Enterprise B2B brands know exactly which job titles and companies they want to reach. However, their influencer programs typically select creators based on follower counts and engagement rates designed for consumer audiences. Chris Peters and Will Beech founded Moon at Dawn to address that mismatch.

Founded in March 2026, the London agency applies the account-based logic that governs B2B programmatic and ABM to influencer selection, using a proprietary scoring platform called “Aurora” to match creators against a client’s buyer persona or, where available, a target account list. The firm targets marketing agencies with B2B practices and mid-to-enterprise brands scaling influencer programs. 

“We’re trying to give B2B marketers confidence in how they can work with external trusted voices,” says Chris, who most recently headed the global B2B team at WPP’s Wavemaker.

Both founders came to the business through experience with how B2B influencer programs were breaking down. Will spent the better part of a decade working in B2B Influencer Marketing, beginning at Onalytica, one of the first dedicated B2B influencer platforms, before a role at Ipsos Synthesio. The recurring issues, such as ROI measurement failures and budgets that evaporated when programs couldn’t show outcomes, eventually pushed him to step away from the sector. Chris, working at Wavemaker, found enterprise clients developing an appetite for Influencer Marketing while lacking the frameworks to justify or sustain it.

When Chris went looking for a co-founder with hands-on B2B influencer experience, he reached out to several practitioners. Will was the one who agreed to meet. “If I’m going to go back into this world, I want to fix the things that I kept on consistently seeing going wrong,” Will says. 

The pair launched with investor backing, initially targeting agency clients. Six months in, they are expanding into direct brand relationships and developing a new Aurora interface that will put the technology more directly into clients’ hands, with more expected in Q4.

B2B Influencer Programs Still Running on Consumer Metrics

The core argument both founders make about the B2B influencer market is how creator selection is done.

“There’s a general lack of rigor that goes into B2B influencer programs,” Will says. “A lot of the selection and collaboration process is built around engagement rates, follower counts.” In B2C, broad demographic targeting makes that workable. In B2B, the target is a specific job title at a specific kind of company, sometimes a named account list. “The key distinction in B2B compared to B2C is, we know who our buyer is,” Will says. “But for some reason, no one’s really doing that at influencer yet.”

Chris traces part of the problem to how enterprise brands perceive the discipline. Influencer Marketing triggers skepticism among B2B marketers who associate it with consumer campaigns. “The default for enterprise businesses, risk-averse, traditional brands, is that this is not for us,” he says. His argument is that most of those brands are already running some version of influencer engagement, through thought leadership programs, customer advocacy, or key opinion leader relationships, without framing or measuring it as such.

The market is moving despite that confusion. Will describes the current moment as “the train starting to leave the station,” particularly in the technology sector, where he argues that brands without an influencer program are already losing competitive ground.

A Scoring System Built Around the Buyer, Not the Creator

Aurora evaluates creators against four criteria. The first is ICP (ideal customer profile) analysis: does this creator reach the client’s ideal customer profile? For clients with a target account list, that match can extend to named accounts. The second and third are brand fit, covering reputational checks, tone of voice, and professional credentials, and campaign fit, assessing subject-matter authority and format track record.

The fourth, cost per engaged ICP, is the one Will argues most practitioners miss. “What a lot of platforms out there do mistakenly is rank the most influential people in the world,” he says. “When we’re thinking about measuring influence, it’s a commercial decision as much as it is an analytics one. Getting as much influence as we possibly can for the least amount of investment, that’s where ROI lives.”

The platform was also designed to address a specific operational failure Will observed frequently: creators receiving briefs for formats they don’t produce because they appeared in a search alongside suitable candidates. A podcaster sent a request to produce an Instagram Reel is a common example. Aurora’s format assessment catches those mismatches before outreach is sent.

Will points to one case study for the system. A major cybersecurity company asked Moon at Dawn to find four better-suited creators to replace those selected by its previous agency. Running candidates through Aurora produced, according to Will, a 180% increase in ICP reached from those influencer activations, alongside improved content quality feedback from within the client organization.

Not Every B2B Buyer Is on LinkedIn

The default assumption in B2B influencer spending is that LinkedIn is the primary channel. Moon at Dawn’s founders push back on that when the data supports it.

Will notes that technical audiences, IT managers, developers, and engineers, do not concentrate on LinkedIn to the degree many B2B marketers assume. For those profiles, he adds, YouTube, Reddit, and in some cases X are more relevant surfaces.

The pushback is built around analysis rather than instinct. When a client defaults to LinkedIn out of familiarity, Moon at Dawn builds a data-backed rationale for any alternative recommendation before presenting it. “If we felt really strongly about the notion that it should be off LinkedIn, there would be a compelling story we’d want to put forward,” Chris says. He also acknowledges that reading the client’s actual constraints matters. “There’s always a fine art to that,” he says. “Sometimes it’s pushing back. Sometimes it is just doing what they say.”

Outcome-Based Pricing as a Confidence Mechanism

Moon at Dawn offers three pricing structures: retainer, commission-based, and outcome-based. The outcome-based model allows specific deliverables to be put under contract. A client allocating $20,000, for example, might receive 200 leads as a contractual output, with creator selection, content, and distribution included.

“We went to market with the assumption that people would gravitate towards outcome-based pricing,” Chris says. “But it’s been wildly different for different brands and different shapes and sizes.” Some prefer a retainer for ongoing programs. Others default to commission splits because that is what their procurement process recognizes. The pricing decision, in Chris’s framing, is partly about minimizing the friction of getting programs approved internally.

He notes that Moon at Dawn has not yet missed a guarantee under the outcome-based model. “There’s quite a lot of rigor that goes behind the modeling,” he says. “That’s an area where we have a lot of confidence.” 

Moving B2B Influencer Programs Off Experiment Mode

One of Chris’s consistent arguments is that the B2B influencer market is still operating in campaign mode when the durable value lies in programs.

“How do you build a program that has more of an always-on, evergreen nuance to it?” Chris says. “How do you put in the governance guardrails that help protect your brand when you’re working with those external voices?”

Will adds a related argument about data. Most B2B brands treat influencer activation as separate from their broader go-to-market motion. Moon at Dawn routes signals from influencer programs, engagement patterns, ICP reach, and audience data back into the client’s ABM stack. “Influencer programs are often the bolt-on on the side of core brand activity, because it’s very hard to make them speak to the wider funnel,” Will says. For influencer teams, connecting those outputs to metrics the wider organization already tracks is also, in his argument, how they secure continued budget from stakeholders who don’t understand the channel.

Building a Position Before the Market Fills In

Moon at Dawn’s near-term plans center on Aurora as a client-facing product and a U.S. expansion. The B2B influencer market is attracting more entrants, and Chris is explicit that the goal is to define a distinct position before the space crowds. “It’s really important that Will and I start to build a hill that we die on,” he says. “This is our perspective.”

Six months later, the operational realities include creators rescheduling, last-minute changes to commercial terms, and the project management demands of running multiple programs simultaneously. Will describes maintaining a mental image of an upward-sloping performance line as a grounding mechanism through difficult periods. “As much as it’s really difficult, the nights are long,” he says. “Just having that chart in your mind makes it all worthwhile.”

Both founders describe the market they are entering as large and still largely underdeveloped. “Huge appetite,” Chris says, “but incredibly immature still.”

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