How to build a creator shortlist around your campaign goal

A useful creator shortlist starts with your campaign goal. Audience fit, relevant content, available evidence and confirmed interest help you decide which creators deserve a closer look.

This is how to build a shortlist that gives your campaign the best chance before anyone posts anything.

What the evidence says about the usual filter

In December 2024, Marketing Science published a study by researchers at Harvard and MIT Sloan covering 19,636 influencer video ads, with sales tested on a held out panel of 2,685 matched product and video pairs.

Public engagement did not correlate with sales lift. Likes came in at a rho of minus 0.0075, comments at minus 0.02, shares at minus 0.0074, none of them distinguishable from zero.

Two things that finding is not. It is not "influencer marketing does not work," and the authors do not say that. Their own constructed measure of product specific engagement does predict lift. Their thesis is that a video can be engaging for reasons that have nothing to do with the product in it, so a raw engagement number tells you the audience liked the video, not that it moved them towards the product. And the data is Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, matched to Taobao sales from around 2019, observational rather than experimental. Anyone quoting it as a clean verdict on TikTok in 2026 is overreaching.

What it does support, at a scale nothing else in this literature matches, is a practical point: engagement rate is a fine measure of a creator's relationship with their audience and a poor proxy for whether that audience will buy your product. Use it for what it measures.

What the wider evidence supports

Two meta-analyses published in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science in 2025 are the best synthesis available. One covers 71 papers, 135 experimental studies and 571 effect sizes. The other covers 1,531 effect sizes from 251 articles and 2,009,314 individuals across 27 countries.

The effects are real, statistically significant and consistent. Influencer exposure correlates at r equals 0.14 with engagement and r equals 0.11 with purchase intention. Creator content beats brand owned posts on both. Against traditional celebrities it wins on engagement and ties on purchase intention.

These are experimental effect sizes on self reported outcomes, so they are not financial returns. What they settle is the shape of the thing. Creator selection, briefing and measurement are practical decisions you can improve when planning a campaign. Those are the creators you pick, how you brief them, and how you measure.

There is one moderator worth having. Smaller and mid sized creators drive more engagement, larger creators drive more purchase intention. The underlying contrast is a binary large versus small and medium split, so it does not license claims about specific follower tiers, but it is a solid reason to match creator size to your objective rather than to a rule of thumb.

Creator selection, briefing and measurement are practical decisions you can improve when planning a campaign.

Build the shortlist around the goal

Put the evidence to work in four moves.

1. Start from the campaign goal, and let it choose the creator size. Purchase intention and conversion point you towards larger creators; community response, comments and content you can reuse point you towards smaller ones.
2. Judge fit on content, not on a column. Watch the creator's normal posts and their prior sponsored work. Does the product belong in that feed? Would the audience recognise it as a natural recommendation? That is the product specific engagement the Harvard and MIT study found does predict lift.
3. Ask for the audience figures that matter to you, evidenced. Audience location, age split and the metrics for the format you are buying are things a creator can show you from their own dashboard. They tell you who will see the post.
4. Confirm interest before you plan around anyone. Whether a creator will say yes is the one thing no public metric can show. It exists only once someone asks. The ask has to name your Creator Call, your budget, your timeline and your product.

A shortlist built this way is smaller than a database export and far more useful, because every name on it has already cleared the questions that decide whether a campaign happens.

Whether a creator will say yes is the one thing no public metric can show. It exists only once someone asks.

Where the returns come from

If the effect size is dependable and execution decides its size, the returns in a mature programme come from the operational parts: how fast you get from Creator Call to live, how many relevant creators you can get in front of, whether they are briefed properly, whether payment is smooth enough that they come back next quarter, and whether you measure the outcome you set out to move.

Where CreatorCall sits

We built the product around the four moves above.

Relevant creators are invited to your Creator Call and you review their offers as they arrive. Specify the product, deliverables, audience, rights, budget and timeline so each quote responds to the actual job.

You can begin a conversation with a promising creator when their offer arrives. Outreach follows the agreed finite plan; you do not wait for a delivered shortlist, and replies can continue afterwards while the campaign is open.

Each offer shows the creator’s quote and supplied information. Screenshots are creator-reported evidence, and gaps stay visible. Email verification does not prove audience quality. Once work is published, review campaign performance with the metric’s source and denominator shown.

A directory supplies possible leads. An offer confirms that a creator responded to this work at the quoted terms. It still needs your review of fit, scope, rights and timing before booking.

Every collaboration includes a cash fee. Optional commission is additional to that fee, with eligibility, attribution, any cap, returns and payout timing agreed upfront. Connected-store commissions use verified tracked orders. For Amazon, first confirm that commission is available for your campaign. Where supported, agree one percentage of eligible Amazon-attributed aggregate sales across the creator's links and ads, rather than an individual-order calculation. See the Amazon Attribution guide.

A campaign costs $99 paid upfront, with no monthly subscription, credits or creator unlocks. Creator fees, optional commissions, ad spend and applicable payment fees are separate. Chat, agreements, content review, payments and results stay in the same campaign. You decide who to hire and what to approve.

CreatorCall grew out of our hands-on experience running creator campaigns.

The test

Run one Creator Call through it beside your current sourcing. Compare on time from Creator Call to confirmed yes, and on how many confirmed creators you get per hour of your own time. Then compare the campaign on the goal you set at the start.

Those are the numbers that turn a creator programme into one worth defending in a budget review.

Sources

• Yang, Zhang and Zhang, "Engagement That Sells: Influencer Video Advertising on TikTok," Marketing Science, published online 20 December 2024, vol. 44 no. 2 (2025). Douyin matched to Taobao sales, observational, circa 2019.
• Barari, Eisend and Jain, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 2025.
• Pan, Blut, Ghiassaleh and Lee, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 2025.