The influencer marketing industry has been measuring the wrong things for years, according to Stevie Johnson, a former “Made in Chelsea” reality TV star turned Managing Director of London-based influencer marketing agency Disrupt Marketing. 

“For too long, we’ve been bound by measuring success based on what the social media platforms want and what they tell us,” Stevie explains. “Ultimately, what matters for you as a business, you as a brand, is the real business impact we need to achieve through our activities that will drive genuine results.”

After spending three years on “Made in Chelsea,” Stevie leveraged his social media platform to become an influencer “in the very early days, when no one cared about what audience you had.” This firsthand experience helped him understand the creator-brand relationship before joining Disrupt in October 2020.

Founded as a youth marketing agency in 2010 and later acquired by digital growth agency Found, Disrupt emerged at a time when influencer marketing was still fighting for legitimacy in marketing budgets. “When we were pitching, we weren’t just pitching to win that business; we were pitching for that budget to be applied to Influencer instead of things like PPC or SEO,” Stevie notes.

Today, while influencer marketing budgets are established at many brands, a new challenge has emerged: measuring true impact beyond surface-level engagement. This gap between platform-provided metrics and actual business results creates confusion for CMOs and procurement managers who need to justify their spending. 

In response, Stevie has elevated Disrupt from a two-person operation into a full-service agency serving brands like Huel and Vinted through what they call “genuine influence” — a framework that prioritizes measurable business impact over vanity metrics.

The Genuine Influence Framework

Stevie’s critique of traditional metrics is pointed: “If you’re focusing on vanity metrics like likes, views, engagement rates, etc., you have been left behind as a brand. If you’re working with agencies that are sending you reports that mainly focus on that, you should consider leaving them.”

Instead, Disrupt emphasizes what Stevie calls “genuine metrics,” tangible indicators of business performance that connect creator activity to commercial outcomes. “The golden thread of genuine influence for me isn’t just that creators are credible; that’s nothing new,” Stevie explains. “It’s that their influence should be trackable in meaningful ways. That for me is the leap from vanity to value.”

Disrupt’s approach focuses on metrics such as brand sentiment uplift, increases in search volume, website traffic attribution, and sales correlation. As Stevie notes, this gives brands a complete view of how creator partnerships affect their business beyond immediate post-engagement.

Stevie makes a key distinction between being genuine and being real in creator partnerships: “Authenticity is all about self-expression. It’s how a creator shows up, it’s about them, it’s more internal. On the other hand, genuineness is all about connection and impact. It’s how their message and that influence land. It’s about the effect they have on their audience.”

This perspective shift helps brands evaluate creators not just on their personal brand alignment but on their demonstrated ability to drive meaningful audience action. As Stevie puts it, “Authenticity is very much expected, but genuineness is earned. And the beauty of genuine influence is that it doesn’t stop at what an influencer looks like and whether a collaboration is a good fit. Genuine influence is brand impact backed by data, not just reach.”

Disrupt’s Integrated Approach to Creator Marketing

To deliver on their promise of genuine influence, Disrupt has developed a practical service model that integrates four key components. 

At its core remains influencer marketing, where the agency manages everything from talent search and vetting through to contracting, briefing, content creation, scheduling, and performance measurement. Disrupt works directly with creators and talent agencies across Europe to identify the right partnerships.

The second important component is paid social media amplification. “For the last couple of years, paid social and influencer marketing have really gone hand in hand,” Stevie notes. “It not only expands the lifetime value of content and that reach, but when brands are focusing more on bottom-funnel performance-based metrics, it can act as a catalyst for that.” He estimates 80-90% of briefs now include a paid social element.

Disrupt also provides content production services, creating hero videos and other assets for brands’ websites and social channels to ensure consistency across all branded content while maximizing the value of creator partnerships.

Perhaps most distinctively, Disrupt offers detailed measurement through bespoke audience sentiment dashboards that track how perceptions change over time. “We can talk about a genuine influence score that we’re giving our clients based on the activity that we’re running for them in terms of what that brand impact can be,” Stevie explains.

When it comes to influencer selection, Disrupt employs a “reverse approach” to ensure creator partnerships align with audience behavior.

Stevie explains, “We look at what that target audience is for a brand, and off the back of that, we build out a strategy based on that specific audience and the right platforms that are required, the type of content. From there, and understanding what the creative might be, we start looking at who the influencers should be.” 

The Vinted Case Study

After several years of managing influencer activities for Vinted, a secondhand marketplace app in the UK, Disrupt was tasked with launching the brand in Ireland.

The challenge required careful preparation and planning for a market where they hadn’t previously operated. Stevie explains, “Challenges that come with launching a new market that we haven’t worked in before just meant that there was a lot of prep and strategy to be built for looking at that new location and how we would go about approaching that and ultimately trying to replicate the fantastic results that we’ve seen in the UK as well in a new market.”

Rather than focusing solely on content views or engagement, Disrupt measured success through the “download-to-lister ratio” — tracking not just app downloads but how many users actually listed items for sale. “In the first six months, we’ve been able to generate a really strong download-to-lister ratio, which is a key thing for Vinted,” Stevie reports.

For a marketplace business like Vinted, the health of the platform depends on having both buyers and sellers, making this metric far more valuable than simple follower counts or likes.

Image: Stevie Johnson at SXSW, London

Measurement in an AI-Driven World

As AI reshapes the creator economy, Stevie sees creator content becoming even more valuable, arguing that it will be crucial in breaking through algorithmic “filter bubbles” that limit discovery and reinforce existing preferences.

“Creator content now is going to become way more important than ever because they’re the ones that can disrupt that algorithmic loop,” Stevie predicts. “These AI systems are optimized for efficiency — lowest friction, most clicks, most familiar. But creators will bring those fresh formats, new voices, emerging trends, and content that doesn’t always look like what the algorithm expects.”

Stevie anticipates the next phase of measurement will incorporate AI analysis alongside traditional metrics. “The next wave of it over the next kind of six months is then how we’re looking at incorporating AI and AI-generated content within our approach,” he explains. For Disrupt, this represents an opportunity to refine their measurement capabilities further.

“In a world of AI, content overload, and so on, creators are going to be important in signaling what’s real,” Stevie observes. “Audiences more and more now are going to be turning to people with real opinions to help make sense of the noise that’s out there.”

As Disrupt looks toward 2026 and beyond, Stevie plans to further refine the agency’s positioning around genuine influence. “It’s about refining our positioning as an agency, talking about genuine influence, what that means to us, what it means to clients, how we can start scoring things a little bit better,” he explains.

For brands and agencies still relying on follower counts and engagement rates, Stevie’s message remains clear: update your approach or risk falling behind.

“What we champion at Disrupt is that a creator-first strategy will elevate all those other digital channels, and it shouldn’t live in a silo,” Stevie says. “It needs to be integrated across all your other digital activities.”

This integration, backed by careful measurement, represents the future Stevie sees for the industry — one where genuine influence is valued not for the numbers it generates on social platforms, but for the business results it delivers. As he puts it simply, “Trust, transparency, and tangible outcomes” are what define genuine influence in the creator economy.

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