Measuring influence, and what still can't be measured.
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The setup
Money is moving into creator work faster than anyone has built a way to measure it. Print budgets went to experiential. Experiential budgets went to creators. The client who signed off on that shift now wants to know what it bought, and the honest answer inside most agencies is a screenshot of a conversion curve and a hope that nobody asks a second question.
That gap is where indie agencies lose money. You recommend a creator program. It performs for three weeks. Conversions dip. The client kills it, the creator is not renewed, and nobody involved learns anything transferable. Then you do it again next quarter with a different creator.
This session was built to attack that cycle with evidence. Every other conversation at Indies @ Cannes 2026 was practitioners arguing from experience. This one had a research company and a media agency on the same stage, and the argument they made together is more useful than either would have been alone.
It is also, on the numbers, a smaller pile of hard data than the framing suggests. That matters, and this chapter treats it as part of the story rather than a problem to paper over.
Who was on stage, and why they're worth listening to
Part One — What the size numbers do and do not say
Zanger opened by putting a figure on the table and naming its source, which is more than most stages do.
"IAB data, your friend and mine, creator ad spend four times faster. That's what we like to call velocity, four times faster than traditional media."
Powers took the same multiple and anchored it in absolute dollars.
"The creator economy is growing 4x faster than any other media type, so that sounds enormous. To put an anchor in that from a number perspective, it's $43 billion in [spend] this year."
Read those two carefully, because they are not the same claim. Zanger's four-times is creator ad spend against traditional media, sourced to the IAB. Powers' four-times is against any other media type, and she did not name a source for it. Her $43 billion also arrived without a citation. If you are putting either number in a client deck, the version you can defend is the IAB one, and you should go get the report yourself before you use it.
What Powers did next is the part worth stealing. She explained the mechanism behind the number rather than letting the number stand as its own argument.
"It's attention, right? That's where people are spending their time in media, and what creators have done is legitimized social. What we talked about for so long with social media was this effort to get a thumb-stopping ad. What creators have done is transformed social into a place of storytelling and emotional brand building."
Her second mechanism is commerce. Creator content sits next to a tagged product, which lets brands test in cheaply and scale spend fast. That is why the dollar figure moves the way it does; it is not a mystery of taste.
Moore added the structural change that makes the category harder to dismiss as a social line item.
"Creators are now being consumed not just on devices, but also on the largest screen in the household, and it's being co-[viewed] by more than one person in the household."
That is a Nielsen-shaped observation, and it reframes the category. Creator content that gets watched on a living-room television by two people at once is behaving like television. Moore's follow-on point is that this is why brand-side comfort is rising: "that content is starting to appear in places that brands know and trust and feel comfortable with."
Zanger pressed on the ceiling. If creator work is mainstreaming onto the big screen, what happens to the brand stuck at $500 million in revenue that wants to reach $1 billion? Powers answered from the direct-to-consumer wreckage.
"You will always encounter points of diminishing return, essentially by only being in one channel. So social has a cap, and that's what happened to all the direct brands. They built themselves on the back of social, and then they had to scale, and so that meant adding new channels. Super uncomfortable. They had to market like a CPG."
Her example was Poppi: launched on TikTok with creators in 2020 with no money, later acquired by PepsiCo, and by this year running a Super Bowl spot featuring creators. The arc is the argument. The brand that proved creator-first works is now the brand that proves creator-only does not.
Which produced the session's cleanest strategic line on unduplicated reach — the audience a plan adds rather than the audience it hits again — and the one to put in front of a client who thinks this is a binary.
"The evidence is that a multi-channel plan is the most efficient way to build unduplicated [reach]."
Powers was also unwilling to let the biggest advertisers in the world be quoted as permission structures.
"Coke and Unilever can say that very boldly and proudly at all these shows, but they have spent years building their equity on the back of traditional media, and they still are in those channels in a significant way."
Both panelists disliked the term "social first." Moore's rescue of it is the most useful reading available: treat it as an IP question rather than a funnel position.
"I'm also not necessarily thinking about it from like a bottom of the funnel transactional social influencer first sort of strategy. What creators, what genres, what influencers do we want to align with to carry our campaign? And then how do we carry that throughout our media plan or our media campaigns throughout the year?"
Part Two — Two tracks, and the conversation with the CFO
Zanger asked the question the chapter exists for: past follower counts, what should agencies be evaluating?
Powers' vetting criteria are audience-first and have nothing to do with size.
"In evaluating creators, it's about the audience, right? And how qualified are they? How long have they been following this person? It's looking at the creator and making sure that they're able to tell a story and not just live on the for you page, if you will, and like sling product out there."
Her sourcing for that judgment is qualitative: social listening, Reddit, verbatims, cross-checked against enough scale to matter. She is explicit that she wants "a really qualified, interested audience and community" alongside "a sizeable audience to make sure there's a little bit of critical mass."
Then she named the failure mode, and it is the one costing indie agencies retainers.
"Something that we're trying to do right now is be really thoughtful about measuring creators because they've been caught up in this front end medium metric world of conversions, and as soon as brands start seeing the conversions slide, they say 'yoink it, pull it, it's stopping.'"
Her objection is not sentimental. It is a media-theory objection, and she cites the theory.
"The whole point of everything we're doing is trying to build mental availability in people's minds. So to attach them to this immediate 'you have to drive a sale for me today' seems a little unfair."
Powers reported that a Byron Sharp and Mark Ritson debate the previous day had landed on frequency and continuity of message, and relayed Ritson's line on creators: leave the cake in the oven a little longer.
Moore's response is the single most portable thing in the session, and it is a reporting structure rather than a metric.
