The Influencer Marketing industry keeps having the same conversations. Creative freedom. Fair pay. Brand control. Brianna Doe thinks it’s time to move on.
Brianna, founder of Verbatim and host of the “Stop the Scroll with Brianna Doe” podcast, sat down with Net Influencer Senior Editor Ceci Carloni to talk through what’s actually happening inside brand-creator relationships right now. Brianna started her career in B2C marketing more than 14 years ago before moving into tech and eventually launching Verbatim in 2023. Today, the agency focuses exclusively on Influencer Marketing for B2B and B2C brands, while Brianna also creates content on LinkedIn and works with The Wishly Group, which represents more than 30 LinkedIn creators across marketing, sales, AI, HR, and GTM.
The conversation covered where the Creator Economy is headed, what keeps breaking inside influencer programs, and why alignment, not creativity, is usually the first thing to go.
1. The Creator Economy Is Approaching a Fork in the Road
The space is not slowing down. What’s changing is how difficult it will be to stand out inside it.
“It’s going to be harder and harder to stand out online,” Brianna said. “Brands will have to be challenged in a good way to be more creative with the way that they activate influencers and not just treat them as contractors.”
The forces converging are familiar: more AI-generated content, more creators entering the market, more brands beginning to see the value of influencer spend. That combination is producing volume at a scale that commoditizes mediocre activations. The programs that survive will be the ones built on genuine integration, not one-off posts.
Brianna frames the choice clearly. Brands can continue doing what their competitors do. Or they can take creative risks, give creators more latitude, and build campaigns people actually remember.
2. Influencer Marketing Still Lives in a Silo at Most Companies
One of the most consistent shifts Brianna has watched over the past two years is Influencer Marketing moving off its own island. Slowly.
“Influencer Marketing shouldn’t live in a silo,” she said. “It should inform. The Influencer Marketing team isn’t working just on their own. They get to work alongside social or paid and actually build a more holistic program.”
Brands that do this well are also starting to bring creators inside the organization. Head-of-storytelling roles. Consultants embedded in campaign development. Creators brought along for brand milestones. Brianna calls this genuine investment and sees it as a signal that the industry’s perception of Influencer Marketing as a standalone tactic is starting to shift.
Not every brand needs in-house creators. The question that should drive the decision: what does your audience care about, where do they live online, and how do they consume content? Those answers determine whether you need an embedded creator or a long-term external partner.
3. Brands Want Authentic Content and Still Try to Control Everything
The tension has not resolved. Brianna hears it constantly.
“I think a lot of it stems from fear,” she said. “As the marketer, you have to own the results of this program. You want to take as few risks as possible.”
The instinct makes sense. Budget justification requires predictability. Traditional paid channels let you plug in variables and estimate outcomes. Influencer Marketing does not work that way. The messier reality is that the content performing best is the content the brand did not write.
Brianna’s framework: build a clear creative brief, align internally on parameters, let the creator work within those guidelines, and reserve one or two rounds of feedback for genuine brand safety concerns. “You want the creator’s voice to shine through,” she said. “You don’t want to own the content.”
Brand safety is a real constraint. Legal compliance is a real constraint. The brief is where those constraints live. Everything outside the brief should belong to the creator.
4. Misaligned KPIs Kill Programs Before They Start
The most common reason influencer programs fail is not the influencers. It’s what happens inside the brand before a single post goes live.
“The marketing manager has certain KPIs they’re tracking against. The CMO has other ones,” Brianna said. “You haven’t really defined which ones are the primary metrics and which ones are secondary.”
When the 90-day pilot ends, half the team calls it a success, and the other half calls it a failure. Both sides are measuring against different things. Defining success at the start, not the end, is the fix. That means agreeing on primary metrics before content goes live and framing creator impact against the actual campaign objective, whether that’s brand awareness, conversions, or lead generation.
The second logistical bottleneck is contracting and invoicing. Unclear ownership over who sends contracts, who reviews them, and how quickly invoices get processed can stall momentum in the early weeks of a program. It is an operational problem, not a creative one, and it is consistently underestimated.
5. Creators Don’t Know How to Market Themselves to Brands
The creator side of the disconnect is not just about brands paying poorly. It’s about creators not framing their value in terms brands understand.
“You can’t command certain rates or complain about certain things if you aren’t marketing your work more effectively,” Brianna said.
A creator pitching brand awareness campaigns should lead with impressions and average engagement rate. A creator pitching conversion-focused campaigns should talk about audience demographics and how closely they map to the brand’s ICP. The mistake is using the same pitch for both. The brief tells you which metrics matter. The pitch should respond to that.
Brianna sees this as a translation problem, and one that cuts both ways. Brands don’t know how to talk to creators. Creators don’t know how to talk to brands. Her agency exists in the space between them.
