Brand

Ulta Beauty Works to Convince Its CFO That Creator Content Counts as Advertising

Published on October 16, 2026

Ulta Beauty Chief Marketing Officer Kelly Mahoney said the retailer is working to prove to its Chief Financial Officer that content generated through creator programs qualifies as “working media,” the same budget category as traditional advertising, per Marketers and Money.

Mahoney made the comments during a panel session at Advertising Week New York alongside Glamnetic co-founder Kevin Gould, who said his $130 million press-on nails and lashes brand loses more than $1 million a year on TikTok Shop and considers it worth the cost.

“For our CFO, we’re finding that we have to convince them that all of this content that we’re generating through creators is actually working media,” Mahoney said. “It’s just a totally different form of working media, and we have to start figuring out how do we measure this so that we can prove to our CFOs that this is a form of media just like [any] other form of media.”

Ulta spent $491 million on advertising in its fiscal year ended January 31, 2026, and lifted ad spend 21% in Q2 2026 while net income grew 8% to $282 million. Its 10-K filing states that a growing share of its marketing budget is shifting toward digital, social media and streaming. The retailer runs three creator programs: “UB Collective” for influencers, “Ulta Beauties” for store-associate ambassadors, and “UB Creates” for affiliates.

Mahoney said sales remain the ultimate measure of success but that isolating marketing’s contribution from other factors, such as new product launches, remains difficult. “Measurement is never going to be a perfect science,” she said, adding that triangulation methods have improved enough to attribute results “with a degree of confidence.” She also pointed to Ulta’s loyalty program as a backstop: the company’s 47 million rewards members generate 95% of its sales, and she said a customer who redeems more than $3 in points becomes “ours for life.”

Mahoney said the retailer initially resisted launching a TikTok Shop over profitability concerns before reclassifying it internally. “This isn’t just a point of distribution for us,” she said. “We’ve got to stop thinking like a retailer. This is a marketing channel that’s bringing a new customer into the door.”

Gould said Glamnetic, which he co-founded in 2019 with no outside investors, will generate “$130-something million” in revenue this year and treats its TikTok losses as acceptable against that scale. He said the brand’s creator spending has shifted away from paid partnerships with macro and mid-tier creators toward an affiliate model involving thousands of micro-creators, a shift he said mirrors a broader move across media toward “pay-to-play” affiliate arrangements. Gould said affiliate content also plays a role in how large language models surface brand recommendations, prompting Glamnetic to optimize both affiliate and on-site content for AI-driven search.

Both executives said a physical retail footprint remains necessary even as agentic commerce grows. Glamnetic is stocked in roughly 3,000 stores across Ulta, Sephora, Target and Kohl’s. “I think for a brand today, you really have to be omni-channel to eventually hit real scale,” Gould said. Mahoney said Ulta views AI-driven shopping as it would any new channel: “You need to meet the customer wherever the customer’s at, and I think the way through that for us is content.”