Ryan Bonnici on Scaling the Creator Economy: How Later Is Driving $1.4B in GMV with Influencer Marketing

1. How does your organization use influencer marketing and social media management to drive revenue growth in the current digital landscape?

At Later, we work with brands like ESPN, L’Oréal, Adobe, and General Mills to run and scale influencer and social campaigns that drive measurable business outcomes. Our platform helps teams manage these programs end-to-end, or gives them the tools and data to run them in-house. We analyze billions of data points across social posts, creator activations, and conversions to understand what drives revenue—not just impressions or engagement. This helps brands move from experimental influencer campaigns to systematic, performance-driven programs. Internally, influencer marketing is also proving to be one of our most efficient growth channels. We’ve seen it outperform traditional paid channels and improve downstream performance when creator content is used across email, organic, and web.

2. What challenges have you encountered in adopting platforms that combine influencer campaign management, social media publishing, and analytics?

The real challenge isn’t with the platform—it’s with changing how teams operate. Marketers are used to managing influencer campaigns, publishing, and analytics across multiple disconnected tools. That patchwork has become the norm.

Adopting an integrated system streamlines the work, but it often requires teams to rethink their workflows and how they collaborate.

3. In what ways are you utilizing creator content to enhance customer engagement and build brand loyalty?

We help brands use creator content to drive deeper engagement and long-term loyalty—not just awareness. It works because it feels personal and trusted: 92% of consumers trust influencers more than traditional ads, and that jumps to 94% for Gen Z.

By integrating influencer and affiliate programs, brands can turn creators into ongoing advocates—building trust across the funnel, from discovery to repeat purchase.

4. How does your organization attribute revenue generated from social media channels to specific marketing activities?

We use cross-platform analytics to show how social and creator campaigns drive results throughout the funnel—from first touch to purchase. Since acquiring Mavely, we’ve expanded our capabilities at the bottom of the funnel, helping brands connect content to conversion with greater clarity.

As of 2024, this approach has contributed to Mavely reaching a $1.4B GMV run rate, reflecting significant growth in sales driven by creator-led campaigns.

5. What strategies are employed to ensure cross-functional collaboration in executing social revenue initiatives?

We foster collaboration by aligning teams around shared goals and performance data. From there, we connect top-of-funnel social metrics—like impressions and engagement—with bottom-of-funnel outcomes such as e-commerce sales. The key is measuring ROCS (Return on Creator Spend) and comparing it to other marketing channels. In other words, how much would we need to spend on paid social to drive the same results? Ideally, for every dollar invested in creator marketing, we generate more revenue than we would through traditional paid channels.

6. What plans are in place to stay ahead of emerging trends in the creator economy and social commerce?

Later is already built to power the creator economy end to end for both brands and creators. With the acquisition of Mavely, we’ve expanded further into performance and affiliate, enabling full-funnel, revenue-driven creator programs.

We’re also heavily investing in AI to streamline key workflows such as creator discovery, campaign setup, and performance optimization. The goal is to help brands and creators scale faster with less manual effort. We’ll have a lot more to share more with you on this soon.

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