Influencer marketing best practices for brands are missing a significant opportunity, and most do not realize it. The frameworks that drove results when every viewer watched on a phone and could tap a link mid-scroll are now underperforming in a world where more than half of YouTube viewing happens on a television. This guide breaks down what still works, what is quietly losing ground because of the shift to TV viewing, and the strategic changes that separate brands getting compounding value from influencer spend from those resetting to zero after every campaign.
The Gap Between Influencer Marketing Advice and How People Actually Watch
Most influencer marketing best practice guides follow a structure that has barely changed since 2018. Choose the right creator. Set clear goals. Agree on deliverables. Use trackable links and discount codes. Measure engagement rate and click-through rate. Optimize and repeat.
That framework made sense when creator content was consumed on a phone screen where the viewer could tap a link, swipe up, or type a code at checkout within seconds. The problem is that viewing behavior has moved on, and the advice has not caught up.
YouTube is now a television channel for more than half of its audience. That single shift has quietly undermined several of the most commonly recommended practices. The viewer cannot click a description link from their sofa. They are unlikely to memorise a discount code while watching a 20-minute video on a large screen. They are in a lean-back state, genuinely interested but not in a position to act. Every best practice that assumes the viewer will respond immediately after seeing the content underperforms in that environment. The attribution challenge this creates for brands is significant, because spend that generates genuine interest shows up as zero conversion in a report that only counts clicks.
This does not mean influencer marketing has stopped working. It means the conversion layer most brands rely on is no longer suited to how people watch, and because it sits underneath everything else, it makes good campaigns look like underperforming ones.
What Still Works Regardless of Where the Content Is Watched
Not everything about traditional influencer marketing needs rethinking. Several fundamentals remain valid because they relate to campaign structure and creator selection rather than to how the viewer responds after watching.
Audience Alignment Still Matters More Than Reach
This has always been the most important decision in any influencer campaign and nothing about the shift to television viewing changes it. A creator with a million followers in the wrong demographic will underperform a creator with fifty thousand followers in exactly the right one.
What has changed is how you evaluate the creator’s audience composition. A creator whose YouTube audience skews heavily toward connected TV will appear to underperform on click-based metrics, even if their audience quality is exceptional. Judging creators by KPIs that depend on clicks penalises exactly the creators whose audiences are most engaged with long-form content on large screens.
The practical shift here is to separate reach quality from response mechanics. If a creator’s audience matches your buyer profile but their click-through numbers look low, the question to ask is not whether the creator underperformed. The question is whether the response mechanism you gave them was even usable by their audience.
Briefing for Outcomes Rather Than Scripts
The best creator content does not look or sound like an advertisement. It sounds like the creator genuinely recommending something to their audience. Over-scripting kills that effect, and audiences detect it faster than most brand teams expect.
The brief should cover what you want to achieve and what the product does. Let the creator communicate it in their voice. The one thing that should be specific is the call to action, and that is where most campaigns now need a fundamentally different approach, which we will come to.
Where brands often go wrong is confusing a detailed brief with a restrictive one. A good brief gives the creator a clear understanding of the product’s value, the audience problem it solves, and the single most important thing the viewer should do after watching. A bad brief tells the creator what words to use, where to hold the product, and how many seconds to spend on each talking point. The first produces content that converts. The second produces content that gets skipped.
Campaign Duration and the Compounding Effect
A single sponsored post from a single creator is an awareness event, not a strategy. The brands that extract the most value from influencer marketing are the ones that commit to multiple touchpoints over time, either with the same creator or across a cohort of creators in the same niche.
Repetition builds familiarity, and familiarity drives action. This matters even more when a large share of the audience watches on a television, because the viewer might see the creator mention the brand three or four times before they are in a moment where they can respond. If the campaign only runs once, that moment never arrives.
There is also a compounding dynamic that most campaign planning ignores entirely. Each touchpoint does not start from zero if the previous one captured the audience in some way. If a viewer adds a wallet pass from the first creator mention, every subsequent mention reinforces the relationship and the brand can re-engage that viewer through push notifications at any time. The campaign stops being a single event and starts building a persistent audience asset. Brands that understand why influencer campaigns fail after the campaign ends structure their strategy around this compounding effect from the start.
The Best Practices That Are Actively Misleading Brands
Several widely recommended practices do not just underperform in a television-heavy viewing environment. They actively mislead brands about campaign performance, creator quality, and return on investment. For any brand investing in creator partnerships, understanding where influencer marketing for brands is being let down by outdated measurement is the first step toward fixing it.
