This shift in creative strategy is essential for what Hanson sees as the new primary metric. The goal is no longer just immediate, massive reach.

“I think longevity is the new reach,” Hanson declared. “Brands are looking to anchor their business decisions on assets, people, and bets that make sense.” If creators can prove that their content meaningfully drove action—ideally a purchase—then that’s more valuable to the brand than just reach; that’s the kind of impact brands want to invest in, she explained.

Lowering risk with AI and fewer KPIs

The final challenge is how to achieve this durable impact at scale. Blazaitis offered a sharp warning, “Scale without suitability is risk.”

This, Hanson explained, is where AI becomes a critical enabler—not to replace human creators, but to protect brand safety and reduce risk. She described its predictive use in building synthetic audiences to test creative before launch, helping brands forecast performance and make more informed, lower-risk decisions.

This focus on lowering risk must be associated with ruthless simplicity in measurement. “I have some clients who have close to 50 metrics,” Hanson said. “By the time you look at all the different divisions and where you are across the funnel, want to get down to like nine, and then if you can try and get to like three or four, that’s probably a good place.”

For brands new to the creator space, the advice was to adopt modern playbooks and clear measurement frameworks from day one. Meanwhile, for established players, the challenge is internal—to respect the creator specialism and integrate it across all media planning, ensuring everyone is “in service of driving growth.”

As the conversation wound down, the focus turned to trust and shared ownership. Hanson emphasized that when brands genuinely give a part of their voice and mission to people, to creators, to influencers who have a vested interest in your brand as well as their own, it results in better voices, content that shines a light on things that need to be heard, and ultimately a better ecosystem.