Brands that underperform in Influencer Marketing rarely have a creator problem. More often, the obstacle is structural, buried inside their own approval processes, brief requirements, and reluctance to surrender brand voice to the people audiences actually trust.

Bradley Hoos has been watching that dynamic play out for more than a decade. As CEO of The Outloud Group, the Detroit-based full-service influencer agency he joined in 2014 and has led as CEO since 2022, Bradley oversees an operation of 60-65 staff serving enterprise and high-growth brands across YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and podcasts. The firm has compiled what Bradley describes as one of the more extensive performance datasets in the industry, spanning more than 34,000 brand sponsorships and 31,000 creator relationships, with staff in the United States, Mexico, Canada, Ecuador, the Philippines, and Taiwan.

“Historical performance is the best indicator of future performance,” Bradley says. “We want to work with creators whose audience has shown that they really see the creator as the gold standard for the norms and the purchasing behaviors they want to follow.” 

That data informs creator selection and campaign structure. But the recurring finding, Bradley argues, is that no dataset compensates for a more fundamental variable: whether the brand itself is structurally set up to let Influencer Marketing work.

When a Brand’s Legal Team Becomes the Campaign Director

When Bradley begins working with a new brand, he pays close attention to early signals that a campaign will struggle. The most reliable indicator has nothing to do with the creator.

“Early signs are if a legal team is going to be heavily involved in approving content, particularly for a non-highly regulated company,” Bradley says. For pharmaceutical or gambling companies, where regulation genuinely applies, legal oversight makes sense. For a brand selling consumer goods, it is a warning.

The same pattern appears in other forms: scripts that creators must read verbatim, briefs requiring long-form content focused exclusively on the product in formats unusual for the creator’s audience, and approvals that expect creators to speak in the brand’s own voice.

“Brands have developed their brand voice over time and put a lot of time, energy, and effort into it,” Bradley says. “But when you have a brand partner, you kind of need to throw all that out the window. It’s going to sound very forced if you’re telling a creator to use the language that the brand uses.”

Clear Objectives Before the Brief, Not During It

What successful brand partners do differently, in Bradley’s view, has less to do with budget or creative sophistication than with clarity established before the campaign begins.

“Is your goal to maximize the number of views? Is your goal to maximize conversions? Do you want a really fantastic, creative story?” Bradley asks. Brands that define success upfront and attach specific metrics to their definitions consistently outperform those that don’t. That clarity is also what makes creative freedom operationally possible.

“We love to go as far as to have no talking points,” Bradley says. “In general, the more freedom that creators can have, the better they’re going to perform.”

He draws on research about consumer trust to explain the mechanism. Bradley cites studies on used car listings showing that including photos of dents and scratches produces higher sale prices than omitting them, because buyers trust they are seeing the complete picture. “To allow a creator to say things that may not be glowingly exclusively positive about a brand actually delivers more credibility,” Bradley says.

How Sponsorships Change Creator Selection

Outloud’s campaign data spans roughly 50 to 60 dimensions per sponsorship. That history, Bradley notes, allows the firm to enter new engagements with a meaningful baseline for predicting which creators are likely to generate commercial results, not just reach.

Photo: The Outloud Group team

“Being able to identify creators who’ve historically developed content that attracted their audience to check out a brand’s page and make purchases is a very strong indicator that the audience trusts the creator enough to take their recommendations,” he says.

Artificial Intelligence has become central to extracting value from that dataset. “AI is extremely helpful in taking our sources of data and being able to translate it into the ‘ahas’ very quickly and thoroughly,” Bradley says. The technology surfaces which variables across those dimensions most reliably predict brand success, a process impractical to run manually at the volume Outloud operates.

That development also changed Bradley’s view of agency structure. He came to Outloud initially believing technology and services were distinct strategic paths. “I think that approach was too simplistic and in hindsight I don’t think it was correct,” he says. Running a high-performing marketing operation today, in his view, requires both.

The One Thing AI Cannot Replicate Is Creator Trust

Bradley draws a firm line around where AI’s utility ends. “One thing I can’t really do is deliver the trust of someone that you know and like and choose to follow,” he says. “We’re wired as social creatures. We identify those in our herd who we want to mimic and mirror because that’s efficient in terms of how our bodies were wired in nature.”

That frame points to the structural durability of Influencer Marketing in an AI-saturated environment. Audiences install ad blockers, resist overt sales messaging, and actively choose to follow individuals whose recommendations carry genuine weight. “That’s where creators are so powerful,” Bradley says.

AI’s competitive pressure is landing elsewhere, Bradley argues. Holding companies historically derived a significant advantage from aggregating data across 15 to 20 marketing channels in a single system. AI has largely eroded that edge. “Even something like dealing with currency differences, AI can handle that very easily now,” he notes. “The democratization of those functions means it’s easier for smaller agencies, or for brands themselves, to run a lot of those different functions.”

Latin America Is Not a Time-Delayed Version of the U.S.

As Outloud expands in Latin America, with roughly 10 staff in Mexico and additional presence in Ecuador, Bradley has developed pointed views on the errors brands make when scaling U.S. influencer playbooks globally.

“A lot of brands default to thinking that Mexico is just three to five years behind the U.S. in terms of their adoption of different trends,” he says. “But that’s not the case. There’s a lot of choice that goes into preferences and behaviors in Latin America.”

The error, as Bradley frames it, is conflating what is culturally specific with what is psychologically universal. Financial behavior illustrates the distinction. In the U.S., insurance is an individual transaction. In Mexico, community-based mutual protection models operate on different underlying logic. A campaign built on American assumptions about financial decision-making will miss that difference entirely.

“It’s very easy for brands to transpose those two pieces,” Bradley says, distinguishing between universal human behaviors and culturally specific ones. “I don’t think most take the time to even distinguish between them.” Entering a new market, in his view, is not primarily a language or content challenge. It is a conceptual one.

Specialized, Global, and Multiplatform

Bradley’s outlook on where the Creator Economy is headed closely reflects the model Outloud has been building toward. “The Creator Economy is going to be specialized, global, and multiplatform,” he says. “We’re working with high-growth and enterprise partners who value that specialization, who value that global approach, and who value the ability to operate cross-platform with clear data and analytics.”

That maturation demands something more fundamental from brands than any platform shift or AI development. The core discipline, Bradley argues, is structural: clarity on objectives before the brief, willingness to cede creative control, and measurement frameworks that reflect what the channel actually produces.

For marketers frustrated with underperforming programs, his diagnosis is pointed. “Brands should be looking for agencies that are transparent, that are fun to work with, and that push them,” Bradley says. “You should want to be pushed, you should want to be led, and you should want to have the clarity on the data and the metrics associated with running any campaign.”

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