Building your Brand with Paid Creator Ads
Last week Cannes Lions once again brought the industry together to debate, inspire and learn about creative effectiveness and what it takes for brands to be noticed, liked and remembered today. Of course it wouldn’t be Cannes without a big splash of System1 pink: the latest Test Your Ad scores and insights for the awarded ads, our thought leaders featured across numerous stages and new research to help marketers solve their toughest challenges.
Following 2025’s The Long and the Short (Form) of It, which proved that creator ads win attention and shared how brands can best leverage them, we’ve returned with another guide around paid creator ads. This new report goes even deeper, codifying exactly what makes creator ads work and putting the learnings into an actionable planning framework.
The Creator Effectiveness Playbook from WPP Media, System1 and TikTok is a new study showing how brands can make creator advertising a more predictable driver of brand memory. To build it, we used System1’s Test Your Ad Social platform, testing 1,217 paid TikTok ads, including 620 creator ads and 597 brand ads, with 182,550 TikTok users. These had a combined 23.6 billion impressions, represent an estimated $70.5m in media spend and span eight markets (US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Brazil and Mexico).
We then connected these survey signals to 350+ TikTok in-market brand and conversion lift studies. This helped showcase what creator ads need to do to deliver Brand Memory Lift (lift in brand awareness and ad recall). The result is a guide that shows what to measure, what to ignore, how to choose the right creator, and how to brief ads that earn emotion and attention without losing the brand.
Read on for a closer look at the report and its key findings.
Creators Deserve their Flowers but Measurement Must Step Up
The industry loves to debate whether creators are worth their price tag. A growing body of evidence reinforces that creators can effectively influence in service of brands. In October 2025, the IPA released Beyond engagement: understanding influencer payback, which showed that creators carry the highest long-term ROI multiplier of any channel measured, just ahead of linear TV. One big step forward for creators.
But wait, there’s more!
Earlier this year, System1 and Effie’s The Creative Dividend revealed creators behave like a Super Touchpoint: a touchpoint able to help campaigns capture immediate demand and build future demand. In the report, which analyzed more than 1,200 campaigns from Effie Insights’ database against System1’s Test Your Ad platform data, creators outperformed TV as well as radio, print and cinema.
This new report shows why: creator ads build more Brand Memory. They make the brand easier to remember later. This is crucial for converting people who aren’t actively in-market but will be at some point in the future. We measured Brand Memory Lift based on whether exposure to the ad increased people’s memory of the brand versus a matched control group.
The research found that creator ads deliver 23% more Brand Memory Lift than brand ads on short-form.
The problem is the industry has been measuring creators according to the wrong success metrics, via engagement rate and follower count. These cannot show whether a brand was remembered and often means that brands invest in work that won’t pay back commercially.
Creator ads should be held to the same brand-building standard as any other advertising. Brand Memory Lift unlocks how to measure their success.
Three Levers to Pull with Creators
The research reveals the three things that drive Brand Memory: Creative Quality, Creator Fame and Brand Fit.
- Creative Quality combines positive emotion and Early Branding (earning brand recognition in the first 2 seconds). An ad must make people feel something and the brand must be recognized quickly enough to own that feeling.
- Creator Fame is the second lever. Importantly, Creator Fame is not just follower count. It is whether the audience recognizes the creator, understands their world, or reads the cues that make the content familiar.
- Brand Fit, focused on belonging, is the third. In the research, we asked respondents how well suited the creator is for the brand. The brand should not feel at odds with the creator and the content for which they are known.
Creative quality alone makes creator ads more impactful. The magic is when brands pull all three levers, resulting in Brand Memory Lift rising by almost 4 times.
While all three maximize attention, emotion and brand memories, the report notes that if you must prioritize between Creator Fame and Brand Fit, choose the latter. A smaller creator in the right world, with a product role that feels natural, is better than a bigger creator who is well known by the masses but feels disconnected to the brand.
Strong Strategy and Briefing Deliver Success
So how can brands apply these levers, and when should they do so? There are two key steps to consider:
- First, use strategy to build the right creator conditions: Creator Fame and Brand Fit. Start with the human need the brand wants to dramatize, then find the creator world that can bring it to life. Check whether the audience recognizes the creator or world, and whether the brand has a natural role there.
- Then use the brief to build Creative Quality that turns all three into branded memory. Importantly, the brief has to make the ad entertaining enough to be felt, distinctive enough to be attributed to the brand, and native enough to still feel like the creator.
Showmanship creative features result in less skipping and drive positive emotion, supporting Brand Memory Lift. The next job to be done is making sure your entertaining creative is also distinctive. The study found that only 61% of creator ads include at least one brand cue in the first two seconds.
Remember, a great brief can lift a strong strategy further, but it cannot rescue weak Creator Fame, weak Brand Fit or the wrong creator world. Get the strategy right from the start and your brief can then follow.
Winning with Creator Ads
Working with creators doesn’t have to feel like a gamble. The Creator Effectiveness Playbook from WPP Media, System1 and TikTok is a practical guide for getting creator ads right. The report unpacks much more than the above, including a deeper dive into aligning on category need and creator world to ensure the proper Brand Fit as well as the keys to entertainment and distinctiveness to uphold Creative Quality. It also explores Platform Fit and introduces the social device, one of the most powerful levers a creator can give a brand.
Download the report below. And if you’d like to learn more about System1’s Test Your Ad Social platform, contact us here.