Spend less time sourcing creators and more time running the campaign

In March 2025 the World Federation of Advertisers published research on how multinational brands run influencer marketing. One number stood out.

The share of brands using agencies to identify influencers rose from around 54 percent in 2019 to nearly 74 percent in 2025.

These are large companies. 73 responses from 59 multinationals representing over $120 billion in cumulative global marketing spend. They can afford any software they want, and many have in-house creator teams. Over six years, the proportion handing the finding of creators to someone else went up by twenty points.

A caveat before we build on it: this is a small sample skewed heavily to large multinationals, and it measures agency usage rather than hours or cost directly. It is a proxy. But it is an independent proxy from a trade body rather than a vendor, which in this category makes it unusually valuable.

The brands with the most resources have decided that finding creators is work worth delegating. That is a useful signal for everyone else, because the same option now exists at a fraction of an agency retainer.

The brands with the most resources have decided that finding creators is work worth delegating.

The step between a list and a campaign

There is a gap between a list of creators and a campaign, and the gap is where the hours go.

A discovery platform can tell you a creator's follower count, their engagement figures, their apparent category, and sometimes an email address. What it cannot tell you is whether this person will say yes. To your Creator Call. At your budget. On your timeline. With your product.

That answer does not exist in any database, because it has not been created yet. It gets created when somebody asks.

So the list is the beginning of the sourcing work rather than the end of it. You export the names, and then you or your team start asking, chasing, and comparing rates, and the distance between "we have a shortlist" and "we have a campaign" is measured in weeks of someone's time.

We looked hard for good independent data on this step: hours spent sourcing per creator, Creator Call to first post, outreach reply rates, contacts per signed creator. We could not verify any of it to a standard we would publish, so we are not going to invent it. The WFA trend is the strongest independent signal available, and it points the same way.

That answer does not exist in any database, because it has not been created yet. It gets created when somebody asks.

What is worth your time

The parts of a creator campaign that reward attention are the parts that shape the outcome: choosing the goal, deciding which creators fit the brand, writing a Campaign Brief that gives a creator what they need, reviewing drafts, and reading the results. Those are marketing.

The middle is different. Identifying who might fit, contacting them, following up, getting a real rate against a real package and finding out who is actually available is mechanical work. It is important, and it is repetitive, and it does not get better with a senior person doing it. Mechanical work is what you delegate. The parts that shape the outcome are the parts you keep.

Mechanical work is what you delegate. The parts that shape the outcome are the parts you keep.

What we built

CreatorCall exists because we ran the tedious version by hand for long enough to know exactly which part was tedious.

TERCZA is a creator marketing agency. The work that took the time was never strategy or briefing or measurement. It was the middle. So we made the middle the product.

You start a campaign and submit a Creator Call. You get back creators who have already been asked and have already said yes, with the rate they quoted against your specific package. 3 to 7 business days depending on list size, or 2 to 3 on express for 2 times the credits.

There is no search bar and no database to page through. CreatorCall handles the initial sourcing and outreach, and you review the returned shortlist and choose who to work with. The list arrives at the end of the window rather than trickling in, because it is the best of everyone who qualified, not the first few who happened to be quick.

Then the campaign carries on in the same room. Chat with the creators you choose. Contracts and the Campaign Brief. Payment to the creator's own bank account. Post performance once the content is live. Which of those your plan includes is on our pricing page.

No marketplace, no bidding and no markup on creator rates. Creators keep their agreed rate, and after the introduction the relationship is yours.

Three lines, matching how the work is usually structured. Sponsored, where the creator posts and you are buying their audience. UGC, where creators produce content for your brand to use under the usage rights you agree, without requiring them to publish it on their own channels. Ownership and permitted usage should reflect the agreement. Affiliate, where creators promote on commission through the affiliate programme you already run, and we never touch tracking, attribution or payouts.

The short version

Nearly three quarters of large multinationals now pay somebody else to find creators for them. They are doing it because the finding is manual, repetitive, and not what a database solves on its own.

If you are currently exporting shortlists and wondering where your week went, buy the outcome instead: a Creator Call in, a list of yeses out, and your time back for the parts of the campaign that need you.

Sources

• World Federation of Advertisers, 27 March 2025, and Digiday, 2 April 2025. n=73 responses from 59 multinationals; a small sample skewed to large advertisers.