Brands and creators dance in perfect harmony, their partnerships yielding four times the results of their competitors. 

This isn’t a marketer’s fever dream — it’s the promise of Traackr’s latest set of analytics, Creator Lifecycle. 

In an industry where churn is the norm and long-term relationships are as rare as viral posts, Traackr co-founder & CEO Pierre-Loïc Assayag is betting big on a radical idea: treat creators like valuable business partners, not disposable content machines. 

But can data-driven ‘scalable intimacy’ transform the volatile world of influencer marketing? 

In an exclusive interview with Net Influencer, Pierre explains why the Creator Lifecycle comes at a time when the industry is grappling with the challenges of creator retention and the need for more strategic, long-term partnerships. 

From Web Analytics to Influencer Insights

Founded in the late 2000s, Traackr began as a tool to reorganize web analytics around authorship. 

“We thought that organizing or reorganizing the web around authorship would be a good anchor to finding a signal to figure out where performance lay,” Pierre explains. 

This insight led to the development of Traackr’s analytics platform, which now supports large-scale influencer marketing programs for global enterprises.

The company’s latest innovation, highlighted in their State of Creator Relationships report, focuses on creator retention analytics. 

Pierre notes that as influencer marketing grows, it’s beginning to mirror customer relationship management (CRM) practices. 

“When we have clients that manage communities of tens or even hundreds of thousands of creators, it just gravitates towards the CRM world,” he tells us.

The report emphasizes the critical importance of creator retention for campaign effectiveness and cost efficiency. 

Pierre points out, “The highest cost is the cost of negotiating a contract or starting to get known within a community of creators. [It] takes more time, more effort, more money. So acquisition is very expensive.”

Beyond the visible costs, Pierre highlights an often-overlooked factor: “When you acquire new creators, they produce less for you. [They] have fewer results because the level of authenticity working with a new brand partner is much lower than if their audience already knows that they work with you.”

Traackr focuses on retention analytics to help brands optimize their influencer relationships. 

“The notion of pivoting to starting to think about retention to [acquire] the right creators, make sure that they produce for you and keep them interested over time, completely changes the economic model of influencer marketing,” Pierre states.

The entrepreneur reveals that client demand drove this innovation. 

“We just look at our clients, the ones that are the most advanced in the space,” he shares. “They were already doing this work manually to figure out retention churn acquisition.”

Creator Lifecycle

Pierre introduces the company’s latest set of analytics: the Creator Lifecycle feature. 

This new tool aims to transform how brands manage their influencer relationships by focusing on the entire creator journey, from acquisition to churn.

“We’re not talking about just sheer retention in and of itself. We’re talking about that life cycle,” Pierre explains.

Image: Creator Lifecycle interface

The Creator Lifecycle goes beyond simple retention metrics, acknowledging that acquisition, retention, and churn are all key elements in the influencer marketing ecosystem.

What distinguishes this tool apart is its depth of analysis. 

Pierre emphasizes, “We bring the depth of detailed analytics so that our clients can understand good churn versus bad churn.” 

According to him, the potential impact of this tool is significant. 

“If you recognize or discover that the cost of acquisition of a creator is twice the cost of retention [and] their productivity for your brand, their performance is half of what it is for a retained creator, the performance difference between applying lifecycle measurement and not is four x,” Pierre notes.

However, leveraging these insights requires strategic shifts. Brands may need to reevaluate their reliance on agencies and take more direct ownership of creator relationships. 

“The brand must transfer that ownership to them,” Pierre advises, explaining that this allows brands to fully exploit the value of their partnerships across various marketing campaign initiatives.

For brands looking to implement Creator Lifecycle insights, Pierre recommends starting with honest self-assessment. 

“Don’t be afraid of getting started. Just look at the data. Put a mirror in front of you, even if it looks bad,” he urges. 

While potentially challenging, this initial step can lead to transformative improvements in influencer marketing performance.

Churn and Retention

While Traackr’s new Creator Lifecycle tool provides access to competitors’ churned creator lists, Pierre downplays its impact. 

“We’re just making it easier and faster to access market-level insights. But that information is out there if you want it,” he explains.

Instead, Pierre emphasizes the importance of brands interpreting their churn data strategically. 

He parallels Traackr’s early days as a SaaS company.

