Do client structures work for creator marketing?

We’ve moved on from the debate on whether creator marketing works. The effectiveness data is in, spend is accelerating, and audiences have long since migrated their attention from linear schedules to vertical feeds.

Yet inside client organisations, there is a lingering question of how to harness one of the most potent parts of the communication ecosystem at scale.

This was one of the subjects debated at the 2026 IPA Effectiveness Conference panel session, ‘Taming the Wild West of influencers: From measurement to creative ambition’.

Firstly, we agreed that rather than seeking to tame influencer creativity, the key challenge represents more of an internal architecture issue for marketers grappling with how to balance brand control and creator freedom.

Too many brands try to bolt creators onto legacy structures built for six-month TV production cycles and committee sign-offs. They treat creators like the final hand-off in an exhausted agency relay race, shoving an idea down the line from creative to media, PR, and finally social.

As Emma Harman, Co-CEO of Whalar observed, when ideas are so rigid in their ‘what’, the ‘who’ becomes impossible to find: “You’re looking for mannequins to stand in shop windows and you’re putting an ill-fitting t-shirt on them.”

Brand Materials > Brand Messages

Fixing the system begins long before a contract is signed. As Gemma Albin, Senior Strategist at The LEGO Group noted, it sits in the comms strategy and the pre-work.

Instead of asking what a creator can incidentally cover around the edges of their content, LEGO asks a far sharper strategic question: What are the raw materials we can offer creators to play with? That might be early access, proprietary technology, or behind-the-scenes assets that push creative boundaries.

“Build ideas around and with the creators really exciting you rather than building the idea and then trying to cast it,” Gemma said.

Crucially, this also means ditching the patronising habit of hiding commercial objectives from talent. When you treat creators as strategic partners and clearly articulate the commercial goal, they pull toward it instinctively. It’s about running proper brand inductions that explain not just what creators can and can’t do, but why those guardrails exist in the first place.

Modern Creator Architecture

Taming the creator landscape doesn’t mean domesticating it with 100-page brand guidelines. It means establishing enough structural confidence to let creativity breathe.

As Emma Harman pointed out, this demands rewiring some entrenched operational habits, stating, “You cannot ask your marketing to behave like it's 2026 if the operating system underneath it was designed in 1997."

It means ditching rigid campaign pots for always-on cultural budgets so you can move when culture does, while trading multi-layered sign-off committees for delegated authority and tight guardrails. It requires agreeing on your organisational risk appetite upfront, knowing that if an idea feels completely safe, it is almost certainly invisible.

Finally, it means fixing the plumbing: modernising procurement rails so individual talent isn't hit with 90-day payment terms, and bringing creator strategy upstream rather than treating talent as the exhausted final handoff at the end of the agency chain.

From Campaigns to Communities

Billion Dollar Boy’s research found that marketers' two greatest headaches with creator architecture are maintaining consistent brand messaging (34%) and managing creator relationships with local relevance at scale (34%).

To solve this, Lipton abandoned the old model of shipping rigid global TV assets to local markets. Instead, they rolled out decentralised ‘Social Hubs’ across six European markets. Central brand teams set the strategic direction, tone of voice, and visual codes, while in-market teams of creators, strategists, and producers are empowered to react to local culture in real time.

The model organises creator marketing around communities, not campaigns. And the approach pays. When Lipton Turkey activated its creator-led 'Tea Shake' campaign, it drove a 648% increase in brand mentions and delivered a 2.5x higher ROAS than planned. Across Europe, the Hubs delivered three times more effective reach per Euro than traditional media channels, reaching 48% of all 18–35-year-olds on TikTok and Instagram.

As Emrah Oner, Lipton's Digital Marketing Director, noted: it’s no longer about control, it’s about participation.

Finding the balance

Creator marketing is not a line item to tick off at the bottom of a media plan. It is a fundamental shift in how brands build modern mental availability,

Social media doesn’t have the safety net of ‘mere exposure’ effects. So. when client and agency structures prioritise control over cultural vitality, the result is invisible work. The brands that win on effectiveness will be those that provide clear parameters, upstream trust, and an operational model built for the communications world we actually live in.

The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and were submitted in accordance with the IPA terms and conditions regarding the uploading and contribution of content to the IPA newsletters, IPA website, or other IPA media, and should not be interpreted as representing the opinion of the IPA.