Last week, Unilever CEO Fernando Fernandez stood in front of his investors and said something that should make every CMO stop scrolling.
"I am absolutely convinced that the times of big corporate big brand messages are gone."
This is not a DTC brand experimenting with TikTok. This is a 300-brand conglomerate that spent decades building some of the most recognised advertising in the world. They have already increased content volume 7x in one year. They are now working with 300,000 creators. Because a social video has a shelf life of four days, and a TV spot has even less.
Salesforce just fired their Super Bowl celebrity- Matthew McConaughey. He was polished, scripted, safe, was their face for two years. This year, they handed the keys to MrBeast. With no narrative arc. and no product pitch. He sent 60 million people to a website for a $1 million prize and turned a passive TV moment into a week-long online chase. They built the entire campaign in 27 days using the very product they were selling.
That is a philosophy change.
The Shift Is Happening Everywhere
Salesforce is not alone in B2B.
Notion ran a 2025 campaign built entirely around creators on LinkedIn called Notion Faces. Snoop Dogg joined organically, triggering a social media frenzy. Over 60 UGC posts were shared by users who were not even part of the campaign. The campaign's stated goal was not reach. It was to get shared inside another company's Slack, which is where B2B buying decisions actually happen.
Gong, the revenue intelligence platform, now runs a LinkedIn presence built on memes and cultural commentary about sales life. Their posts consistently rack up hundreds of engagements because they make their audience feel seen, not sold to.
Semrush partnered with marketing practitioners to fight the AI is killing SEO narrative. Not with press releases. With creators already trusted inside their buyers' communities.
At Cannes Lions 2025, the world's most senior marketing leaders named the trend formally: the rise of the Creator CEO. C-suite executives building personal creator presences, not just corporate ad budgets. The Financial Times confirmed it: a 35% rise in C-suite professionals posting regularly on LinkedIn over the past five years.
Why Consistency Beats Celebrity
A few years ago, a celebrity video was a feat most brands could not pull off. That scarcity created attention. Today, that scarcity is gone. Even the biggest campaign gets buried in 48 hours, and your buyer scrolls right past it.
The brands winning right now are not the ones with the most expensive single moment. They are the ones showing up consistently in the feeds of the exact people who will eventually buy from them. Not once but every week, in the voice of someone that buyer already trusts.
This matters more in B2B than anywhere else.
Impressions, reach, likes, engagement rates- these are not business metrics. They are Vanity Metrics. And the creator economy is drowning in them.
The Channel Shifted But The Problem Did Not
For years, CMOs carried the same frustration. Their TV commercials, display campaigns, and programmatic spend could not be tied to pipeline. The CFO kept asking how a billboard in Chicago contributed to the deal that closed in Dallas. Nobody had a clean answer.
Then the budgets moved.
CMOs started reallocating toward creator partnerships, analyst newsletter sponsorships, podcast placements, and thought leadership seeding in private communities. It felt more targeted. More human. More measurable, because engagement feels like signal.
It is not.
Edelman found that more than 40% of B2B deals stall due to internal misalignment within buying groups. The culprit is the hidden buyer, the committee member who consumes thought leadership content for months before a deal starts, forms strong opinions about your credibility, and never fills out a form. Standard attribution has no record of their influence at all.
The Dark Social Gap
With creator content, the instrumentation often does not exist at all.
When a CMO reads an analyst's Substack and visits your website without clicking a tracked link, that visit shows up as direct traffic.
When a buying committee member hears your name on a podcast during their commute and Googles you three days later, that intent is invisible.
When a LinkedIn practitioner's post gets forwarded to two colleagues in a private message, none of that journey leaves a fingerprint in your CRM.
The B2B buying cycle for a $150K to $250K SaaS deal involves six to ten stakeholders. Most of them will never fill out a form. By the time any of them appear in your pipeline, they have already consumed weeks of content, formed strong opinions, and had internal conversations about your credibility, none of which your attribution system captured.
CMOs who shifted budget from display ads to creator partnerships have not escaped the measurement problem. They have amplified it.
The ones who do not realise this are making allocation decisions on the same foundation they were trying to escape: instinct, assumption, and the hope that reach eventually becomes revenue.
What they need is the infrastructure to prove that their spends are working.
The Measurement Roadmap: How to Actually Do It
This is not theoretical. Five things need to be instrumented before any creator investment can be tied to revenue.
Step 1 : Stop measuring content. Start measuring movement.
Right now, most CMOs measure creator partnerships through platform metrics: podcast downloads, newsletter open rates, post engagement. These measure whether the content was consumed. They tell you nothing about whether a deal moved.
Change the measurement frame entirely. Every creator investment should be evaluated by one question: Did buyers progress through the funnel after engaging with this? Did leads advance from MQL to SAL? Did open opportunities accelerate? Did deals close faster or at higher value?
If your reporting on a podcast sponsorship or analyst newsletter placement cannot answer those questions, you do not have attribution. You have a content report.
Step 2 : Capture the buyers who are invisible right now.
