Our reading
One brief, three different jobs
The most useful thing in this paper is not any single effect size. It is the split. Attitude, engagement, purchase intention and actual sales do not respond to the same levers, and a brief that asks for all four at once is asking the creator to optimise in four directions.
- Want engagement and brand warmth? The audience has to see themselves in the creator. That is a casting decision, and it is about audience fit, not reach.
- Want purchase intention? The post has to carry real information or real enjoyment. That is a content decision, and it is where most sponsored posts are weakest — a product held up next to a face is neither.
- Want sales? How the creator talks about the thing does the heavy lifting. That is a briefing decision, and it usually means giving up control of the words.
Decide which one you are buying. Campaigns that fail often fail because nobody did.
Recognition is not the enemy
The paper routes effects through persuasion knowledge — whether the audience clocks the post as an ad — and through source credibility. That pairing matters more than it sounds.
Audiences already know. Disclosure labels are mandatory in most markets and audiences have got fast at spotting sponsorship regardless. The recoverable variable is not whether they notice; it is whether they trust the person anyway. Which is an argument for creators who turn brands down, and against the roster that promotes something new every week.
What we changed because of it
We stopped writing briefs that list five objectives. We now name one primary outcome per campaign and cast against that one. Where a client genuinely needs both reach-and-warmth and conversion, that is two sets of creators, not one set asked to do both.
Read it with the ceiling in mind
This is a synthesis of academic studies, not of campaign data. Most of the underlying work is experimental — people shown a post in a controlled setting — and those settings systematically overstate attention compared to a real feed, where the post competes with everything else and is gone in a second.
Treat it as a map of which levers exist and roughly how they rank. Do not treat the effect sizes as forecasts for your next campaign. And note where the evidence is thin: the further you move toward money changing hands, the fewer studies there are, which is a fair description of the whole field.
The study above is the work of its authors and is not ours. The summary and commentary on this page are written by Big Bang Story and are our interpretation, not the authors’. We do not host copies of other people’s papers — read it at the source.