A new lipstick range launches in six weeks. The brief is done. The product is photographed. PR samples are packed and ready to ship. The influencer plan? Send samples to 15 creators and hope they post before launch day. Three weeks later, four creators posted. Two were posted after launch day. One posted a photo that barely shows the product. Launch week arrives with thin organic content, zero pre-launch buzz, and no idea which of those four posts actually drove the spike in

You pull up last quarter's influencer report. 4.2 million impressions. 3.8% average engagement. 22 creators across Instagram and YouTube. Then the founder asks: "Which creator actually drove sales?" You switch to Shopify. The discount codes are there, but three creators never used the ones you sent them. Two campaigns ran without UTM tags. One creator's affiliate link pointed to the homepage rather than the product page. The data exists. The attribution doesn't. That's the re

Reach came in 40% below projection last quarter. Every influencer posted on time. The content looked decent. Engagement rate was fine. The client still wants to know why it underdelivered. The problem was that the brief was written in 2023, but implemented in 2026. Think about it: the platform, the algorithm, everything has changed, but the brief was written in such a way that it would have ranked in 2023, not 2026. In 2026, saves and shares perform much better than likes bec