As creator marketing breaks out of its silo and becomes embedded across the full marketing system, brands need a more sophisticated approach to manage increased budgets, scrutiny, and risk.

"The way that I think about this is what we call social first marketing or thinking," said Nicholas Spiro, chief commercial officer at Viral Nation, during EMARKETER's Creator Summit.

According to Spiro, brands can leverage social intelligence to scale their creator marketing efforts while maintaining performance and minimizing risk.

Social first

For many organizations, social media began as an add-on to traditional marketing plans, resulting in fragmented digital voices across different platforms and teams.

"Most companies, many of the larger brands, predate social media," said Spiro. "What happened is that the PR strategy could maybe sit on one team and go through Twitter, and some of the brand marketing would be on Instagram and have another team or another budget."

This fragmentation is becoming increasingly problematic as creator marketing grows in importance.

"It behooves all of us to think social first," he said. "Start with social media. That's where a lot of the attention lies today."

The key to scaling with confidence

As creator marketing budgets increase, so does the scrutiny from finance teams and C-suite executives. What was once considered a "vanity splash play" now commands significant portions of marketing budgets.

"As budgets increase, so does scrutiny," said Spiro. "Most CMOs or marketing leaders of large brands do have some leeway when it comes to budgeting for long-term brand building, but if it's 30% of your budget or 50%, it's a lot more scrutinized by finance and the CFO."

The solution, according to Spiro, is to focus on measurement from the beginning: "We try to focus on measurement first, meaning you want to start with what your goals are and you want to make sure you understand not just your actual KPIs, but how you think about measuring it."

Managing risk through AI-driven analysis

As creator marketing expands across teams and KPIs, risk management becomes increasingly important. Many brands currently rely on manual processes that don't scale.

"I met with a very large brand and asked about risk, especially for social media and especially for wanting to scale fearlessly," said Spiro. "They said they had a team of 20-30 folks that were just thumb scrolling. They were just trying to take some of these creators, Googling their handles and looking on TikTok, looking on Instagram."

This approach is ineffective for major brands that have invested heavily in building their reputation.

"You know how much effort and heart and analysis that takes, and you can lose that in an instant with the wrong brand ambassadors," he said.

AI-driven social intelligence allows brands to analyze creators' content at scale, identifying potential brand safety risks like hate speech or inappropriate content that might be buried in a creator's history.

Justifying investment through predictive analytics

As creator marketing receives more attention from CFOs and other executives, brands need to justify their investments with clear performance metrics.

"I think about the two halves of the equation as the risk and the reward," Spiro explains. "On the reward side, you do want to understand your investment."

Creator marketing impacts multiple stages of the marketing funnel—from awareness to loyalty—making measurement complex. Viral Nation captures billions of signals to understand costs and attribution, helping brands determine the true ROI of their creator partnerships.

The mindset shift

For brands just beginning to build more intelligence-led creator programs, Spiro suggests starting with unification, ensuring a consistent social-first approach across channels, creative, and strategy, followed by establishing clear measurement methodologies.

Perhaps most importantly, Spiro advocates for a fundamental mindset shift in how brands approach social media: "Historically, social media was the amplifier of a brand voice... The shift is from output to input."

Rather than simply using social media to broadcast messages, brands should leverage it as a source of insights.

"The insight to what creators see, to the comments, to the audience, and using it as a testing ground and to really learn... is so much more valuable, even than the amplification of the voice," he said

Watch the full session.

This was originally featured in the EMARKETER Daily newsletter. For more marketing insights, statistics, and trends, subscribe here.