Link Attribution in a TV-First Viewing Environment
The standard advice is to give each creator a unique trackable link and measure how many clicks and conversions it generates. On a phone or laptop, this works. On a television, it is invisible.
The viewer cannot click a link in a video description while watching on a TV. They would need to pick up their phone, find the creator’s profile, navigate to the link, and then complete a purchase. That is four steps of friction at a moment where the viewer is relaxed and passive. Most will not do it. The brand then concludes the campaign underperformed, when in reality the campaign reached the audience successfully but the conversion path was broken by the viewing environment.
The damage goes beyond a single campaign report. When link attribution consistently underreports, brands reduce spend on creators who are actually driving genuine awareness and interest. They shift budget toward creators with mobile-heavy audiences whose click rates look better on paper, even if those audiences are less commercially valuable. Over time, the entire creator roster gets optimized for the wrong signal.
Discount Code Tracking as the Primary Attribution Method
Discount codes suffer from the same problem in a slightly different way. The viewer sees the code on screen and might even remember it. But applying it requires them to leave the sofa, open a browser, navigate to the store, add products to a cart, and type the code at checkout. On a phone that process takes thirty seconds. From a TV viewing position it requires enough motivation to interrupt what they are watching and switch to a different device entirely.
There is a second problem that receives less attention. The codes that do get used are disproportionately picked up from coupon aggregator sites rather than from the creator’s content. A viewer who saw the creator mention the brand might search for the product later, find a discount code on a third-party site, and use it. The attribution data then credits the creator, but the journey that led to the sale was not the clean path the brand assumes. Conversely, viewers who were genuinely moved by the creator’s content but never used a code are invisible in the data. The attribution is corrupted in both directions.
Click-Through Rate as a Proxy for Creator Quality
CTR has been the default metric for comparing creators for years. Higher CTR means the audience responded more actively. But CTR only measures clicks, and clicks only happen on devices where clicking is possible.
A creator whose audience watches 70 percent on a connected TV will always show a lower CTR than a creator whose audience watches 70 percent on mobile, even if both generate the same level of genuine interest. Using CTR to rank creators systematically favors mobile-heavy audiences over TV-heavy audiences, and the data consistently shows that the issue is the conversion mechanism, not the creator’s effectiveness.
This creates a structural blind spot in how brands build their creator rosters. The creators with the most valuable, engaged, lean-in audiences on the largest screen in the house are the ones most likely to be cut because their numbers look weak on a metric that was designed for a different viewing environment.
Why the Conversion Layer Is the Actual Best Practice
The underlying principle behind trackable links, discount codes, and CTR is sound. Brands need to know which creators drive value and which do not. What needs to change is not the desire to measure, but the mechanism through which measurement happens.
The reason most influencer marketing best practice guides miss this is that they treat the conversion layer as fixed infrastructure. They assume the viewer will click a link or use a code and then focus all their strategic advice on what happens before that moment: choosing the right creator, writing a good brief, setting goals. But when more than half of the audience cannot use the conversion mechanism you have chosen, no amount of upstream optimisation will fix the downstream gap.
A conversion mechanism that works across every viewing environment needs to meet three criteria. It must be actionable from a sofa with a phone in hand. It must require minimal cognitive effort. And it must create a persistent connection rather than a single transaction attempt.
A wallet pass call to action meets all three. The creator says something along the lines of “scan the code and add the pass to your phone.” The viewer picks up their phone, scans the QR code on screen, and one tap adds a branded wallet pass to their Apple or Google Wallet. That is a two-step action that takes under five seconds, does not require the viewer to leave what they are watching, make a purchase decision, or enter any information.
From the brand’s perspective, the wallet pass add replaces the click as the primary attribution event. Instead of measuring how many people clicked a link, the brand measures how many people added the pass from each creator’s content. That number is deterministic. The brand knows exactly which creator drove each pass add, and because the pass is now on the viewer’s phone, every subsequent notification tap, link click, and purchase can be attributed back to the original campaign.
The scan rates that brands achieve with this approach are consistently three to five times higher than traditional purchase-intent QR codes, because the ask is softer and the action is simpler.
Structuring Creator Deals Around Audience Capture, Not Just Exposure
One of the least discussed best practices in influencer marketing is how the deal itself is structured and what incentives it creates for the creator.
