ELEVATE Education: Collaborating with Influencers and Content Creators to Grow Your Audience Reach Authentically

Fashion and beauty influencer Jazzmine Maria posed a question at ELEVATE London that's reshaping how smart affiliates think about creator partnerships: “If money wasn't involved, would I still work with this brand?” This simple test is driving successful affiliates away from vanity metrics toward authentic, performance-driven relationships that actually convert.

ELEVATE's panel session, “Collaborating with Influencers and Content Creators to Grow your Audience Reach, Authentically,” brought together industry figures who revealed both the unprecedented opportunities and emerging challenges reshaping affiliate-influencer collaboration strategies. The panel featured: Adam Fung, Affiliate Marketing Manager at LoveHoney; Greta Dunne, Founder of Marker Video; Liliane Bambara, Influencer Community and Partnerships Manager at Skimlinks; and Jazzmine Maria, whose insights on authentic audience engagement provided a creator's perspective on what truly drives conversion.

Previous ELEVATE Education Series:

• Performance Marketing's Reality Check: Industry Leaders Reveal What's Really Driving Success in 2025
• Leveraging B2B Partnerships To Scale Your Business and Customer Reach
• From ELEVATE Stage to Strategy: Media Buyer Partnership Essentials
• How to Grow Your Google Visibility in an AI World Via Digital PR
• Getting Affiliates and Partnerships on LinkedIn: The Room Strategy

The Volume Revolution: Why Brands Are Abandoning Perfect Influencers for Real Customers

Greta Dunne's revelation about working with Unilever exposes a fundamental shift in influencer strategy that many affiliate marketers have yet to recognise. “We used to want maybe one great influencer or one post a month,” Greta explained, describing conversations with Unilever's head of Vaseline and Dove in the US. “Now we want 50 different types of people talking about one product within one brand—menopausal and non-binary and acne and the whole tapestry of humanity.”

This transformation reflects what industry data confirms: 44% of B2C marketers found the most success with micro-influencers (audiences of 10,000 to 99,999) in 2024, while only 25% had success with macro-influencers. However, the ELEVATE panel revealed that successful brands are going even further—moving beyond traditional influencer categories toward customer-generated content that provides “guaranteed human” authenticity.

The commercial implications are significant. As Greta noted, brands like Unilever can “afford to say, well, let's test this out with 200 videos, let's test this out with 500 people and see what they all say.” This volume approach allows for sophisticated testing and segmentation that traditional single-influencer partnerships cannot provide. Yet it also demands new management systems and relationship-building processes that many affiliates haven't developed.

For affiliate marketers, this trend presents both opportunity and operational complexity. As highlighted in our comprehensive analysis of influencer marketing in fashion affiliates, managing multiple micro-partnerships requires sophisticated systems but delivers superior conversion rates through enhanced audience trust.

Creative Freedom Versus Control: Navigating Brand Safety Without Killing Authenticity

Adam Fung's approach at LoveHoney illustrates how brands can maintain necessary controls while preserving the creative freedom that drives authentic content. “We tend to do sort of not so rigid briefs, but kind of like, you know, do's and don'ts for influencers,” Adam explained. “It's all about sort of from a brand perspective, it's co-creating content rather than dictating it.”

This balance becomes particularly critical in regulated industries. Adam's candid discussion about managing sexual wellness product promotion demonstrates how even sensitive sectors can leverage influencer partnerships through clear guidelines combined with creative flexibility.

Liliane Bambara reinforced this approach from the network perspective, emphasising the importance of “ping-ponging between the two” to ensure both brand requirements and creator authenticity. “We want to give the influencer creative freedom. We don't want to lock them down with a brief,” she noted, while acknowledging that “it's good to know the dos and don'ts so that they can just avoid those and then film the content that is more relevant to them.”

The key insight here challenges common affiliate marketing assumptions about content control. Rather than demanding script adherence, successful partnerships require what Adam described as “investing in a long-term partnership with influencers” where “you kind of develop a real connection with them.”

The Authenticity Imperative: How Creators Identify and Reject Inauthentic Outreach

Jazzmine Maria's insights reveal critical gaps in how many brands approach influencer partnerships. “It's clear when a brand reaches out to me and they don't know much about who I am and my content,” she explained. “I have received so many emails and outreaches and I can see when one's just been AI'd and that makes me not respond.”

This creator perspective highlights a fundamental problem in affiliate marketing's approach to influencer collaboration. Traditional affiliate recruitment focuses on metrics and reach, but successful creators prioritize relationships and alignment. As Jazzmine emphasised, “You want us to love your brand. We need you to love what we do as much as us loving what you guys do.”

The solution requires what Jazzmine termed “human connection”—understanding the creator and their brand rather than simply targeting their audience size. This approach aligns with broader industry trends toward performance-driven partnerships focusing on commissions rather than flat fees, but demands more sophisticated relationship management.

Her advice proves particularly relevant for affiliate marketers: “Show an interest in us before you propose working with us. Whether that's following us on social media, commenting underneath our posts, just show us that we're on your radar.” This relationship-first approach contradicts typical affiliate outreach strategies but delivers superior partnership quality.

As discussed in our recent analysis of TikTok's expanded affiliate features, platforms are building tools to facilitate these relationships, but success depends on affiliates' willingness to invest in genuine partnership development.

Four Critical Actions for Affiliate Success

Based on the panel's insights and current industry evolution, affiliate marketers would be wise to implement these strategic approaches immediately:

Develop Authentic Relationship Protocols: Move beyond transactional outreach toward genuine partnership development. Jazzmine's emphasis on showing interest before proposing collaboration should become standard practice. Create systematic approaches to research potential partners, engage with their content, and demonstrate understanding of their brand and audience before making partnership proposals.

Implement Volume-Based Testing Strategies: Follow Greta's model by developing systems to work with multiple smaller creators simultaneously. This approach provides the testing volume necessary for optimisation while reducing dependency on single high-profile partnerships. Consider developing customer-to-creator programs that leverage existing satisfied customers as authentic content creators.

Balance Control with Creative Freedom: Adopt Adams “do's and don'ts” approach rather than rigid scripting. Successful affiliate programs require clear brand guidelines combined with creative flexibility. Develop partnership briefs that communicate essential requirements while encouraging creator authenticity and voice.

Focus on Long-term Partnership Development: Both Adam and Liliane emphasised the importance of sustained relationships over one-off promotions. As Liliane noted, “if you invest throughout a quarter or over the space of a month or two, then she can try out different types of content and see what works.” Build partnership structures that reward sustained collaboration and performance improvement over time.

The panel's insights reveal that successful influencer-affiliate collaboration requires fundamental changes in how partnerships are initiated, managed, and measured. Creators increasingly demand authentic relationships and creative freedom, while brands need volume and performance accountability. Affiliates who master this balance—combining genuine relationship development with systematic testing and long-term partnership structures—will capture the greatest share of this evolving market opportunity.

The future belongs to affiliate marketers who recognize that influencer collaboration is ultimately about human connection scaled through systematic processes, not algorithmic targeting applied to creative partnerships.

Want to learn directly from industry leaders like these panelists? Secure your tickets for ELEVATE 2026 and gain access to exclusive insights from the practitioners who are reshaping affiliate marketing.

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