“In the early days of Traackr, we would kiss any frog or brand that wanted to work with us,” Pierre tells us. “A few years into the business, we realized this was a really bad business model because we had high churn and low satisfaction from these customers that weren’t well adapted to what we offered.”

This lesson applies directly to influencer marketing. Pierre advises brands to view churn as a potential positive, especially in the early stages of adopting a retention-focused strategy. 

“The notion that in the early days of adopting a system like this, you would experience higher churn than you did is okay. You just need to understand the reason behind the churn,” he states.

Image: Creator Lifecycle interface

Pierre stresses the interconnectedness of acquisition and retention strategies. 

“Retention and churn cannot happen properly without a very strict and meaningful acquisition strategy,” he notes. 

This means prioritizing quality over quantity in creator partnerships, focusing on long-term compatibility rather than short-term tactical gains.

While specific case studies are limited due to client confidentiality, Pierre points to the B2B2C sector as a model for successful retention strategies. 

He cites examples from the beauty industry, such as L’Oreal’s Redken, which has a long-established strategy for acquiring and retaining relationships with hairdressers.

Balancing Data and Human Nature

Pierre highlights the crucial balance between data-driven insights and human touch in managing creator relationships. 

While Traackr’s Creator Lifecycle tool provides powerful analytics, the industry veteran stresses that the human element remains indispensable.

Product seeding emerges as a key strategy in this balance. 

“Creators like to be insiders to a brand,” Pierre explains, hinting at how seeding can maintain regular engagement. 

However, he cautions that it’s just one piece of a larger retention strategy: “Seeding is a key element because it’s easy and scalable. It’s not the only one.”

Pierre introduces the concept of “scalable intimacy” in creator relationships, crediting G20 Ventures’ Mike Troiano for the term. 

This approach contrasts sharply with traditional consumer relationship management. 

“You need to preserve the human; you must preserve that touch,” Pierre insists. “Short of that, automating or productizing your relationship with creators goes against the very definition of a relationship.”

According to Pierre, the role of data and AI is to “clear the field from all the noise so that you can spend your time on things that are most meaningful and move away all the monkey work that can be automated.”

Traackr’s tool offers granular, platform-specific insights, allowing brands to “slice and dice data in any way you wish.” 

Pierre focuses on maintaining the “chain of custody of data,” enabling users to drill down from high-level trends to specific posts and understand the levers driving performance in their influencer marketing strategies.

Challenges and Opportunities of Creator Lifecycle

Pierre notes that the primary challenge lies in obtaining and acting upon insights. 

Many brands have outsourced their creator relationships to agencies, making it difficult to pivot when data reveals inefficiencies. 

Pierre believes brands may need to reclaim direct relationships with creators, potentially straining agency partnerships.

However, the opportunities for early adopters are significant. 

Pierre points to a broader shift in marketing dynamics: “We see a significant shift of digital dollars moving towards creative content and boosting.”

Image: Creator Lifecycle interface
 

The expansion of influencer marketing’s scope amplifies the impact of retention strategies. 

“The four x becomes 20 x,” Pierre states, referring to the potential performance gap between brands that optimize creator relationships and those that don’t.

He argues that early adopters stand to gain an “unfair competitive advantage.” The tool enables brands to invest in long-term creator relations, aligning with creators’ preferences for stability. 

“Creators want nothing more than a long-term contract with a brand. They hate the tactical one-off thing,” Pierre observes.

Traackr’s chief envisions a future in which data-driven, long-term creator relationships are the norm, claiming that “the world is ready for this.”

The Professionalization of Creator-Brand Relationships

Based on Traackr’s recent experiences working directly with creators, Pierre has been impressed by their professionalism and business acumen.

“I have been so impressed by the quality of thinking of the creators, their professionalism, their eagerness to be better, so behaving very much like small businesses,” Pierre notes. 

The shift in perception is crucial as brands begin to view creators as business partners rather than merely super fans or hobbyists.

Pierre highlights the mutual understanding between brands and creators. 

Through Traackr’s “Impact” event series, both parties gain insights into each other’s perspectives and needs.

Looking ahead, Pierre predicts increasingly professional relationships. 

“Creators who are not full-time doing this want to become full-time, which means they need to make money,” he tells us. “Brands are figuring out ways to help.”

“There’s just a lot of work that needs to be done, and hopefully, we’ll lead in making the data more available and transparent so that we create a true opportunity for the market to unfold,” Pierre concludes.