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Social media has been the most credible channel for genuine brand building for some time. The debate isn’t really about whether brands should be using it. It’s about whether they’re executing it in a way that actually builds anything.
According to CreatorIQ’s 2025–2026 State of Creator Marketing report, 71% of organisations increased their creator marketing investment year-over-year, with nearly two-thirds of that new spend pulled directly from traditional paid media budgets. The channel shift is already happening across the industry. The question is whether brands are making the most of it.
Stena Line is not an obvious place to look for answers. Ferry travel is a low-interest category by almost any measure, and the company had spent years treating its marketing accordingly: promotions, schedules, price. Creator-led woCreator-led work hadn’t been explored, not because the decision had been made against it, but because it simply hadn’t been a priority. When TSA, a London-based creator and social agency, came in, the brief was straightforward: mark Stena’s 30th anniversary on Irish waters, raise awareness of the ferry services, and shift how people think about the experience.
The approach TSA built had three deliberate stages, and the sequencing mattered. First, identify creators with audiences that matched Stena’s target customers and the capability to produce content worth watching. Second, brief each creator on a distinct narrative rather than a single script, so the content that emerged was authentic to each creator while serving a coherent overall strategy. Third, let the organic content run, watch what performed, and boost the strongest assets toward a targeted audience. That final step, boosting organic content rather than producing paid assets from the outset, was a deliberate strategic recommendation from TSA, not an afterthought.
Over a single weekend, the creators produced more than 100 pieces of content across multiple crossings: Holyhead to Dublin, Dublin to Belfast, several routes back. That included 50 live stories and 15 grid assets built for paid amplification. The boosted creator posts outperformed all of Stena Line’s other paid media by 30%. The campaign drove 750 incremental bookings in the run-up to Christmas. That outperformance figure is consistent with broader data: across more than a thousand campaigns tracked by The Cirqle, ads run from creator handles delivered between 20 and 40% lower CPMs and more than double the click-through rate of studio-produced content.
The content that drove those results was produced to earn genuine attention first, with paid amplification coming second, using creative that had already proven it could stop people scrolling. Brand-building and performance marketing, running in sequence from a single piece of work.
“No one’s looking at your website anymore,” says Harry Foyle, TSA’s founder. “They’re looking at your socials. That’s how they discover you, and that’s how they’ll figure out pretty quickly whether they want to engage with you or not.” That framing has practical consequences for how social investment gets justified internally. Foyle describes a shift in the conversations his agency is having with clients: away from reach and engagement metrics and toward something boards can actually evaluate. “Clients are coming to us saying: tell us how we’re going to get more cut-through and build our brand in the right way. And if we can make that turn into results, people actually buying the product, then even better.”
The budget context matters here, and it goes beyond creator marketing specifically. A joint study by the World Federation of Advertisers and MediaSense, surveying more than 70 multinational companies representing over $50bn in ad spend, found that only 11% of respondents believe their current agency model fits their future needs. That figure deserves to sit with the creator spend data rather than beside it: brands are not just reallocating budgets, they are questioning whether the structures through which they buy and manage media are fit for purpose at all. Foyle describes clients actively moving spend toward channels where results are trackable and measurable, and away from contracts where the return has become harder to justify. The conversations, he says, have shifted from defending existing commitments to asking what a different model could deliver.
Which creates a different kind of pressure on social agencies. If brands are shifting budget because they expect trackable results, the temptation is to optimise entirely for conversion, letting performance logic swallow the brand-building work before it has a chance to compound. The brands getting it wrong are the ones treating creator content as a straightforward media buy: find someone with a large following, pay them to hold the product, measure the click-through. It produces volume data that looks like accountability and delivers very little of either brand equity or sustained conversion.
The Stena case worked because the content was given space to earn attention before it was asked to convert. That sequencing is straightforward in principle and routinely skipped in practice. It requires patience that short-term reporting cycles don’t naturally reward, and it requires an organisational willingness to measure brand and performance outcomes from the same piece of work rather than attributing them to separate campaigns with separate agencies.
None of this resolves the broader tension in the creator marketing space. The data is not flattering: a CreativeX analysis found that 45% of creator ad spend on Meta failed to deliver brand impact, largely because branding was absent from the first three seconds. And according to a survey by Linqia, 79% of marketers still cite measuring ROI as their biggest challenge in influencer marketing. Those two figures sit together uncomfortably: the industry is pouring money into a channel it cannot reliably measure, and then wondering why so much of it fails to build anything.
The discipline the Stena case demonstrates, earning attention before asking for conversion and holding creator content to the same strategic standards as any other channel, is precisely what most creator briefs skip. They skip it because it requires a single agency to hold responsibility for both brand and performance outcomes, and most marketing structures aren’t built that way. Brand goes to one agency. Performance goes to another. The sequencing that makes the model work gets lost in the handover.
That organisational reality is the harder problem, and the one the industry’s current enthusiasm for creator marketing hasn’t yet addressed. Shifting budget is the easy part. Restructuring accountability is not.
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