"It's really important for brands and indie agencies to be able to report on two tracks. You want to be able to report on [ROI]. That is foundational. But you also really want to be tracking your brand metrics, and those are not as immediate. They do take a little time to understand, to evaluate. You want to understand your brand favorability. You want to understand the resonance. You want to understand how your consumers are interacting."
Her analogy for running one track alone:
"If you're just looking at the immediate metrics, it's like you're picking your tomatoes and not planting new tomatoes."
Moore is candid that the second track is expensive in the currency clients have least of, which is patience. Letting the bread bake, in her words, "probably gives your CFO a little agita."
Zanger pushed on how anyone wins that argument, given how short a CMO's runway is. Someone on the panel put average CMO tenure at three years. His immediate reaction, unprompted, was "That sounds high." That exchange is worth more than the statistic. Neither figure was sourced on stage, and the moderator publicly doubted the number the panel offered.
Powers' answer to the CFO problem is that you cannot win it in the moment, so you have to have won it in advance.
"It's just really important to have proof points and to make sure that your CMO is aligned, your KPIs are mapped out, and so that when your CFO is breathing down your neck, you're ready for that conversation. It also comes down to trust."
She is honest about the cost: "MMM is not a cheap exercise, so it's a lot of conversations. It's really uncomfortable." And her discipline for keeping brand work accountable is a rule any principal can adopt on Monday. Stella Rising pushes every plan to connect to one key business metric gathered around a sales effort. Brand love does not qualify.
"I love brand love, but you can say you love me and you don't want to take me home."
On brand safety, the panel refused the usual reassurance. Powers' position is that some high-performing content is not available to you, and that this is a cost rather than a problem to solve.
"Sometimes you cannot be a part of the trend, and it's a bummer to watch it pass by you. But if it's not right for your brand, you just have to let it go."
Moore's version routes it back through the same discipline: "it comes back to your KPIs and understanding exactly what you're looking to accomplish, and then that will direct you into who you want to work with." Her observation is that brand safety incidents drop as brands stop buying creators off a list and start participating in selecting them.
The most operationally valuable disclosure came from an audience question by Katie Walley-Wiegert of Indie Agency News, on the shifting relationship between paid and organic. Powers described a mechanic inside TikTok Shop that changes how you budget:
"The way that it's built from a paid perspective is you have to put money against it. They will score you based on paid criteria points, and if you don't have enough affiliate links, if you're not putting enough paid media against your TikTok shop, they'll give it a bad grade, so it goes down."
She also flagged how recently her own view changed: "Every single brand is going to be on TikTok shop, and until like probably three weeks ago, I don't think I would have said that." Her agency stands up TikTok Shops for clients, so this is first-hand rather than secondhand, and it is the kind of platform mechanic that quietly destroys a media plan built on organic assumptions.
Moore did not pretend Nielsen has the answer to Walley-Wiegert's question yet.
"It is incredibly complicated, and it is something that I think we're all searching to find the answer for, especially for me and my team. I'm hopeful that we'll find the right methodology to unpack that more for brands because it is such a critical key data point."
A measurement company saying on stage that the paid-organic relationship is not yet solved is the most reliable data point in the session.
The uncomfortable truth
The hardest passage was not about numbers at all. It was about the feedback loop that does not exist.
Powers reported it as a finding.
"One of the surprising findings for creators that I found is that they don't get the feedback from their partners. So we're kind of operating in this black box a little bit. They're hired. They're so eager. They're so excited to embark on new partnerships with brands, but then they're not renewed. They don't necessarily understand why they're not renewed, and it sort of breaks the growth cycle. So creators are sort of stunted, and then brands also don't get the long term benefit of being able to grow that partnership either."
This is where the Blueprint's two creator sessions lock together. On Monday, in Creator-Led Trenches, creators described the brand relationship from their side: personality stripped out of the work, middlemen inserted between them and the client, contracts written one job at a time. Read alongside Powers, those are not four separate complaints. They are four symptoms of one structural fact, which is that nobody on the brand side is closing the loop.
The measurement counterpart supports the creators on nearly every point, with one correction worth naming. The creators framed the problem as brands not respecting them. Powers and Moore both describe something less flattering and more fixable: brands have not built the reporting to know whether the partnership worked, so there is nothing to feed back, and renewal decisions get made on the only number anyone has. The disrespect is real. The cause is a missing measurement track.
Powers put the resulting posture in a sentence that should end the debate about where creator work sits on an org chart.
"Brands for a really long time have kept creators over to the side. They're like, 'and we're doing this over here with those people,' or 'I have an intern I hired to do this because they're Gen Z and they know how to do it.' And by leaving them out on that island alone, it's not helped tell this story that they should be integrated in the plan so that we can hold them accountable for measurable results."
Note the trade she is proposing. Integration is not a favor to creators. It is the precondition for holding them accountable. An agency that keeps creator work on the island has given up the right to measure it.
The second uncomfortable finding is that data does not win this argument on its own. Asked by an audience member how you get clients to loosen control over creator content, Powers described showing brands the evidence and watching them ignore it.
"We have so much data on how the scripted stuff just doesn't perform. It just doesn't work. So it's funny though, because you show that, and they're still like, 'but tell them to sit up.'"
Her method when the data fails is not more data.
"This is an incredibly uncomfortable conversation that we have to have with brands. I've offered to hold their hands across the table before, like jokingly, but also I'm like, 'Do you want me to hold your hand?' Because you have to let them do their thing."
Moore's framing is the one to use in the room, because it gives the nervous client something to hold rather than something to surrender.
"I love what you're saying about brands being able to fully articulate what the guardrails are. It's like guidelines for life. Know your do's, know your don'ts, and then go have fun. That's when the magic happens."
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