The enormous impact of brand ambassadors — whether they are influencers, celebrities or athletes — on culture and the fashion industry was a hot topic Wednesday morning at a panel discussion in New York.

Called “Brand Ambassador Marketing 2025: How Celebrities & Influencers Shape Brand Perception & Impact,” the panel featured Chris Gay, president of Society Management and chief executive officer of Elite Model Management, and Aditi Banga, head of fashion x innovation at Meta. The discussion, held at Lectra’s offices at 601 West 26th Street, was moderated by Michael Jaïs, chief executive officer of Launchmetrics, which hosted the event. (Launchmetrics was acquired by Lectra in 2024).

In 2024, brands in the U.S. spent over $7.1 billion in influencer marketing. That level of investment confirms that brand ambassadorships have evolved into a cornerstone strategy, according to Jaïs.

Jaïs kicked off the discussion noting that 34 percent of fashion, luxury and beauty marketers pay more than $500,000 annually on their ambassadors, and 60 percent have no clue how to measure the return-on-investment of these partnerships. He said at Launchmetrics, they help their 1,700 customers move from “a situation where branding initiatives are an expense to a situation where it’s an investment.”

Launchmetrics monitors more than 60 industry events that are important for fashion and beauty, and help a brand stay culturally relevant. They include the Cannes Film Festival, the Met Gala, Fashion Weeks, and the Grammy Awards. They use two types of KPI to measure. The first is MIV, (media impact value), which tells you the value of print, online and social media in places like New York or Shanghai, which they conduct for some 6,000 brands. In 2024, they added Qualitative Insights with gen AI, so they can measure thematic topics and the perception of consumers.

Interestingly, he noted that the direct impact of a celebrity is more or less only 15 percent of the overall impact for a brand. The indirect echo, which is all the media and social that doesn’t come from the social account of the celebrity or the social account of the brand, represents 77 percent. Those mentions come from media, partners and other third-party voices, proving that true value extends far beyond ambassador and brand content alone.

That’s probably the most important part of the story, so it’s super important to focus on that, said Jaïs. Second, one’s ambassadors are not just people you pay, but they can also start a conversation. And the third is finding the right ambassador that aligns with the values of your brand who can create an additional value that you are not even expecting, that will allow you to really go beyond the objective that you’ve defined for the company.

Kicking off the discussion, Jaïs asked the speakers how things have shifted over the past five years.

Meta’s Banga spoke about a deeper emphasis on longer-term partnerships versus one-off moments, featuring ambassadors across a whole season, multiple seasons or multiple years. She said there’s been a greater shift and understanding in selecting ambassadors that can be authentic fans and representatives of the brand, versus simply being hired by the brand without having that genuine connection.

“Because I think customers have also become smart and are able to suss out whether someone genuinely cares about the brand that they’re representing, whether they believe in those values, and whether those values align, in general with that ambassador,” said Banga.

Gay added that nowadays you look at ambassadors as your media buy. “When you’re doing a strategic media buy, which I think everyone in the digital age is doing right now, you’re definitely looking at the people whom you’re hiring as well. That echo is so important because that’s the cultural conversation that’s going on. That is what matters most for brand relevance. And if you can activate that, and you have the right person that can activate, it’s more meaningful than anything else that’s going on. So when you say the 77 percent, that is actually the most important conversation by far,” agreed Gay.

He added that “we’re in the golden age of digital media.” Recalling that when you look at the golden age of TV from the 1950s through the 1990s, you had CBS, ABC, and NBC controlling exactly what you watched, and everyone knew how relevant those programs were. “We’ve totally changed. And so now you have Instagram, TikTok, Weibo. And brands have to play where people’s eyeballs are at.” He said brands have to play there now, “and every decision that they make, it’s no longer, my $30 million media buy with Condé Nast or Hearst.”

Banga said people are expecting to see someone they can really believe in, and they’re expecting to see real conversations. They’re also expecting to see ambassadors who can speak for themselves about the brands, “who aren’t just feeding back campaign lines or slogans or captions that have been written for them, but ambassadors who can really sort of represent themselves and talk about the brand intelligently, and the values and why they care about it,” said Banga. They are also looking for ambassadors who can engage with the audience and there can be a dialogue between the brand, the ambassador and the audience. She believes that makes for “a much more dynamic, at times unpredictable [situation], which can be a bit uncomfortable for brands, because in a way, they have to be willing to relinquish control.”

