TL;DR
Attention is harder to earn than ever, and most branded content loses it by prioritizing reach over creative fit.
Later's Made You Look campaign spotlights five creators across food, fashion, home, wellness, and design whose work proves that authentic creative voice outperforms polished, scripted execution.
The brands breaking through in the creator economy are hiring for point of view, giving creators room to interpret rather than execute, and measuring outcomes beyond impressions.
Table of Contents
There are more than five billion active social media users in the world. The average user will give you just eight seconds of their attention, and closer to six if they’re Gen Z. Volume is up, but attention is down. And in the gap between them, most branded content quietly disappears.
Senior marketing leaders already know there’s a saturation problem. The question is what to do about it. And the answer, increasingly, is better creative. Specifically, it’s partnering with creators who have something to say, and then trusting them to say it.
Later’s new campaign, Made You Look, is built on exactly that premise. The name is more than just a nod to the oldest trick in the magician’s playbook. It’s a thesis statement and a challenge. In an environment this crowded, stopping the scroll is an act of creative courage.
The attention economy has a trust problem
Content saturation alone doesn’t explain why so much branded content fails. The deeper issue is credibility.
According to the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report on Brand Trust, 73% of people say their trust in a brand increases when it authentically reflects today’s culture. And the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer reframes the entire landscape. Edelman’s researchers argue that we’ve now moved into the “insularity” level of trust, meaning people are reluctant to trust anyone who’s different from them. From an influencer marketing perspective, it’s no longer about who commands the biggest platform, but rather, who feels closest.
“People aren’t saying, I trust this person because they have two million followers,” Sara Rezaee, Head of Creator Marketing for North America at Edelman, said in commentary on the report. “They’re saying, I trust that creator with 12,000 followers who shares my values, who feels like they’re part of my circle.”
This has direct implications for how brands approach creator partnerships. Reach and follower count are lagging indicators. What drives results beyond impressions is creative alignment. Audiences have developed finely tuned instincts for inauthenticity, and the content economy has trained them to keep scrolling when something feels off. The brands breaking through have understood this for years.
What Made You Look is and why it’s different
Made You Look is a campaign docuseries produced by Later that spotlights five creators across food, fashion, home, wellness, and design. But calling them “creator spotlights” undersells what’s actually happening here.
Directed by Betsy Field and photographed by Joe Perri, these short films go inside the creative process of each person featured. Studios. Kitchens. Daily rituals. Personal philosophies. The work invites you into a world and follows them through the practice that makes their content worth making.
That distinction is everything. When a brand elevates artists’ work rather than treating them as spokespeople, the output stops looking like content and starts looking like culture. And culture, unlike content, gets shared.
Meet the creators who stopped the scroll
halo perez-gallardo: Innovative food
halo is the creative director and co-founder of Lil’ Deb’s Oasis in Hudson, NY, a restaurant where food, queerness, installation art, and maximalist energy converge. Their culinary practice resists easy categorization as it lives somewhere between dessert and performance art.
For Made You Look, halo created a Luxardo cherry ice cream cake layered with chocolate cookie crumble, whipped meringue, black sesame drizzle, and a crown of cherries. The result is eye-catching and technically precise. But it’s the sensibility behind it that makes it stop-worthy. halo makes food that asks something of the people who look at it.
“When I’ve made something authentic with my own hands, and someone does a double-take,” halo says, “that’s so gratifying.”
Timothy Goodman: Home goods and art
New York-based artist and designer Timothy Goodman has created more than 250 murals, participated in viral social experiments, and partnered with many brands over the years. He’s built a practice around transforming the overlooked: everyday spaces, ordinary objects, and the surfaces we stop seeing because we ’ve seen them too many times.
For his contribution to Made You Look, Goodman turned a breakfast nook in his studio into a work of art: cabinets, a microwave, and a kettle converted into canvases, hand-drawn with the same intuitive, emotionally charged line work that defines his public murals.
It’s a simple idea that lands with the force of a bigger one. Which is what separates Goodman’s work from the vast majority of “branded home” content that moves through feeds daily. He brings spaces to life by animating them rather than just decorating them.
“‘Made you look’ to me,” Goodman says, “it’s that continuous conversation that connects people. I want them to connect with the art outside of me.”
Jeremy Jankowski: Home lifestyle
Jeremy Jankowski (@jeremyjanko) operates at the intersection of domestic life and creative practice. Inspired by texture, light, interior design, fashion, and life with his dog Astro, his work reframes homemaking as something intentional and expressive.