Most brand-creator agreements are built around deliverables: a certain number of posts, stories, or videos in exchange for a flat fee or a performance bonus tied to clicks and sales. This structure made sense when clicks were a reliable signal. In a TV-heavy viewing environment, it creates misaligned incentives. The creator is motivated to drive clicks because that is what they are measured on, but a large portion of their audience cannot click. The creator may start skewing their content toward mobile-friendly formats or shorter clips to improve their click numbers, even if their long-form TV content is what actually drives the most brand value.
A better approach is to structure part of the deal around audience capture. Instead of paying solely for impressions and clicks, include a component tied to how many viewers added the branded wallet pass. This aligns the creator’s incentive with what actually matters: getting viewers to take an action that creates a persistent, re-engageable connection with the brand. It also gives the creator a call to action that works regardless of how their audience watches, which means they do not have to compromise their content format to hit a metric.
This shift also changes the economics of the relationship for the better. When a brand captures an audience through wallet passes, the cost of re-engaging those people drops to near zero. Every push notification is essentially free reach to someone who has already expressed interest. That means the value of the original creator campaign does not expire when the video stops circulating. It compounds over weeks and months as the brand continues to engage the captured audience. The true return on influencer spend becomes significantly higher than any single-campaign report would suggest.
Owned Audience Versus Rented Reach
The distinction between owned audience and rented reach is the single most important strategic concept that most influencer marketing best practices for brands fail to address.
When a brand pays a creator for a sponsored video, they are renting that creator’s audience for the duration of the campaign. Once the campaign ends, the audience goes back to watching the creator’s content and the brand has no direct way to reach them again without paying for another campaign. The brand might have generated awareness, but it has not captured anything persistent.
This is why so many brands describe influencer marketing as expensive relative to the results. The spend is real, but the asset it creates is temporary. Every new campaign starts from scratch because the previous campaign did not leave behind an audience the brand can contact directly.
The alternative is to use every influencer campaign as an opportunity to build an owned audience. When a viewer adds a branded wallet pass, that viewer becomes part of the brand’s owned audience infrastructure. The brand can send push notifications, share offers, drive traffic to product launches, and re-engage at any time without paying for another ad or another sponsorship.
This changes the entire calculation around influencer spend. The question shifts from “how many sales did this campaign generate?” to “how many people did this campaign add to our owned audience, and what is the lifetime value of that audience over the next twelve months?” When you measure it that way, influencer marketing for brands stops looking like a cost center and starts looking like a customer acquisition channel with compounding returns.
Rewarding Engagement Rather Than Demanding Immediate Conversion
A best practice that is gaining ground among brands with more sophisticated influencer programs is the shift from demanding immediate purchases to rewarding engagement actions that signal genuine interest.
The traditional approach treats every influencer campaign as a direct-response channel. The viewer sees the content, clicks the link, and buys. That is the expected sequence, and anything less than a completed purchase is treated as a failure. But that expectation is unrealistic for most product categories and most viewing contexts. A viewer watching a 15-minute YouTube video on their television is not going to stop watching and buy something. They might be interested, they might even be persuaded, but the moment is wrong.
Engagement rewards allow campaigns to recognize that buying process instead of pretending it does not exist. Actions like adding a wallet pass, scanning a QR code, returning to a landing page later, or sharing a pass with a friend all demonstrate genuine momentum toward a purchase without forcing the transaction in a moment where it would not naturally happen.
For brands running campaigns through agencies, this shift also improves reporting. Instead of presenting campaign results that show low click-through and low immediate conversion, the agency can report on leading indicators: pass adds per creator, notification engagement rates, return visit rates, and downstream conversions that happen days or weeks after the original exposure. These metrics paint a far more accurate picture of what the campaign actually achieved.
The 2026 Shift: Lock Screen Notifications as the Emerging Channel
If there is a single trend that will define the next phase of influencer marketing infrastructure, it is the ability to push notifications directly to a customer’s lock screen without requiring them to download an app.
Email open rates have been declining for years. SMS is effective but expensive per message and increasingly regulated. Social media reach is algorithmically throttled. Brands have been searching for a direct communication channel that combines the visibility of SMS, the cost efficiency of email, and the persistence of an app, without the friction of convincing someone to download and keep an app.
Wallet pass notifications are that channel. When a viewer adds a branded wallet pass to their Apple or Google Wallet, the brand gains the ability to send push notifications that appear directly on the viewer’s lock screen. No app download required. No email inbox to compete in. No algorithm deciding whether the message gets seen. The notification appears in the same place as a boarding pass update or a bank transaction alert, which means it gets looked at.
