Social Rocket
The rug manufacturer Ruggable is moving ad money away from classic performance ads and towards creator partnerships. Marketing chief Lauren Sherman-Kaoud told Digiday on 16 October 2026 that since August of last year the company has shifted around ten percent of its total marketing budget from performance channels into measures such as creator marketing and connected TV.
The decisive question for other brands is not whether influencers generally sell more than Meta ads. It is which part of the creator business can be run as a measurable sales channel and which part as long-term brand building.
Affiliate creators and brand ambassadors have different roles
Ruggable uses ShopMy mainly for numerous commission-based partnerships. According to the company representative, hundreds of creators are involved. They can present products in their own environment and make sales attributable via affiliate links. Larger partnerships with personalities such as Dan Pelosi run in parallel with longer-term brand collaborations and the company's own product projects.
Ruggable names a concrete budget shift for this: more than one million US dollars were taken out of Meta performance advertising and invested in ShopMy creators. The brand wants to further expand the share of more brand-oriented measures 2027. The absolute total spend has not been published.
This split explains why creator marketing is no longer organised merely as a special PR budget. It also matches the broader trend towards long-term creator partnerships and reusable content. For smaller brands, the key is to keep the two goals separate in briefings, budgets and KPIs.
Three million dollars in sales is not yet proof of additional purchases
For the first month with ShopMy, Ruggable reported roughly three million US dollars in sales attributed to the channel. According to the marketing chief, the following months were even higher. However, these figures were already public in May as part of an industry conversation at ClickZ, not only in the current budget announcement.
Whether the orders would also have happened without creator contact remains open. The official ShopMy help describes the usual last-click attribution: the last eligible affiliate click before the purchase receives the credit. This makes a sale measurable, but does not prove that a creator generated the purchase in addition.
For a comparison with Meta campaigns, the total commissions, platform costs, production costs and a control group are among the missing pieces. The published sales are therefore neither a reported profit nor a reliable metric for incremental return on ad spend. A good measurement strategy must distinguish between attributed revenue, the share of new customers and actually additional business. Our overview of social media KPIs for leads and sales covers this separation in more detail.
Why ShopMy does more than manage links
Alongside affiliate links, the platform also bundles product gifting, paid partnerships, discount codes and direct communication with brands. The ShopMy documentation also describes the option of boosting creator content as paid Meta advertising. This is a general platform feature, not evidence that Ruggable uses exactly this format.
On its own British creator page, Ruggable explicitly promotes longer-term relationships with interior, lifestyle, parenting and pet creators. This highlights the difference between a short-term, commission-driven link and a partner who shapes the brand across many pieces of content.
The trend also affects the value of creator companies and affiliate networks. The takeover of Howl's creator business by Connexity shows that the infrastructure needed for this is itself becoming a business. For marketing teams, the practical test remains: evaluate a collaboration by which sales were attributed to it, and measure separately how much additional revenue it actually generated.