A self-proclaimed dog dad, his piece for the campaign is a lavish birthday celebration for Astro. Table settings. Styling. Ceremony. The kind of meticulous attention usually reserved for weddings applied, without irony, to a dog’s birthday party.
What Jankowski brings to this is his understanding that ordinary, authentic moments are the material. Brands that try to tell that story from the outside will always get it slightly wrong. Jankowski lives inside it, and it shows.
“When I’m being authentically myself, and I turn someone’s head,” he says, “it’s the ultimate compliment.”
Megna Paula: Wellness and fitness
Megna Paula (@megnapaula) is an Ashtanga yoga teacher whose practice has been shaped by travel, culture, and a sustained curiosity about what happens when we push past the familiar. She teaches from her home studio, grounding students in discipline, breath, and self-exploration.
Her contribution to Made You Look is a personal interpretation of Gherandasana, a deep backbend that’s meant to be heart-opening, devotional, and meditative. The effect is closer to sculpture than content.
Megna brings something that wellness brands routinely flatten in their campaigns: the small moments that make up a demanding practice. “When I feel ‘made you look,’ says Megna, “it is a flower, it is the way water moves. It is a jolt of beauty, and that is what inspires me.” You can’t script the stillness inside the effort. You can only hire someone who knows it from the inside.
“We’re here to share something exquisite, ephemeral, in the moment,” she says. “If you’re not looking, you might miss it.”
Julian McCleary: Fashion
Julian McCleary (@thebadjujudesign) is a designer and maker who works in reclaimed textiles, transforming secondhand fabric into wearable art. His studio process is experimental and emotionally driven. He describes embracing vulnerability and creative risk as core to how he works.
Julian’s piece for the campaign is called Sunset on Mars: a garment constructed through patchwork and appliqué that tells a surreal story about a UFO drifting across a city skyline. The result is a combination of fashion, illustration, and short fiction: a story stitched in reclaimed fabric.
When it comes to brand partnerships, McCleary believes, “the best collaborations happen when you create something together that neither of you could have created alone.”
“When people look,” he says, “that’s the world giving you permission to be yourself, to be as creative as you want. Making them look is what an artist should do.”
Authentic voice outperforms polished execution
The creator economy industry is projected to reach $40 billion in the US in 2026. That’s a staggering investment, and a lot of it produces content that audiences tune out, skip, or simply don’t trust.
While paid reach delivers eyeballs, authentic creative voice delivers something harder to buy: recognition. When a creator interprets a brief through their own lens, audiences engage with saves, shares, follows, and word of mouth. These signals drive the metrics that actually matter to a business: brand lift, purchase intent, and earned amplification.
The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer makes clear that alignment now matters more than reach. “Your values and that authenticity need to be so on point,” Edelman’s Rezaee put it. “Otherwise, it’s ‘bye!’ I’m going to keep scrolling.”
The ROI case for senior marketers
Influencer spend has a credibility problem because it’s often deployed in ways that systematically undercut its own value. Over-scripted briefs, creators chosen for follower counts rather than fit, one-off placements that ask audiences to do the heavy lifting of connecting a creator to a brand story.
The Made You Look approach centers the creative process by creating content that has genuine earned media potential. Audiences who engage with this kind of work share it because it reflects something true.
The lessons from Later’s Made You Look campaign can apply to any brand investing in creator partnerships. Here’s how to apply these principles to your influencer marketing.
Hire for creative voice, not follower count: The right creator has a point of view your audience doesn’t have yet, and they’ve already done the work of building a community around it. The real asset is the community, no matter what their follower count looks like.
Give creators a brief, not a script: The magic in partnerships like Made You Look lives in the interpretation. halo didn’t execute a cake concept; they expressed a culinary philosophy. Julian McCleary didn’t follow a mood board; he made a garment that tells a story. That only happens when you trust the creative.
Think in campaigns, not posts: A creator embedded in a brand story delivers compounding value, while a one-off placement is a transaction. One builds brand equity, while the other shows up in a report and fades.
Measure what matters: Track brand lift, saves, earned amplification, and sentiment alongside reach. If the only metric you’re watching is impressions, you’re optimizing for the wrong thing.
Let the work be art: The more content looks like an ad, the less it works like one. The brands that break through are going beyond broadcasting at audiences and instead making things worth looking at.
The attention economy is crowded, fragmented, and increasingly skeptical. But it’s not immune to creative work. The audiences are still there, just waiting for something that deserves their attention.
Later helps brands partner with creators who already have a point of view by bringing together trusted insight, intelligent technology, and expert guidance to turn cultural moments into measurable ROI. Learn more about Made You Look or explore Later’s influencer marketing services.
