Element Human, a campaign measurement software provider, is launching a sophisticatedly simple measure to predict campaign impact, revealing full funnel performance. Stopping and Staying Power (SSP) is a measurement framework to compare creators, creatives, platforms, content types, and brands.

Element Human believes it’s a solution to the measurement gap plaguing brands and creators. SSP measures the extent to which the content captures attention in the social feed, then commits the brand into memory. 

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Rob Sanders, Director of Measurement, Influencer weighed in: 

“Our partnership with Element Human is helping us to lead the industry in creator marketing measurement. They provide us with unparalleled depth of insight into how our campaigns perform.

Their cutting edge technology and innovative methodology mean that we not only measure the impact of creator content for brands, but we can also explain the "why" behind those results. This delivers powerful learnings and actionable recommendations for both us as an agency and our clients.”

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Stopping Power means the content is getting attention; it’s standing out in the infinite scroll of social media. Being better here drives impact at the top of the funnel - awareness of the brand. 

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Staying Power means the brand will be remembered; the content has created an emotional association with the brand that will endure. Being better here boosts performance at the bottom of the funnel - intent to purchase.

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SSP ranks each of the creators and/or creatives against the Element Human creator content database. The measure uses key performance indicators that matter to brands in those two crucial areas (attention and memory) to produce a single score to predict campaign impact. 

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Industry veteran, Gaz Alushi, President, Measurement & Analytics at Whalar had this to say about SSP:

"Element Human has been an invaluable partner in showing the business impact creators can have on brand performance.

The development of the SSP framework takes this to the next level by giving brands the opportunity to understand not only effectiveness, but opportunities for optimization, and is a powerful tool that will help brands continue to grow through the creator economy."

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Creator agencies such as Whalar are finding the right creator and platform fit for a brand’s campaign objective within a day or two. Helping them and their customers, some of the largest brands out there, understand the impact creators are having on brand performance. 

Let’s take a step back and start with a look at the creator economy. The creator economy has over 207 million content creators (Linktree), and is a $127.65B market, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.5% (Coherent Market Insights).

Creator/Influencer marketing spend is forecasted to be $24B globally in 2024, growing at a CAGR of 34.2% since 2016 (Statista). Dr Hamish McPharlin, Managing Director at Element Human on the value and challenge of creator marketing:

“What makes creator content great is exceptional storytelling. Creators are masters at telling stories to their audiences and creator marketing gives permission for brands to enter that hallowed, intimate space.

Until now, it has been really hard to measure just how well brands do in there, because the tools we have only really tell us how well the storytelling is going.

With SSP, our clients are now able to get to the truth of how well each creator and creative in their campaign is delivering on brand goals, and understand WHY it’s working. We’re really excited by the enthusiasm and take-up of SSP from our agency and brand partners.” 

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Despite the large and rapidly growing market opportunity, the majority of brands and creators are struggling to reap the potential. 94.0% of content creators and influencers worldwide are generating less than $10,000 in revenue, and 72.0% are generating less than $500 (Statista). 68.8% of creator’s revenue comes from brand deals (Statista). 

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Not surprisingly, the top challenge for creators is finding brands to sponsor them (Statista). On the brand side, their biggest challenge with influencer marketing is finding the right partner for their objectives (Influencer Marketing Hub).

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So what gives? Do they need a matchmaker? Yes, top creator agencies such as Whalar and Influencer are leading the matchmaking charge, pairing brands with creators. But some things are still missing for all parties; there’s no consensus on how to measure success.

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The top two challenges marketers face when working with a creator are: determining success metrics and determining payment rates (Statista). The most common method marketers use to measure success is views/reach/impressions (Influencer Marketing Hub).

Not surprisingly, CFOs aren’t sold on investing based on views. What’s the impact to the business? What’s the ROI?

So marketers are turning towards an equally crude method to measure success: paying creators based on attributable sales. For the first time, in 2024, the most widely used method of paying creators is a percentage of sales they can track (Influencer Marketing Hub).

This works great in theory. The brand wants to gain customers and boost sales. The creator wants to deliver an impactful partnership that meets their sponsor’s objectives. So impact is tracked using a variety of tactics, such as coupon codes, referral links, and email addresses (Influencer Marketing Hub).

However, it doesn’t work well in practice - only around 1.2% of viewers take action that can be attributed back to the ad (HootSuite). If the content’s impact is an iceberg, the platform proxy metrics are visible above the surface. 

So what about the 98.8% of viewers? Most of the impact goes under the bridge. And that’s the key factor holding back the creator marketing spend.

Marketers are coming around to the value, creators know the value of their passionate audiences, but businesses struggle to invest without being able to measure the impact. This is the problem Element Human is dedicated to solving, so the entire ecosystem can flourish.

Element Human’s AI technology uses biometric data to measure emotions viewers are feeling and where their attention is directed to while viewing the content. This enables their customers to see the 98.8% of the iceberg, submerged under the surface. 

SSP is a high fidelity way to predict campaign performance and calibrate against the deepest set of creator content benchmarks with over 30,000,000,000 rows of data, collected over 10 years across 223 brands. This enables customers such as Whalar and Influencer to assess their content’s full impact. Then they can optimize their creator/brand plus platform pairing strategy. 

Here's a little sneak peek of SSP in action from Jo Cronk (Whalar), Hamish McPharlin (Element Human), and Jasmine Enberg (eMarketer) - live on the stage at Advertising Week 2024 in NYC.

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SSP captures the human interaction with the content and predicts business outcomes for the brand. And we're just getting started. Founder and CEO, Matt Celuszak:

“The media industrial complex is built on a foundation of proxy metrics and benchmarks that miss whether people actually pay attention, emotionally react, or remember the content.

Stopping Power and Staying Power puts audience engagement first and opens up a whole new way to value creators, media, and inventory around quality marketing spend.

In a world where half of marketing spend is effective, marketers now know which half with authentic human data that’s good for creators, good for brands, and good for you and I”.