For most of its history, Influencer Marketing lived in the PR department, not the revenue team. Vivien Garnès built Upfluence on a different assumption: creators would eventually be judged by revenue, not just reach. Nearly 14 years later, that thesis has become harder for brands to ignore. 

Vivien is the co-founder and co-CEO of Upfluence, an Influencer Marketing software platform built exclusively for e-commerce brands. Founded in 2012 and operating across New York, Lyon, Mexico, and Madrid, the company serves more than 1600 clients and has sustained profitability without having to raise what Vivien calls “a whole lot” of external capital. 

Vivien’s academic background adds an unusual credential: a doctoral thesis on Influencer Marketing ROI, completed at SKEMA Business School and iaelyon School of Management, making him, by his own account, the field’s first doctoral researcher on the topic.

The company’s thesis has not changed since the beginning. Influencer Marketing should function like any other performance channel: measurable, attributable, and directly tied to revenue. 

“We turn creator marketing into a revenue channel,” Vivien says. “That’s our angle.”

Getting there required patience. The market Upfluence targeted in 2012 did not yet exist in the form Vivien imagined. What followed was a 14-year exercise in building for a destination the industry had not yet reached.

From Bloggers to a Business Case

Upfluence’s founding story begins not with a product vision but with a problem. In 2011 and 2012, Vivien and co-founder Kevin Creusy were running a side e-commerce business while holding day jobs. Paid channels had failed to move the needle. What worked, unexpectedly, was reaching out to bloggers and sending them products for reviews.

“The entire mechanics that later became Influencer Marketing,” Vivien recalls. “And that’s when we had a little bit of a eureka moment.” The channel was effective. But it was slow, opaque, and impossible to scale without resources a bootstrapped operation could not afford.

The gap became Upfluence. The two co-founders built infrastructure for what would eventually be called Influencer Marketing before the term had entered mainstream vocabulary. The early market was defined by confused motivations: “It was a Frankenstein between PR and word of mouth marketing and even a little bit of SEO,” Vivien says. “A lot of our early clients were coming to us looking for an article placement on a blog as an SEO backlink.”

The education process was extensive. Brands had to be convinced that surrendering messaging control to a creator was not reckless but necessary. “You need to accept giving control, giving your brand messaging to that person,” Vivien explains. “He or she is going to appropriate it and turn it into something that’s going to work.”

Two Pivots That Defined the Company

The path from concept to platform was not direct. Vivien describes two turning points that shaped Upfluence’s current form.

The first came early. The team built a software product, brought it to market, and found no buyers. The company pivoted to running influencer campaigns as an agency, a move Vivien describes as initially painful but ultimately clarifying. 

“In hindsight, it was a fantastic pivot because we were executing campaigns for clients. We were understanding the world of Influencer Marketing probably much better through that lens.” By 2016, the technical and data foundation was mature enough to relaunch as software.

The second came in late 2019, when Upfluence began building the affiliate and e-commerce integrations that would define its positioning, connecting with Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and eventually Amazon to tie creator content directly to sales. 

Then COVID arrived, contracting revenue as SMB clients closed. The subsequent e-commerce acceleration turned a risky bet into a structural advantage. “Is it luck, is it hindsight?” Vivien says. “I don’t know. But it ended up being a good bounce back.”

Photo: The Upfluence team

The Customer-Creator Overlap

One of Upfluence’s most distinctive features addresses a persistent critique of the industry: the authenticity problem.

The platform’s Shopify integration allows brands to cross-reference their customer database against Upfluence’s creator database. On average, 1% to 3% of a brand’s existing customers are themselves creators with an audience. “Instead of starting from zero and having to create your creator program from the ground up,” Vivien explains, “you start with 1,000 to 3,000 creators who have already purchased your product, who already love your brand.”

According to Vivien, the practical result is a creator pool that requires less convincing and produces more credible content. He frames it directly: “These creators are not sellouts. They actually bought your product with their own money prior.”

What Separates High-ROI Brands From the Rest

From working with more than 1,300 clients, Vivien has developed a clear view of what separates brands that extract value from Influencer Marketing and those that don’t.

