e4m D2C Summit: Why brands are looking beyond reach to turn creators into revenue drivers

As influencer marketing matures into a serious commerce channel, brands are increasingly looking beyond reach and follower counts to evaluate creators on relevance, trust, purchase intent and measurable business impact.

This shift came into focus during a panel discussion titled ‘Influencer Commerce: From Content Creators to Revenue Drivers’ at the exchange4media D2C Summit, held in Gurugram on September 10.

Moderated by Shantanu David, Assistant Editor-Technology, exchange4media, the panel featured Arpit Upadhyay, CGO, Beastlife; Vimarsh Razdan, Co-Founder & CEO, Underneat; Saahil Nayar, VP & Business Head, Honasa Consumer; Abhishek Marla, Co-Founder & Director, Revenue Partnerships, The Marvel of Everything; and Damandeep Singh Soni, CBO - Ecommerce, AstroTalk.

The conversation began with the impact of AI on content and commerce, with the panel agreeing that technology will increasingly enable brands to scale rather than necessarily replace existing teams.

However, Damandeep Singh Soni sounded a note of caution around the rush towards AI-generated content, pointing out that the very platforms building AI tools are also beginning to restrict synthetic content.

“The companies and the platforms that built AI don't want AI,” he said, citing his experience of scaling content on TikTok. According to Soni, even content that has only been partially modified using AI can be tagged as AI-generated and see its organic distribution affected.

“What's going to happen for all the platforms, where we're seeing a lot of AI content for distribution, are going to start throttling AI content,” he said, adding that Google too has become more aggressive in identifying low-value AI-led content.

Soni also argued that excessively polished AI output can work against brands in India, where consumers are accustomed to the imperfections of everyday life.

As the conversation moved to influencers, Arpit Upadhyay said Beastlife deliberately avoids treating creators merely as media inventory, and added that creators need to function as an extension of the brand itself.

“Instead of making them the media channel for us, we try to build them as how they can be the brand channel. They communicate the essence of the brand towards the consumers,” he said.

That becomes particularly important when consumers are already in the consideration stage. Upadhyay argued that choosing creators purely on immediate ROI, reach or CPMs can result in partnerships that add little to the brand.

“If we start looking at influencers basis immediate ROI, what's the reach, and maybe like the CPMs that we are getting out of it, we may make a group of influencers which are not adding to the brand,” he said.

The more important question, he suggested, is whether the creator has genuine influence over a relevant audience. In many cases, a smaller creator with a highly engaged and category-relevant community may prove more valuable than a larger influencer delivering mass reach with weaker purchase intent.

Vimarsh Razdan of Underneat argued that brands also need to be clear about where influencer marketing sits in the funnel. “You should have a goal, whether you're applying influencer marketing at top of funnel, middle funnel,” he said, noting that marketers often over-index on expecting bottom-funnel outcomes from every campaign.

Razdan also questioned how accurately brands can predict which creator will perform best. Rather than trying to identify a handful of perfect influencers in advance, Underneat prefers to improve the odds by working with a larger pool of relevant creators and then allowing consumer response to identify the winners.

“Nobody knows who's the best suited influencer for your brand,” he said. “We increase the probability — okay, she's relevant to us, she talks about this segment and all that — but we only do a large number of influencers, work with them, and then let the curation be done by the audience.”

Creators are given freedom to develop content in their own voice, after which the brand observes which pieces gain organic traction and amplifies the strongest performers. “We just choose the influencer on the basis of probability, we allow her to make content based on her own script, and let the audience curate it,” Razdan added.

For Saahil Nayar of Honasa Consumer, influencer strategy also needs to evolve according to the maturity of the brand.

“With scale, what starts happening is, you start using influencers for different brands for a different outcome,” he said.

A younger brand may use creators to drive acquisition and revenue, while an established brand may look at reaching new consumer cohorts or strengthening recall. The important part, Nayar said, is to define the objective before the campaign begins and measure success against that specific outcome.

That discipline also prevents brands from changing success metrics after the campaign. “We are slightly more structured and planned to say, we are doing this for this. So we also measure that outcome,” he added.

The discussion also widened the definition of influencer commerce beyond conventional social creators. Abhishek Marla highlighted the role of editorial formats, listicles, reviews and other high-intent content in influencing purchase decisions, pointing to a broader ecosystem in which publishers, creators and commerce platforms can all shape the customer journey. This is a topic that will be explored in a future e4m article.

The panel also touched upon the growing role of AI in content creation. While AI can help brands generate creative variations and scale output, the speakers noted that access to such technology will quickly become widespread. The differentiator, therefore, will lie in how intelligently brands use it without losing the authenticity that makes creator-led communication effective.

As influencer commerce evolves, the broad consensus was clear: the industry is moving from impressions to influence. The most valuable creators will not necessarily be those with the biggest audiences, but those who reach the right consumers, retain credibility and can be tied back to clearly defined business outcomes.