6. B2B Influencer Marketing Is Growing, Just Not the Way Anyone Expected
LinkedIn, as an influencer channel, is still being figured out. The spend is real. The measurement logic is not.
“B2B Influencer Marketing is a space that’s going to be really fun to watch,” Brianna said, “but brands are still taking some time to figure out what that will look like and if it’s actually worthwhile for them on LinkedIn.”
Brianna’s read: the channel works, but brands need to stop expecting it to behave like Facebook ads. The measurement refinement is coming. The brands that build programs now will have a head start when it does.
7. The Best Programs Mix Creator Tiers and Track Message Resonance
If Brianna were sitting in a CMO seat today, the first thing she would change is the influencer mix.
“The best programs have a combination of both,” she said, referring to the macro versus micro debate. “A lot of programs don’t include both, sometimes just because of budget.”
Her approach: build a roster that includes nano, micro, macro, and, where appropriate, mega creators. Run messaging across all tiers. Track how it’s consumed, engaged with, and how it resonates differently at each level. Let the data tell you which creators fit which role, whether that’s sponsored content, event attendance, or brand ambassadorship.
The strategic reason is straightforward. You cannot build a complete picture of how your message travels without distributing it across audiences of different sizes. Running everything through macro influencers optimizes for reach and loses signal on conversion intent. Running everything through micro influencers improves engagement data but limits distribution. The combined approach produces better intelligence.
Brianna’s closing note for brands just starting out: “You don’t have to have your entire program figured out before you start.” The pilot is where you learn what works. Start structured, stay open to refining.
Brianna’s core argument is not complicated. Influencer Marketing works when brands treat it like a partnership and fails when they treat it like a media buy. The infrastructure problems, unclear KPIs, slow contracts, and mismatched expectations are all symptoms of the same underlying issue: brands entering the channel without building the internal alignment that makes external creativity possible.
The programs Brianna describes as working share a common element. Someone inside the brand made a decision to trust the creator and build the internal systems to support that trust. The question for brands still debating the channel is how long they are willing to wait before making that decision.
Listen to the full conversation on “The Big Three” podcast.
Dragomir is a Serbian freelance blog writer and translator. He is passionate about covering insightful stories and exploring topics such as influencer marketing, the creator economy, technology, business, and cyber fraud.
The Influencer Marketing industry keeps having the same conversations. Creative freedom. Fair pay. Brand control. Brianna Doe thinks it’s time to move on.
Brianna, founder of Verbatim and host of the “Stop the Scroll with Brianna Doe” podcast, sat down with Net Influencer Senior Editor Ceci Carloni to talk through what’s actually happening inside brand-creator relationships right now. Brianna started her career in B2C marketing more than 14 years ago before moving into tech and eventually launching Verbatim in 2023. Today, the agency focuses exclusively on Influencer Marketing for B2B and B2C brands, while Brianna also creates content on LinkedIn and works with The Wishly Group, which represents more than 30 LinkedIn creators across marketing, sales, AI, HR, and GTM.
The conversation covered where the Creator Economy is headed, what keeps breaking inside influencer programs, and why alignment, not creativity, is usually the first thing to go.
1. The Creator Economy Is Approaching a Fork in the Road
The space is not slowing down. What’s changing is how difficult it will be to stand out inside it.
“It’s going to be harder and harder to stand out online,” Brianna said. “Brands will have to be challenged in a good way to be more creative with the way that they activate influencers and not just treat them as contractors.”
The forces converging are familiar: more AI-generated content, more creators entering the market, more brands beginning to see the value of influencer spend. That combination is producing volume at a scale that commoditizes mediocre activations. The programs that survive will be the ones built on genuine integration, not one-off posts.
Brianna frames the choice clearly. Brands can continue doing what their competitors do. Or they can take creative risks, give creators more latitude, and build campaigns people actually remember.
2. Influencer Marketing Still Lives in a Silo at Most Companies
One of the most consistent shifts Brianna has watched over the past two years is Influencer Marketing moving off its own island. Slowly.
“Influencer Marketing shouldn’t live in a silo,” she said. “It should inform. The Influencer Marketing team isn’t working just on their own. They get to work alongside social or paid and actually build a more holistic program.”
Brands that do this well are also starting to bring creators inside the organization. Head-of-storytelling roles. Consultants embedded in campaign development. Creators brought along for brand milestones. Brianna calls this genuine investment and sees it as a signal that the industry’s perception of Influencer Marketing as a standalone tactic is starting to shift.
Not every brand needs in-house creators. The question that should drive the decision: what does your audience care about, where do they live online, and how do they consume content? Those answers determine whether you need an embedded creator or a long-term external partner.
