When an influencer with tens to hundreds of thousands of followers is in talks with a brand, there is a good chance that many of those followers are entirely irrelevant to the campaign. 

Yet most agencies still negotiate based on total follower count, wasting marketing dollars on phantom audiences.

In a situation like this, brands would benefit from having someone like Moburst by their side. This growth agency specializes in helping brands achieve measurable growth through precision-targeted creator marketing. It aids major brands like Google, Microsoft Gaming, Uber, and Robinhood in elevating their growth and achieving their goals. 

As part of their services, they manage creator partnerships by replacing subjective influencer selection with quantifiable audience analysis.

“Our goal is to help our clients to overachieve their growth goals,” says Gilad Bechar, founder and CEO of Moburst. “Everything that we do is geared toward growth and making sure that our clients will be able to continue ruling the market, becoming the category leaders or staying the category leaders of each and every niche.”

Founded in 2013 as a mobile marketing firm, Moburst has expanded to 27 specialized services, such as web design, app development, and video production, through strategic acquisitions of complementary agencies.

Beyond Vanity Metrics

The creator economy has long struggled with measurement challenges. Gilad is outspoken about this industry-wide challenge that combines both vanity metrics and attribution difficulties.

“Most agencies that we are speaking and seeing in the market are talking about business impact, but they don’t have the numbers to back it up,” he explains. “They’re talking about, ‘Yeah, look at that. We managed to still get 400,000 views from that specific type of collaboration.’ But what does that mean for actual business results? How many purchases did the brand get because of it? How many subscribers did it have, and how many people came back to the brand?”

This challenge is compounded by consumer behavior that defies linear tracking. “You have a massive number of people that didn’t trust you to go to the link in the bio,” Gilad notes. “They just Google that specific brand name. They found it organically, and the value was captured as an organic uplift. And when it’s an organic uplift, how many purchases did we get, how many sales did we get, how many subscriptions did we get because of that activity?”

Moburst addresses these twin challenges through both precision targeting and advanced measurement. On the targeting side, their data-first approach transforms negotiations with creators:

“From the 400,000 followers that influencer has, only 160,000 meet my criteria for the campaign. Now, for 160,000 followers, I’m willing to pay X and not 2X or 3X,” Gilad explains.

For measurement, they’ve developed sophisticated methodologies that examine before-and-after performance while leveraging AI for deeper insight:

“I think today, with the use of AI, it’s much easier,” Gilad explains. “I can just throw all the different engagements into a custom GPT we created and, say, analyze the sentiment. How much of that was positive, how much of that was negative, how much of that was things that I would like to resonate with as a brand.”

This comprehensive approach spans Moburst’s entire service ecosystem:

• Strategy Services: Mobile strategy, digital strategy, social media, product design, analytics and business intelligence
• Organic Growth: App store optimization, search engine optimization, conversion rate optimization, PR and thought leadership
• Creative Production: Concept development, video production, UI/UX design, UGC videos
• Media Buying: Social, search, influencer marketing, email campaigns, programmatic and OTT
• Development: Wireframes, websites, apps, and custom tools

Content Intelligence

These measurement challenges directly informed Moburst’s development of advanced AI tools that go beyond basic attribution to provide actionable content optimization insights. 

The agency has built proprietary AI systems that analyze video content to identify exactly which elements drive engagement for specific audiences. This technology examines thousands of videos and scores them on multiple parameters to identify patterns that would be impossible to detect manually.

“We are analyzing the pace of the video, who’s the spokesperson in the video. Is it the male? Is it the female? All of the different data points,” Gilad explains. “From 2,000 videos, the best performing are those 60, but from those 60, the things that actually work the best are the ones that have a hook starting in the first two to three seconds or focusing in here on that and every one of those parameters.”

This granular analysis provides insights a human could hardly detect alone. “You have so many things happening in every single second of every single video that it’s impossible to detect what made it more successful or less successful,” Gilad says. “But data, when you’re extracting data, and you’re looking at all of those things and giving and scoring them on all of those parameters, you start seeing clusters.”

A New Model of Value Calculation

Beyond content analysis, Moburst has developed what Gilad calls “brandformance”—a hybrid model that recognizes how influencer marketing delivers both brand awareness and performance metrics.

“I think most of my clients today are saying it needs to be part of the mix, but it also needs to be a special type of treatment for that,” Gilad explains. “Because it’s not just performance, it’s like ‘brandformance’. Like I’m getting brand awareness, and I’m also getting performance, but it’s a different type.”

This dual nature requires a different approach to valuation than traditional digital marketing channels. Brands are increasingly willing to accept different ROI calculations for creator partnerships compared to other channels.

“I’m willing to pay more for influencers because I understand the value it brings to my brand,” Gilad explains from a client perspective. “When I compare it to Facebook ads, for example, in Facebook, it might be $100 per purchase, but here it’s $120.”

This more nuanced understanding acknowledges that creator partnerships deliver multiple benefits beyond immediate conversions. “You’re getting the creative, and then you can use that creative for the next six months or 12 months. You can even use that as advertisement later on outside of the value you got from the people who got to see that organically from that post,” Gilad adds.

Redefine Meat: Solving the Digital Taste Challenge

Moburst’s data-driven approach to creator marketing is perhaps best illustrated by their work with Redefine Meat, a food tech company that creates 3D-printed plant-based steaks. The campaign faced a unique challenge: how do you convey a sensory experience like taste through digital channels?

“For them, we created the brand book and everything that focuses much more on the side of going after the Gen Z,” Gilad explains. “How can we approach the younger generation, the rebels, the ones that are actually making the world a better place? The ones that are all about making the world what we’ve got before doesn’t mean that this is what we need to have in the future.”

The solution was a multi-faceted creator strategy that focused on authentic reactions. “Using influencer marketing, sending many influencers to restaurants and seeing them taste it for the first time. How they feel when they’re tasting it, sending vegetarians to taste it. ‘Oh my God, I feel like I’m eating. I can’t believe that this is not the real thing. Like it feels the same,'” Gilad describes.

The campaign leveraged data to target specific audience segments and used creator content to bridge the experiential gap. “If the campaign is digital and you need to make people feel like they are missing a flavor, how can you pass a flavor through the screen?” Gilad asks. That gap was bridged through using those creators, that type of creative, and that type of influencers that brought that authenticity in.”

The results speak for themselves: “We managed to get them within 11 months from zero followers to 250,000 followers,” Gilad shares. “We got them spread in eight different markets in eight different languages, sold in thousands of restaurants all around Europe, and into hundreds of retailers.” The success helped the company raise a $135 million Series A round.

The Future: AI, Efficiency, and Progress

For Gilad, the future of effective creator marketing lies in the intersection of data and creativity, with AI playing an increasingly central role. “If you use data, creativity, and bold actions, I think that you can conquer any marketing challenge out there,” he advises.

As AI tools become more sophisticated, Moburst is investing heavily in building even more advanced capabilities. “Another project we are investing heavily in is AI and implementing AI in every single department,” Gilad reveals. Rather than focusing solely on headcount expansion, Gilad now emphasizes efficiency improvements enabled by AI tools.

This shift has caused Gilad to reconsider his original growth targets: “I think that it’s much more about the efficiency of how we can do much more with the team you have.”

Yet despite this emphasis on data and technology, Gilad acknowledges that human judgment remains essential. “Not every content piece is gold,” he admits. “We’re still making lots of different hypotheses, different tests. Some of them are working fantastically. Some of them don’t. It’s part of digital. And we are trying to be very humble about it, but also learning extremely fast about what works and what doesn’t.”