She said if you’re willing to release some of those reins, “I think it can also create a much richer moment for the brand ultimately,” she said.

For example, Gay pointed to Nara Aziza Smith, who is featured in Marc Jacobs’ campaign. While Jacobs doesn’t have shared values with her, “he created a wonderful moment that is super trendy online, and they created a subversive moment where she really leaned into that, and they did something that was really funny and wonderful and great.” Smith and Jacobs’ viral 2024 TikTok collaboration saw her riffing on her signature from-scratch recipe series to cook up a red Tote Bag. In the video, she kneaded the red dough in a bowl and placed a mini version of the purse on a baking sheet. When she opened the oven door again, it revealed a full-size Tote, “fully risen and red,” she said in the post.

In discussing the metrics, Banga said there are so many different things to be looking at. She said they used to focus on likes and follower count, but now they try to create a bigger emphasis on all the other actions you can take on every post, which is a mix of quantitative and qualitative actions around comments and conversations. She recommends that that people look at growth rates, and not top-line follower count.

The panelists talked about cultural relevance and how to break through culturally, especially at some of these big moments or events.

“You know there’s so much going on, there’s so much noise. How do you actually cut through that moment and have something planned?” said Banga. “The direct content that gets created or posted can only have so much impact but if you can sort of create a moment that gets picked up by other accounts, whether that’s traditional media accounts or meme accounts or things that sort of get picked up in the moment and continue to foster the conversation, that is a big par. But I think some of it is also a little bit of luck as well when it comes to driving culturally relevant conversations. You can only sort of plan so much,” she said.

Gay stressed the importance of how brands work with the talent, and how they show up, whether that’s exiting an airport or picking up coffee at Starbucks, or how they show up at the Met Ball. “If I told you how relevant an after party at the Met Ball actually is to a designer’s career, and just how sticky those looks are on every single celebrity who might have three hours before walked the red carpet. But to their fans, to the conversations that their fans are having, those after party looks are actually probably as equally important, if not more important,” said Gay.

Gay noted that previously the business was B2B, and a lot of time, talent was decided by a freelance stylist. “Now mark my words, it is a CMO that is definitely making that decision, even a CEO sometimes making that decision as well. And the reason being is they want total alignment and they want to understand that this person is going to be showing up and the conversation is going to be around your brand. It’s their community.”

He said big brands need to know where they are in culture and they need to know “that you can’t be all things to all people, and you shouldn’t try to be.” He said it’s necessary to understand who your core fan is. “If you’re just throwing out darts randomly and trying to tick every box, it looks like the least genuine type of messaging that you absolutely can do,” said Gay.

Jaïs said that 60 percent of the MIV of the campaign is performed during the first 24 hours of the announcement of the campaign. Every day there are new partnerships announced, and he asked, how do you break through the first 24 hours and make a more consistent impact?

As an example, Gay spoke about Victoria’s Secret bringing back its fashion show, and one of his key talents, Adriana Lima, who worked for many years with Victoria’s Secret, and the other VS stars were having their own nostalgic moment that was created out of TikTok and shared across Instagram. It was happening prior to their show and was bubbling up from user generated content. “Victoria’s Secret had a plan on how they wanted to bring Adriana back and do their sort of version of it, and this is how we see it. It didn’t align with Adriana and it didn’t align with us. So quite frankly, the people on our team, we are so grateful to people like Vicky Yang from my team here, who know what’s happening digitally and culturally at all times. They brought a re-sharing of meme that was relevant on TikTok and relevant on Instagram. We reshot it with our team, with the blessing of Victoria’s Secret. It was the most engaged and viewed piece of digital content that Victoria Secret had in their history of their brand.”

He called these talents “their own media channels.”

Banga said she recommends a mix of formats. Now there’s a big emphasis on video content, because just by its nature, it’s “incredibly engaging, more engaging than static content has shown to be.” She said the video content also gets distributed to great, unconnected audiences. She also recommended rounding out your story with more niche voices, voices who may have a community size that’s smaller than some of the hero names.