The company runs a large, always-on creator programme across multiple markets and beauty categories, booked through a long tail of agencies and talent intermediaries. Leadership could see the total invoice but not what the money bought: real reach was tangled up with intermediary fees, opaque margins and inauthentic audience. The brief was to expose the true worth of the spend and make it work harder — not to cut it.
VA separated real reach from intermediary margin, built a rate-card governance model with reference rates by creator tier, market and deliverable, and widened the roster to high-value creators on transparent terms — so the same budget reaches more genuine audience.
Chief Marketing Officer, Head of Influencer, Head of Social Media, Head of Marketing Procurement
The strategic problem
The company runs a large, always-on creator programme across multiple markets and beauty categories, booked through a long tail of agencies and talent intermediaries. Leadership could see the total invoice but not what the money actually bought: real reach and engagement were tangled up with intermediary fees, opaque margins and pockets of inauthentic audience. The brief was deliberately not a cost-cutting one — it was to expose the true worth of the spend and then make it work harder.
Diagnose & Design
VA ran a spend mapping and cost baseline analysis across the full creator programme, separating working spend — the share that genuinely reaches and engages real audiences — from non-working cost absorbed by intermediary fees, opaque margins and inauthentic reach, market by market and creator tier by creator tier. The AURA/Influencer Benchmarker (Influencer Benchmarker) sized the gap between rate-card prices and genuinely delivered value, establishing the true cost-to-value ratio for the first time and benchmarking efficiency against the wider market.
Ecosystem & Remuneration
On the strength of that diagnostic, VA built a rate-card governance model: reference rates by creator tier, market and deliverable, so every fee can be challenged against what comparable creators genuinely deliver rather than against an intermediary’s headline number. Vendor scouting and shortlisting through the VA 5,000+ supplier database widened the roster beyond incumbent relationships and the mark-ups attached to them, giving the team direct access to high-value creators on transparent terms.
Rollout & relationship management
Rollout and commitment tracking, contracting and onboarding: AURA/Planner (Planner) back-planned the deployment of the rate-card governance model and benchmarking discipline across markets, and tracked that working-versus-non-working pricing was embedded in each market team’s way of working before VA stepped back. Relationship management ensured the brand could keep running the benchmark and challenging fees at source on its own.
Execution Oversight
VA set the governance, benchmarks and negotiation playbook so every creator deal is priced on real delivered value, not headline reach; bid governance applied the same scrutiny to creator selection as to any other production spend, stripping non-working cost out of each booking. Crucially, the buying power freed at each negotiation was reinvested into more and higher-value activity — the budget was not cut.
Performance Measurement
Not a saving story but maximisation: by shifting spend from non-working cost to working value, the same budget unlocks an estimated 24% more working spend reaching real audiences and 19% more measured reach, with approximately 27% of spend reallocated from low-value to high-value activity [illustrative, to be confirmed]; partner performance evaluation via the AURA/Influencer Benchmarker tracks creator value on a continuous cadence — the budget does more, it does not shrink (today closure reports; full performance measurement on the roadmap).
Why VA
Procurement instinct says cut; the smarter move is to maximise. VA gave the brand the real cost-to-value of its creator programme — working spend laid bare against intermediary margin and inauthentic reach — and a rate-card governance model the team now runs itself, so the same investment buys more genuine reach, more relevance and more growth without a single point of additional budget.
Common questions
How do you separate real reach from intermediary margin?
By exposing, per fee, how much reaches real engaged audiences versus intermediary mark-up and inauthentic reach, then setting reference rates by creator tier, market and deliverable so every fee is challenged against what comparable creators genuinely deliver.
Why is this maximisation rather than cost-cutting?
The brief was to make the spend work harder, not shrink it: shifting budget from non-working cost to working value means the same money reaches more genuine audience and delivers more measured reach — more growth without more budget.
How does the brand keep control after the diagnostic?
A rate-card governance model the team runs itself, plus direct access to high-value creators on transparent terms and continuous value tracking — so working spend keeps rising rather than drifting back to intermediary margin.