PushPass is the wallet pass platform that enables this. It allows brands to design a branded wallet pass, distribute it through creators via QR codes and direct links, and then send push notifications to every person who added the pass. The platform handles pass design, audience segmentation, notification delivery, and performance tracking across both Apple and Google Wallet.
For influencer marketing specifically, this means every creator campaign can serve a dual purpose. The immediate goal is brand awareness and audience engagement. The persistent outcome is a growing base of people who have opted in to receive lock screen notifications from the brand. That base grows with every campaign and reduces the brand’s dependence on paid media to reach people who have already expressed interest.
The combination of wallet pass audience capture during campaigns and lock screen push notification re-engagement afterward is what makes influencer marketing measurement work properly for the first time. Every pass add is attributable to a specific creator. Every notification is trackable. Every downstream action, from a link tap to a purchase, connects back to the original campaign. The measurement chain is unbroken from first exposure through to revenue.
A Measurement Framework That Reflects Reality
The best practices that matter most in 2026 are not about content format, posting schedules, or platform selection. They are about measurement infrastructure. If you cannot measure what happened after the viewer saw the content, you cannot evaluate whether the campaign worked.
The standard influencer marketing measurement stack of impressions, engagement rate, CTR, and conversion rate was built for a world where every viewer was on a device that could click. In that world, it worked reasonably well. In a world where half the audience watches on a television and responds hours or days later on a different device, it misses more signal than it captures.
A measurement framework that works regardless of viewing environment needs to track the following:
Wallet pass adds by creator, which replaces CTR as the primary response metric. This tells you which creators actually moved their audience to take action, regardless of whether that audience was on a phone, a laptop, or a television.
Notification engagement rates, which measure how the captured audience responds to subsequent brand communications. High engagement rates indicate the audience is genuinely interested, not just passively exposed.
Downstream conversion with attribution, using the tracking code on your website to connect purchases back to the original wallet pass add and therefore back to the specific creator who drove it. This works across devices and across time, because the wallet pass persists on the viewer’s phone regardless of where they originally saw the content.
Audience growth rate per campaign, which measures how much the brand’s owned audience is expanding with each influencer investment. This is the metric that reveals whether influencer spend is creating a compounding asset or a disposable one.
Cost per owned audience member, which divides the total campaign investment by the number of wallet pass adds. This gives you a true acquisition cost for people the brand can now reach for free through push notifications, and it tends to look dramatically more efficient than cost per click or cost per acquisition when measured over a twelve-month period.
Updating Your Influencer Campaign Framework
If you are building or revising your influencer marketing best practices for brands, the structural changes needed are straightforward even if they require a meaningful shift in how campaigns are planned and evaluated.
Creator selection, audience alignment, authentic content, and campaign duration all remain essential. None of that changes. The fundamentals of choosing the right person to represent your brand to the right audience are as important as they have ever been.
What changes is everything that happens after the viewer sees the content.
Instead of giving every creator a unique discount code and a trackable link, give every creator a unique QR code that leads to a branded wallet pass. The viewer scans, taps once, and the pass is in their wallet. That single action replaces the click as the primary attribution event and creates a persistent connection between the brand and the viewer.
Instead of measuring CTR as the primary signal of creator quality, measure wallet pass adds per creator. This works equally well whether the audience watched on a phone, a tablet, a laptop, or a television. It measures genuine response, not device capability.
Instead of evaluating campaign success only during the campaign window, track notification engagement and downstream purchases for weeks and months afterward. The audience captured through wallet passes is yours to re-engage without paying for another campaign. The economics change completely when campaigns stop expiring the moment the content stops circulating.
And instead of treating every campaign as an isolated event, plan each one as a layer in a growing owned audience strategy. Every creator partnership should leave behind a larger base of people the brand can reach directly. Over time, the accumulated audience from multiple campaigns becomes the brand’s most valuable marketing asset, one that was built through creator trust but belongs to the brand.
The brands that update their playbook around these principles will outperform the ones that keep measuring clicks from an audience that increasingly cannot click. The gap between those two approaches widens with every percentage point of viewership that shifts from mobile to television, and it is why influencer marketing for brands in 2026 looks fundamentally different from the version that worked five years ago.
A 15-minute call. Your brand on your lock screen before it ends.
