Key Takeaways
- Stopping the scroll and building the brand are two different jobs, and footwear brands vary widely on each.
- One leading sportswear brand's creators sit in the top quartile, both holding attention and making the brand stick.
- Two other footwear brands are strong on Staying Power (brand memory) but have room to improve at stopping the scroll.
- One of the category's biggest brands has creators in the bottom-left quartile, weak on both.
- Scale and fame don't automatically translate into top-tier creator performance.
Footwear is one of the most creator-heavy categories on social. Unboxings, fit checks, run-club clips, sneaker rotations. With so much content, you'd expect the biggest brands, with the biggest creator rosters, to come out on top.
When I pulled a handful of footwear brands from our industry-wide dataset, that isn't what we found.
How do footwear brands compare on creator content?
Footwear brands spread right across the Stopping & Staying Power chart. Stopping & Staying Power ranks every creator video we test against its social platform on two questions: does it stop the scroll, and does it get the brand into long-term memory? Here's how the measure works.
- Top quartile: one leading sportswear brand's creators are both holding attention and making sure the brand sticks.
- Strong on memory: two other footwear brands have creators who build lasting brand memory, but there is room to improve on stopping the scroll.
- Bottom left: one of the category's biggest brands has creators who currently sit in the bottom-left quartile, below the line on both measures.
- Remembered, not stoppingFootwear brand BFootwear brand C
- Top quartileLeading sportswear brand
- Below the line on bothOne of the biggest names
- Stopping, not remembered
Stopping Power (holds attention) →
Brands anonymised. Quadrants show where each brand sits, not exact scores.
Why doesn't a big name guarantee results?
Because the feed doesn't care how famous you are. Repping a big name isn't a guarantee of the best results. A creator video still has to earn the stop, and then make sure the brand, not just the creator or the product, is what people remember.
Big brands can fall into the trap of assuming recognition does the work. It gets the brand noticed, but it doesn't build new associations on its own.
What should footwear brands do with this?
- Plot every creator video. Score each one on stopping power and staying power, not just views.
- Fix the weaker job. If your creators are strong on memory, work on the first seconds. If they stop the scroll but don't stick, put the brand inside the moment people enjoy.
- Upweight what works. Move spend towards the creators and videos in the top-right quadrant during the campaign.
The lesson? Stopping the scroll and building the brand are two different jobs. The best creator campaigns do both.
How we measured this
For this analysis we took a handful of footwear brands from Element Human's industry-wide dataset of creator videos tested in simulated social feeds, and scored each on Stopping Power (in-feed attention) and Staying Power (implicit association uplift against a control group), ranked against other content on the same platform. Brands are not named. Element Human also tests brand ads as well as creator content, across social feeds (TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube Shorts), CTV pre-rolls and sponsorships in simulated Netflix and Prime Video environments, and standalone video such as TV ads. Every test compares an exposed group with a control group of people who did not see the content.
About the author
Hamish McPharlin is Chief Customer Officer at Element Human, where he helps brands prove and optimise the impact of their advertising. He previously worked at the BBC and CNN. Follow Hamish on LinkedIn.
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