When brands say Influencer Marketing hasn’t delivered, Marie-Josée Cadorette has a ready diagnosis. 

“If it hasn’t been working for someone, there was probably something in their plan that wasn’t well thought out,” she says. “Because we’ve seen so many different brands across all verticals succeed with it.”

That directness reflects two decades in traditional advertising and four years running Clark Influence‘s Toronto office, watching the channel move from experimental budget line to core media strategy. Her argument is not that Influencer Marketing is easy. It is that failure is usually a planning problem, not a channel problem.

Clark Influence is a Montreal-founded influencer and social media marketing agency with offices in Toronto, France, and a new presence in Austin, Texas. The agency employs more than 60 people and runs campaigns across North America and Europe for clients in CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods), beauty, and telecommunications, among other verticals. In 2026, it won “Influencer Marketing of the Year” at Canada’s PR Net Awards.

Marie-Josée joined in June 2022 as one of three managing partners, brought in to build out the Toronto office and the North American client base. Her background spans Leo Burnett, BETC, Juniper Park/TBWA, and The&Partnership, where she managed global accounts for Kellogg’s, L’Oréal, Danone, Kraft, and TELUS. Before joining Clark, she was managing director at The&Partnership in Toronto, overseeing the TELUS account.

The move into Influencer Marketing, she says, was less a career pivot than a response to an obvious cultural signal. “I was turning 40 and realizing there weren’t that many people watching TV anymore,” she says. “I have kids. They don’t watch TV. I don’t watch TV. And I was like, ‘What’s going to happen when I’m 50 and 60?’”

The Channel That Stopped Being Optional

When Marie-Josée started at Clark, Influencer Marketing was still competing for line-item legitimacy on media plans. That era is over, she argues.

“Brands are now seeing creator partnerships as a core media channel,” she says. “It’s not an experimental tactic anymore. It’s really part of the strategy and part of the mix.”

She points to broader industry data: more than 200 million creators are now active across platforms, and Influencer Marketing remains the fastest-growing advertising channel. But the more telling signal, in her view, was cultural. She recalls the Met Gala year when roughly half of former Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour’s invitations went to creators rather than traditional Hollywood celebrities. “This is where culture is heading,” she recalls thinking at the time.

That shift is now visible in how brands structure their agency relationships. For about 20% of Clark’s clients, Marie-Josée says the agency now sits alongside above-the-line creative shops and media agencies in unified briefings. “The creative lead presents the campaign, we show how it works for Influencer Marketing, and then the full media plan follows,” she says. “It’s one integrated team.”

Strategy First, Creators Second

Clark’s operating model is built around a premise that distinguishes it from platforms and talent-management-adjacent agencies: strategy comes before creator selection.

“We’re not matchmakers between brands and creators,” Marie-Josée says. “We have creative strategists in-house, and we work on a full creative proposal with our clients first. We find the insights, we show what the campaign could look like, and only then do we find creators who can embody that strategy.”

Marie-Josée believes that distinction matters because many Influencer Marketing platforms invert the process, surfacing creators by category match and leaving brand positioning as an afterthought. Clark looks for creators whose content style and communication patterns already align with a strategic direction before any outreach occurs.

The agency also operates without a proprietary talent roster. “A lot of agencies have their own talents, so they push those talents for campaigns,” she says. “We’re completely independent. We work with everyone.”

The Attribution Problem

Performance-driven Influencer Marketing is a phrase appearing across the industry. The machinery behind it, however, remains incomplete, according to Marie-Josée. 

She is direct about where the gap sits. “The hardest thing right now is that it’s really hard for brands to isolate the results of Influencer Marketing,” she says. “It’s part of an ecosystem. You can track clicks and see whether someone visited the client’s website. But the sales data belongs to the client.”

Attribution breaks down at the boundary between Clark’s visibility and the client’s back-end. The agency can confirm that a consumer clicked a link embedded in creator content. What happens after the landing page is invisible.

“We don’t see the cart,” she says. “We don’t see the purchase. That data belongs to our clients, and they may or may not share it with us.”

Compounding this is the nature of consumer behavior. Research suggests a buyer typically needs seven to ten exposures to a brand before converting. A creator post might initiate consideration without triggering an immediate transaction. “If the content made you click and check the brand, consideration has started,” she says. “Maybe the conversion hasn’t happened, but you’ve started something.”

Marie-Josée draws a direct parallel to television’s historical measurement problem. “You did a big TV spot. You knew how many people saw it. But how could you tell it was because of that spot? Influencer Marketing is more trackable because it’s digital, but we’re still missing that last piece.”

Paid Media Is No Longer Optional

One of the clearest shifts Marie-Josée describes is the adoption of paid amplification behind creator content. Organic reach, she argues, is no longer a viable standalone strategy for brands operating in large geographies.

“Organic is very limited, especially in big countries like Canada and the United States,” she says. “When you add paid media behind creator content, you’re making the most of what you’ve created.”

Clark has built out paid media capabilities in two ways. For clients with existing media agency relationships, Clark integrates into the broader plan and delivers assets optimized for paid placement. For clients without a media agency in the mix, Clark handles paid setup in-house.

The downstream effect, Marie-Josée notes, is that influencer content is migrating well beyond social feeds. “We see influencer content being used on brand websites, in-store, in newsletters,” she says. “Brands are getting smarter about repurposing. They’re making the most of what they’ve created.”

The Consistency Problem Brands Keep Ignoring

Among the persistent mistakes Marie-Josée observes, one stands out: brands treating Influencer Marketing as a one-time tactic rather than an ongoing program.

“Consistency and repeated exposure are key to creator marketing,” she says. “A lot of clients will do a small campaign, not see immediate results, and decide it’s not working for them. But when you look at long-term partnerships, the results are night and day.”

This applies to content volume as well. The pressure to post constantly, she says, is producing diminishing returns. “A lot of brands think they need to post every single day and create content, content, content. But at some point that content isn’t meaningful anymore.”

The more durable approach, in her view, is to build genuine, ongoing creator relationships that enable authentic advocacy. “If people are just talking about your brand to talk about it, with no real connection or meaning, the audience feels it,” she says.

Expansion and What Comes Next

Clark’s 2026 roadmap centers on the U.S. market. The agency opened its Austin office as an entry point and hired a dedicated business development lead based there. Further expansion in both headcount and geography is possible, though Marie-Josée is deliberate about the pace. “We’re starting slow, but yes, both expanding the team and potentially new cities,” she says.

On AI, her position is calibrated. She acknowledges tools that accelerate workflow, but flags audience trust as the central pressure point. “The reason brands work with creators is authenticity. It’s word of mouth,” she says. “When AI joins in, you want it to help go faster, but you don’t want to take away that creativity or authenticity that makes Influencer Marketing unique.” 

The deeper concern is saturation: as synthetic content multiplies, audiences are losing the ability to distinguish between real and manufactured content.

What Marie-Josée hopes changes most over the next year is measurement. “Platforms will keep evolving so we have access to more and more data,” she says. “Hopefully that’s a big change coming our way.”

For Marie-Josée, the case for the channel remains straightforward, even as its mechanics grow more complex. “It’s one of the most powerful channels we have right now,” she says. “And we should never underestimate it.”