Your Creator Data Is Your IP: Here's Why That Changes Everything

Recently at WWD’s Beauty CEO Summit, Traackr’s CEO, Pierre-Loïc Assayag, sat down with Casey DePalma McCartney, Chief Strategy and Brand Communications Officer at Unilever USA, to talk about what it really takes to scale creator marketing. 

If there's one thing to walk away with, Pierre-Loïc made it crystal clear:

"If you have to leave today with just one thought, it's that your IP in the future is your data."

If you’re investing seriously in creator marketing, owning and structuring that data is the strategic foundation on which everything else is built.

Scale alone is not the goal

Influencer marketing is up 26% globally year over year, and organizations like Unilever are making bold public commitments to dramatically expand the number of creators they work with. But Casey made a key point that scale on its own is fairly meaningless since any brand with a big enough budget can transact at scale in this space. What actually separates the leaders is quality and repeatability.

The brands winning in creator marketing today are building operating models around genuine relationships.

"The idea is to scale the relationship, not necessarily to scale just the transactions."  – Pierre-Loïc Assayag, CEO & CoFounder Traackr

Dove is a strong example of what that looks like in practice. After hearing its audience talking about body odor at concerts, the brand launched a personal care campaign built entirely around that insight. Because the creator relationships were already in place and grounded in shared values, the team was able to move from idea to activation in days rather than weeks or months. That kind of speed only comes from having laid the groundwork long before any single campaign.

Vaseline followed a similar instinct. Rather than being rigid about how consumers should use the product, the team practiced genuine social listening and built the "Vaseline Verified" campaign around the off-label hacks their audience was already sharing, like applying it before perfume to make fragrance last longer. The result was growth in areas the brand might never have pursued on its own.

The common thread across all of it is a strong brand identity. Brands with a clear sense of self have more room to experiment because the audience always understands what the brand stands for, regardless of which direction the content takes. While there is no single way to win in creator marketing, the brands making good decisions consistently are the ones who know what's working for them, understand what their competitors are doing, and have the data to back up where they go next.

Owning your creator data is what makes any of this work

The first step is to get a hold of your creator data and put it in one place. Right now, for most brands, that data is fragmented and distributed, sitting with agencies, scattered across platforms, and inconsistently organized. That makes it nearly impossible to draw real insights from it.

Having your creator data in one place is what allows you to actually learn and be able to answer questions like, "Which creators are building genuine equity with your audience? Which formats are driving results? What are your competitors doing, and where is your opportunity?” It turns creator marketing from a series of gut calls into a practice where decisions are grounded in evidence. 

"Even if you don't know what you're going to do with the data today, it's going to feed your AI strategy tomorrow, and it will save you time and money and just build out the IP." -  Pierre-Loïc Assayag, CEO & CoFounder Traackr

From there, the AI opportunity opens up. The agentic systems handling automations will only be as good as the data they are trained on and learning from. Brands that have spent time organizing high-quality, structured creator data will have a meaningful advantage as those systems mature, because the AI will be learning from the best available signal rather than noise.

And that is ultimately what Casey pointed to as the real prize: when automation handles the operational weight of creator marketing, teams get back the time to invest in the genuine relationship building that makes programs work, freeing people up to focus on the decisions and connections that actually require human judgment.

Listen to the full conversation with Pierre-Loïc and Casey here.