Influencer marketing continues to grow as brands increasingly rely on creators to deliver content that drives awareness, trust and purchase behavior. This ARF Knowledge at Hand report synthesizes findings across academic research, industry studies and ARF events to identify what truly drives influencer impact—and how marketers can optimize creator partnerships for effectiveness.
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On December 3, the ARF Creative Council pulled back the curtain on how leading brands navigate the evolving creator and influencer landscape. This roundtable discussion offered a candid, client-side look at the creator/influencer economy and provided attendees with real-world examples of how leading brands strategically deploy creators, select the right partners, brief them effectively, and measure their performance.
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A recent Journal of Advertising Research study presents the first empirical evidence that petfluencers can outperform human influencers in driving engagement and willingness to pay. Across four studies—including a real-world A/B test and controlled experiments, the researchers show that pet influencers benefit from higher perceived sincerity, and that message framing matters. When temporal cues align with consumers’ propensity to anthropomorphize animals, the persuasive impact increases further.
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Today’s consumer is spread across more platforms than ever. On October 15, the ARF AI Series explored how to transform your creative process from a bottleneck into a growth engine. This session provided attendees with a clear roadmap to amplify talent, bring more ideas to life and drive measurable growth.
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Based on two decades of Brand Asset Valuator (BAV) data and a complementary custom study, this ARF Cognition Council report examines why some brands maintain strength over long periods while most decline. The research identifies differentiation, consistency, cultural relevance and sustained visibility as critical drivers of long-term brand resilience in the face of market and consumer change.
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On December 4, this Insights Studio Session dove into new research explaining why cutting brand spend is more costly than ever and how leading marketers are delivering revenue growth by focusing on brand equity. Attendees learned about new tactics that mature marketers are using to build equity, drive consumer influence, and navigate the future of marketing.
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A new Journal of Advertising Research study investigates how music tempo—a ubiquitous but understudied element in video advertising—interacts with regulatory focus to shape consumer purchase intentions. Analyzing 26,025 real-world video ads and running three controlled experiments, the researchers find that fast-tempo music significantly boosts purchase intention for promotion-focused ads, while tempo has no meaningful effect in prevention-focused ads. The mechanism is driven by time pressure and consumers’ reliance on heuristic vs. systematic processing. These findings offer actionable insights for advertisers optimizing creative strategy in short-form video environments.
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Repeated ad exposure is a double-edged sword: it can help messages stick (wearin) or risk audience fatigue (wearout). This ARF Knowledge at Hand report reviews the latest evidence and finds that while true creative wearout is less common than once assumed, it can occur under specific conditions such as heavy short-term frequency or when there is poor creative quality. For advertisers, the key is knowing when repetition builds impact and when it backfires.
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