that is being considered.”

From Vanity Metrics to Walmart Checkout

One of Precisify’s central measurement claims is that it can connect creator campaign activity to offline retail purchases, which, Christian notes, standard UTM codes and vanity URLs cannot.

The company’s retail sales lift methodology uses synthetic A/B testing across geographies. Precisify typically receives historical sales data at the SKU and zip-code level, models an expected sales trajectory, runs the campaign in target markets, and measures against a comparable market where no campaign runs. The difference, adjusted for baseline trends, becomes the estimated lift attributable to the campaign.

Earlier campaigns run on Precisify’s existing AI platform, before its integration with the YouTube Creator Partnerships API, show what the measurement approach can capture. A campaign for products tied to All Star Innovations and the Dude Perfect creator group, using $125,000 in spend, delivered an 11.4x return on ad spend and a 24.2% retail sales lift across Walmart, Target, and Amazon, according to Precisify’s figures. A campaign for ASICS using Precisify’s contextual targeting produced a 52.28% video view rate and 78,202 hours of total watch time, with a 17.66% relative brand lift for awareness, per the company’s data. Christian describes offline attribution as “the Holy Grail” of creator measurement, framing it as a reflection of how long the industry has worked around the problem.

The data infrastructure supporting both the measurement and the targeting includes two proprietary consumer panels. The first is a 30,000-participant first-party survey panel spanning Gen Alpha through Gen X. The second is an opt-in panel of more than two million consumers whose anonymized browsing, shopping, and search behavior informs audience planning and targeting models.

Accountable Influencer Marketing Moves to Center Stage

Precisify is scheduled to present at the IAB Creator Fronts in New York on September 15, where Christian says the company will address “the new era of accountable Influencer Marketing” and what the industry needs to move beyond vanity metrics. A launch event tied to the API announcement is also planned at a Google office later in September.

The case Christian makes for where creator marketing is heading is essentially an extension of the argument he has been making for paid-media optimization on YouTube for the past decade, now applied to creator content specifically. The maturation of the channel, from experimental budget line to something planable, measurable, and auditable, is what the YouTube partnership is designed to accelerate.

“We are in a fast-growing industry,” Christian says, “but we make it even faster.”

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