3. Brands Want Authentic Content and Still Try to Control Everything
The tension has not resolved. Brianna hears it constantly.
“I think a lot of it stems from fear,” she said. “As the marketer, you have to own the results of this program. You want to take as few risks as possible.”
The instinct makes sense. Budget justification requires predictability. Traditional paid channels let you plug in variables and estimate outcomes. Influencer Marketing does not work that way. The messier reality is that the content performing best is the content the brand did not write.
Brianna’s framework: build a clear creative brief, align internally on parameters, let the creator work within those guidelines, and reserve one or two rounds of feedback for genuine brand safety concerns. “You want the creator’s voice to shine through,” she said. “You don’t want to own the content.”
Brand safety is a real constraint. Legal compliance is a real constraint. The brief is where those constraints live. Everything outside the brief should belong to the creator.
4. Misaligned KPIs Kill Programs Before They Start
The most common reason influencer programs fail is not the influencers. It’s what happens inside the brand before a single post goes live.
“The marketing manager has certain KPIs they’re tracking against. The CMO has other ones,” Brianna said. “You haven’t really defined which ones are the primary metrics and which ones are secondary.”
When the 90-day pilot ends, half the team calls it a success, and the other half calls it a failure. Both sides are measuring against different things. Defining success at the start, not the end, is the fix. That means agreeing on primary metrics before content goes live and framing creator impact against the actual campaign objective, whether that’s brand awareness, conversions, or lead generation.
The second logistical bottleneck is contracting and invoicing. Unclear ownership over who sends contracts, who reviews them, and how quickly invoices get processed can stall momentum in the early weeks of a program. It is an operational problem, not a creative one, and it is consistently underestimated.
5. Creators Don’t Know How to Market Themselves to Brands
The creator side of the disconnect is not just about brands paying poorly. It’s about creators not framing their value in terms brands understand.
“You can’t command certain rates or complain about certain things if you aren’t marketing your work more effectively,” Brianna said.
A creator pitching brand awareness campaigns should lead with impressions and average engagement rate. A creator pitching conversion-focused campaigns should talk about audience demographics and how closely they map to the brand’s ICP. The mistake is using the same pitch for both. The brief tells you which metrics matter. The pitch should respond to that.
Brianna sees this as a translation problem, and one that cuts both ways. Brands don’t know how to talk to creators. Creators don’t know how to talk to brands. Her agency exists in the space between them.
6. B2B Influencer Marketing Is Growing, Just Not the Way Anyone Expected
LinkedIn, as an influencer channel, is still being figured out. The spend is real. The measurement logic is not.
“B2B Influencer Marketing is a space that’s going to be really fun to watch,” Brianna said, “but brands are still taking some time to figure out what that will look like and if it’s actually worthwhile for them on LinkedIn.”
The pressure on attribution is tightening. Brands entering B2B Influencer Marketing are applying direct-response ROI logic to a channel that behaves more like brand-building. That mismatch is creating friction between marketers who see the long-term value and leadership teams that want clear conversion data.
Brianna’s read: the channel works, but brands need to stop expecting it to behave like Facebook ads. The measurement refinement is coming. The brands that build programs now will have a head start when it does.
7. The Best Programs Mix Creator Tiers and Track Message Resonance
If Brianna were sitting in a CMO seat today, the first thing she would change is the influencer mix.
“The best programs have a combination of both,” she said, referring to the macro versus micro debate. “A lot of programs don’t include both, sometimes just because of budget.”
Her approach: build a roster that includes nano, micro, macro, and, where appropriate, mega creators. Run messaging across all tiers. Track how it’s consumed, engaged with, and how it resonates differently at each level. Let the data tell you which creators fit which role, whether that’s sponsored content, event attendance, or brand ambassadorship.
The strategic reason is straightforward. You cannot build a complete picture of how your message travels without distributing it across audiences of different sizes. Running everything through macro influencers optimizes for reach and loses signal on conversion intent. Running everything through micro influencers improves engagement data but limits distribution. The combined approach produces better intelligence.
Brianna’s closing note for brands just starting out: “You don’t have to have your entire program figured out before you start.” The pilot is where you learn what works. Start structured, stay open to refining.
Brianna’s core argument is not complicated. Influencer Marketing works when brands treat it like a partnership and fails when they treat it like a media buy. The infrastructure problems, unclear KPIs, slow contracts, and mismatched expectations are all symptoms of the same underlying issue: brands entering the channel without building the internal alignment that makes external creativity possible.
The programs Brianna describes as working share a common element. Someone inside the brand made a decision to trust the creator and build the internal systems to support that trust. The question for brands still debating the channel is how long they are willing to wait before making that decision.
Listen to the full conversation on “The Big Three” podcast.
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