How Liquid I.V. and MCoBeauty Turn Creator Data Into Action

Every brand is fighting for the same thing: attention. But more creators, more content, and more spend don't automatically create it.

So how do you know the right strategy for your brand? That's the insight at the heart of VIT, Traackr's proprietary framework for measuring and improving creator marketing performance. It shows you the specific path to success based on where your program actually stands today.

To see what that looks like in practice, we spoke with Luke Henika from Liquid I.V. and Hayley Rayman from MCoBeauty, who've had to make real decisions about where to focus, what to change, and how to move quickly when the data points to an opportunity.

The Framework: What VIT Actually Measures

VIT stands for Visibility, Impact, and Trust. As a score, it's a single transparent number that quantifies brand attention and ranks performance across your competitive set. But the real value lies in what it tells you to do next.

The framework breaks down creator marketing performance into four actionable levers:

• Creator Volume: how many creators are talking about your brand
• Frequency: how often each creator mentions you
• Average Audience Size: how many people each creator reaches per post
• Content Performance: how efficiently that content generates engagement and views

These four levers multiply together to produce your VIT score. And because they multiply, a brand can reach the same total through very different combinations. One brand might win through sheer creator volume and frequency. Another might get there through fewer, larger creators with exceptional content performance. Neither is wrong. The question is which path fits your program.

"The power of VIT isn't just knowing your score. It's knowing which lever to pull."
- Taylor Rodriguez, Global VP of Customer Experience at Traackr

That's what makes VIT a strategy tool, not just a measurement tool. When your score drops, it tells you which lever moved. When you're deciding where to invest next, it shows you which lever has the most room to grow. The path to more attention becomes a concrete, data-backed choice rather than a guess.

See the breakdown of your brand’s VIT performance on Traackr’s creator marketing performance leaderboard. 

Tip #1: More creators is not the same as more attention

Data from Traackr's Creator Advantage 2026 report makes this point clearly: across industries, brands expanded their creator ecosystems significantly year over year, yet most saw their total attention decline. 

The reason is that scale without strategy dilutes performance. More creators posting more content does not automatically translate into better engagement, larger reach, or stronger brand trust.

MCoBeauty experienced this firsthand. When the brand launched in the US, the strategy was deliberately volume-driven: get as many creators as possible talking about the brand and build awareness fast. It worked as a launch play. But as Hayley explained, the program needed to evolve.

"Just because we have 80-plus creators a month speaking about us doesn't necessarily mean we're reaching our target audience or that it's resonating with the consumer."
- Hayley Rayman, Influencer Campaign Manager at MCoBeauty

The shift was from transactional partnerships toward longer-term, multi-episodic collaborations, like their 'IYKYKMCo' content series. Rather than activating creators once and moving on, the team began deepening relationships with specific creators over time, allowing momentum to compound across posts instead of starting from scratch with each campaign. 

Tip #2: Let organic content tell you what to amplify

One of the clearest patterns in the Creator Advantage report is the growing role of boosting. Brands boosted content at dramatically higher rates year over year, with Beauty up 129%, Food and Bev up 142%, and Personal Care up 95%. Yet engagement per view fell overall, suggesting a lot of that amplification budget is landing with less-interested audiences.

The brands that used boosting most effectively used it as a signal: let content live organically first, watch what resonates with real audiences, and then amplify what's already working. Liquid I.V. arrived at this model through direct experience.

Luke described a period when the brand was investing heavily in polished, brand-approved, science-forward content for TikTok, and it simply wasn't landing. The turning point came from an unexpected source: Benny Blanco pouring Liquid I.V. on watermelon in an organic post. The comment section was proof that communicating the science in a fun, relatable way landed far better than anything the brand had scripted.

"We flipped it on its head, went the organic route, and that was the kick-start for realizing organic can outperform brand-say assets."
- Luke Henika, Partnerships & US Comms Lead at Liquid I.V. International

The team reposted Benny's content with a light, tongue-in-cheek caption and watched it outperform everything they'd produced with formal creative direction. From there, Liquid I.V. restructured their entire workflow around an organic-to-paid model: start with owned content, develop earned traction, identify what resonates, then put paid amplification behind it.

"We have to move at the speed of what all of our consumers want to engage with. Being ready to add that extra boost and amplification when the data trends positive is critical."
- Luke Henika, Partnerships & US Comms Lead at Liquid I.V. International

Tip #3: Focus on engagement signals that show genuine intent 

When it comes to evaluating content performance, most teams default to engagement rate. Both Luke and Hayley pushed back on that instinct, not because engagement rate is worthless, but because it's increasingly easy to misread.

"Engagement rate is just such an undirectional metric at this point. It helps validate audience size and engagement, but the derived strategy behind it is really tough to tell just based off those numbers on the page."
- Luke Henika, Partnerships & US Comms Lead, Liquid I.V. International 

The metrics both teams have started weighting more heavily are the ones that signal genuine intent: saves, shares, and video completion rate.

Saves, according to Hayley, are one of the most meaningful indicators MCoBeauty tracks. A save implies the viewer found something worth returning to, either for personal use or to share with someone else. It's a signal of durable interest, not just passive scrolling.

"Shares and saves are really important to us because it implies they're gonna come back later, or they found something in it that is worth sending to more people."
- Hayley Rayman, Influencer Campaign Manager at MCoBeauty

Video completion rate is where Luke focuses most when assessing whether a piece of content is genuinely engaging. At a time when Liquid I.V. is reluctant to produce anything longer than 15 seconds, getting someone to watch all the way through is a meaningful bar. On Instagram, shares and likes serve as additional validation layers on top of completion: did someone watch it, and did it earn a share to a friend?

Tip #4: The brief should set the stage, not write the script

Saves, shares and video completions comes from content that resonates with a creator’s audience. A heavy brief is the fastest way to lose that. 

"Creators are the experts of their own channel. If it's too brand-say, the audience knows it right away."
- Luke Henika, Partnerships & US Comms Lead at Liquid I.V. International

Hayley's approach at MCoBeauty is to put the key messaging points and mandatory guidelines in the brief, then step back. If a creator hits the dos and don'ts and lands the core message, they know better than the brand team how to deliver it to their specific community.

Equally important: update the brief regularly. Both Luke and Hayley treat their briefs as living documents, iterating by quarter or by campaign based on what the data shows is working.

"Our briefs are constantly evolving and constantly changing. Moving at the speed of culture, you kind of have to have your briefs translate that as well."
-- Hayley Rayman, Influencer Campaign Manager at MCoBeauty

The Takeaway: Data only matters if you act on it 

There is no universal playbook for creator marketing. 

Liquid I.V. found its edge through an organic-first testing model and amplifying what audiences already respond to. MCoBeauty found its by deepening creator relationships and letting performance data guide long-term partnerships.

The lesson isn’t to copy either strategy. It’s to use data to identify which lever your program needs to pull next and act on it.

That last part is the hard part. The bottleneck is rarely the data. It's the organizational infrastructure to move quickly on it — leadership buy-in, a short decision-making path, and a workflow built for speed.

That kind of agility doesn't happen when creator performance data lives in spreadsheets, platform exports, and agency decks that don't talk to each other. It happens when there's a single platform where every stakeholder is looking at the same data. Traackr is built to be that system of record, so when the data points to an opportunity, your team is ready to move.

Download the Creator Advantage 2026 report for more insights and listen to the full conversation with Luke and Hayley here.