Imagine a scenario where, a well-followed B2B analyst mentions your product in their weekly Substack. 300 CMOs read it, 40 visit your website that afternoon but no one fill out a form. In standard analytics, those 40 visits show up as direct traffic and disappear.
This is the dark social gap, and it is where most creator content's actual influence lives.
The fix is a first-party pixel combined with de-anonymisation tooling, software that identifies which companies and contacts visited your site even when they did not convert.
Some of our customers have uncovered more than 31,000 previously invisible companies that were actively engaging with content but never surfacing in any CRM. These were buyers being influenced. They simply did not exist in any pipeline report.
Once you can see who arrived after a creator touchpoint, you can map those companies to open opportunities, understand whether the right accounts are responding, and begin attributing the creator investment to real pipeline rather than anonymous traffic volume.
Step 3: Build a Journey Timeline, Not a Touchpoint List
A VP of Marketing at a target account hears your name on a RevOps podcast in January. They visit your site, do not convert. In February, a colleague forwards them a newsletter issue from an analyst who referenced your platform. They visit again. In March, an SDR reaches out and gets a response. In April, they book a demo.
Standard last-touch attribution gives all credit to the SDR outreach. The podcast mention and the newsletter reference, which are the actual reason the SDR email got a reply, get nothing.
What you need is a sequential journey timeline: every touchpoint across every channel, in the order they happened, mapped to each buying stage. When you look at this across hundreds of accounts, patterns emerge that are invisible in aggregate reporting.
That is pipeline acceleration data, not a content metric. And that is what justifies the investment - in the same language that your CFO speaks.
Step 4: Test Causation, Not Correlation
This is the step most CMOs skip. And it is the most important one.
When you see that buyers who engaged with creator content converted at higher rates, that does not mean the content caused the conversion. It may mean the content found buyers who were already going to buy. They were already warm. The content reached them but it did not change them.
How Incrementality Testing Works
Incrementality testing separates these two things. You create test and control groups: accounts exposed to a specific creator partnership versus accounts who were not. Then you measure whether the exposed group progressed faster, converted at higher rates, or closed larger deals. The difference is the actual causal impact.
A Real-World Warning
We ran this test for a customer whose campaign had strong engagement across every standard metric. The incrementality result showed a negative 2.3x lift. Accounts that engaged with that campaign were statistically less likely to convert than those that had not touched it. The content was finding the wrong buyers and building false confidence. Without the test, that campaign would have been renewed and scaled.
Step 5: Close the Loop Back to Revenue, Every Quarter
The measurement does not end at Pipeline influenced.
Most marketers stop there. They see that a podcast sponsorship touched 12 open opportunities, call it a win, and renew the contract. What they cannot see is how many of those 12 actually closed, at what deal size, and whether the creator touchpoint made any difference to the outcome. That last question is the only one that CFO cares about.
At RevSure, every buyer interaction, content touchpoints, SDR outreach, website visits, intent signals, is pulled into a single data graph. Each touchpoint is mapped to the buying stage it occurred in and tied to the account it came from. When a deal closes, we reconstruct the full journey: which creator touchpoints appeared in the path, and whether accounts with those touchpoints closed at higher rates, larger deal sizes, or shorter cycle times than accounts without them. This runs as a standing quarterly report, not a one-time project.
Two things consistently surface when you do this:
Budget Leakage: Some creator investments generate awareness with accounts that never convert. High engagement, zero revenue impact. They look like wins in standard reporting. In a revenue attribution model, they are budget leakage.
Quiet Accelerants: Others systematically appear in the journeys of accounts that close faster and larger. These are almost never the ones getting the most budget. They are the quiet accelerants nobody could prove until the data did.
Separating those two categories, and reallocating accordingly, is the difference between a marketing function that reports on activity and one that compounds its impact every quarter.
The Only Marketing Report That Changes the Room
The CMOs who will win the next three years are not the ones working with the most creators.
They are the ones who can walk into a board meeting and say:
Our creator investments touched 50 open opportunities last quarter. The accounts that engaged closed at 1.8 times the rate of those that did not. Average deal velocity was 12 days shorter. Here is what we are scaling. Here is what we are cutting.
They don't prepare a marketing report but make a business case, own the revenue.
The creator economy shift is real and the intent behind it is right. Buyers trust human voices over corporate broadcasts, and no amount of spend on polished campaigns will change that direction.
But intent without measurement is just expensive intuition.
The CMOs who treat creator content as a strategy without building attribution infrastructure to prove its impact are making the same mistake they made with TV budgets, display campaigns, and every unmeasured channel before this one. They are spending on faith instead of evidence.
The ones who build the measurement infrastructure now, before the rest of the market catches up, will have an unfair advantage that compounds every quarter.
Because in the absence of truth, people create their own versions of it.
The CMO who owns the truth owns the room.
P.S. If you are navigating this measurement gap right now, whether you are building attribution infrastructure from scratch or trying to connect creator investments to pipeline for the first time, reply directly. I would like to understand what you are seeing in your funnel. You can mail me at: [email protected]
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