The first variable is risk allocation. The strongest-performing brands find a middle ground between fixed fees and pure commission arrangements. “You need to have a value proposition that is sufficiently attractive for creators, but that mitigates the risk,” he says. “The influencers support a little bit of risk, and they can have a huge payout if they perform.”

The second is creative control. Brands that insist on scripting messaging word-for-word consistently underperform. “A lot of luxury brands want to control everything to the T,” Vivien notes. “They want their words to be basically repeated by a creator. And I think this is no longer how this works.” Audiences identify inauthenticity quickly, and the value of the creator’s community relationship disappears the moment content feels manufactured.

A third, less intuitive finding: volume beats celebrity. Brands consistently overinvest in a handful of large creators when the data favors spreading budget across a much larger pool of smaller ones. “Performance tends to asymptote towards zero pretty fast for very large creators,” Vivien says. He adds that the economics of working with micro-creators improve significantly when managed through technology, where the marginal cost of scaling from 10 to 100 creators drops from ten times the effort to roughly twice.

Attribution’s Underrated Problem

Measurement remains one of the field’s persistent gaps. Upfluence uses two primary attribution mechanisms: coupon codes, which are flexible and distributable across any format but can be leaked onto aggregator sites, polluting conversion data; and tracking links, which are more precise but limited by platform restrictions. Instagram posts, for example, cannot embed them directly.

What both approaches share, Vivien argues, is a systematic underestimate of actual ROI. Untracked conversions are common: someone forgets the coupon code, a shared link loses its URL parameters, or a purchase happens days later through direct search. 

“Influencer Marketing attribution is quite pessimistic,” he says. “What you see as the ROI is probably the lowest ROI, a lower one than the truth.” If a campaign shows an ROI of three or four, the real figure is likely one to two points higher.

Vivien believes brands at scale can validate this through uplift analysis, comparing web traffic and sales in the days following a creator post against a baseline. “They can certify to that hunch,” he says, “which is that yes, the ROI being presented to you is usually a little bit pessimistic compared to what it actually is.”

The Autopilot Roadmap

Vivien’s near-term product roadmap centers on a single objective: making influencer campaign management fully automated at the operational level.

Upfluence has already deployed Jaice, a proprietary AI that scrapes brand websites, builds campaign briefs, pre-selects creators based on audience criteria, and distributes outreach automatically. The next phase, projected for later in 2026, is an agent-based system that handles negotiation back-and-forth with creators, manages content approval, and processes payouts with minimal human intervention. 

“The number-one hurdle to Influencer Marketing being performance-based was that the bottleneck was the human element,” Vivien says. “It just was very labor-intensive.”

He is careful to distinguish Upfluence’s AI approach from generic LLM deployments. The company’s 12+ years of campaign data form the foundation for verticalized models that predict creator pricing, identify content language, and estimate conversion likelihood before a campaign launches. “There’s a wrong way to do AI, which is just to leverage LLMs off the bat with little to no customization,” he says. “A lot of people say garbage in, garbage out. That’s the risk.”

The automation Vivien envisions is not one-sided. “Creators will increasingly use agents to negotiate with brands as well,” he says, “so they can focus on making great quality content.” The administrative bottleneck disappears. The strategic and creative work remains.

The Long Game

Upfluence entered 2026 without external investment, and is building toward a roadmap Vivien believes will change the economics of creator campaigns. 

Two priorities dominate: the autopilot infrastructure and a new ad product that will allow brands to identify high-performing creator content, secure usage rights through the platform, and push it programmatically across TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.

The convergence Vivien has tracked for 14 years, between creator marketing and affiliate marketing, between social content and e-commerce conversion, is accelerating. Budgets that once sat in communications are moving to performance teams. Brands that once measured success in impressions are now asking about GMV. What Upfluence built in 2012 for a market that didn’t fully exist yet is now the infrastructure that market needs.

“Trust the influencers,” Vivien says. “Let them make that message their own. Let them make it something that will work. That will resonate with their audience. That’s how you’re going to achieve the best results.”

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