In this episode of Now that’s Significant, host Michael Howard, Head of Marketing at Infotools, sits down with Ed Keller, CEO of the Keller Advisory Group, to discuss the impact of the creator economy on American consumers. Keller, a leading expert in word of mouth, influencer marketing, and consumer insights, shares valuable insights from his recent study, "Unveiling Influence: The Impact of Creators on American Consumers Lives."

Keller highlights the significant size of the creator economy, revealing that a staggering 27 million paid creators exist in the US, representing 14% of consumers aged 16 to 54. The study also found that 70% of Americans in the same age group follow creators and influencers, with 60% engaging with creator content daily. Keller emphasizes that creator content consistently outperforms traditional advertising across various dimensions, including relevance, emotional connection, trustworthiness, and uniqueness.

The study reveals that consumers primarily seek entertainment and educational value from creator content. Food, beverage, and cooking content emerged as the most popular category, followed closely by entertainment. Instagram and YouTube are the dominant platforms for creator content consumption, with TikTok trailing in third place. Importantly, 80% of consumers reported taking further action after engaging with creator content, with a significant portion researching brands' websites and making purchases.

Here are seven key takeaways from the episode:

+ The creator economy is a significant force, with a vast number of creators and followers.

+ Creator content surpasses traditional advertising in effectiveness across multiple aspects.

+ Consumers value entertainment, education, and product reviews from creator content.

+ Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok are the leading platforms for creator content consumption.

+ Creator content drives consumer action, including brand research, social media engagement, and purchases.

+ Brands should partner with creators who align with their target audience and values.

+ Marketers can leverage creator insights to optimize their strategies and amplify brand messaging.

Tune in to future episodes of Now that’s Significant for more insightful discussions on the latest trends in market research.

***

Infotools Harmoni is a fit-for-purpose market research analysis, visualization, and reporting platform that gives the world’s leading brands the tools they need to better understand their consumers, customers, organization, and market.

www.infotools.com

Established in 1990, we work with some of the world’s top brands around the world, including Coca-Cola, Orange, Samsung, and Mondelēz.

Our powerful cloud-based platform, Harmoni, is purpose-built for market research. From data processing to investigation, dashboards to collaboration, Harmoni is a true "data-to-decision-making" solution for in-house corporate insights teams and agencies.

While we don't facilitate market research surveys, we make it easy for to find and share compelling insights that go over-and-above what stakeholders want, inspiring them to act decisively.

One of the most powerful features of Harmoni is Discover, a time-tested, time-saving, and investigative approach to data analysis. Using automated analyses to reveal patterns and trends, Discover minimizes potential research bias by removing the need for requesting and manually analyzing scores of cumbersome crosstabs – often seeing what you can’t.

Discover helps you easily find what differentiates groups that matter to you, uncover what makes them unique, and deliver data points that are interesting, relevant, and statistically significant, plus see things others can’t. Add to all this an impending GenAI feature, and you have an extremely powerful, future-proofed tool.