There is a moment in most creator programs when someone in finance asks the question nobody wants to answer: what did it actually drive?
That question — and how Norwegian Cruise Line answered it — was at the center of the fireside chat Trevant GM Kristina Coughlin and NCL VP of Media Mike Roca brought to the main stage at Creator Economy Live East.
There is a moment in most creator programs when someone in finance asks the question nobody wants to answer: what did it actually drive?
That question — and how Norwegian Cruise Line answered it — was at the center of the fireside chat Trevant GM Kristina Coughlin and NCL VP of Media Mike Roca brought to the main stage at Creator Economy Live East.
"Over the past couple of years, what a lot of us have seen is more scrutiny. If there's going to be budget expansion, they want to start seeing performance numbers to really align with that."
The session "From Awareness Play to Booking Engine" was a breakdown of how NCL evolved a creator program from impression-chasing to a full-funnel strategy that competes on CPA. And what it delivered.
The accountability shift
NCL's creator program started where most do: awareness KPIs, impressions, engagements. Performance entered the brief later, and the shift happened in the QBRs.
"We know creator actually has the power. Now we need to showcase it."
Roca, who spent nearly two decades on the agency side before joining NCL five months ago, described the pressure that's now on every creator program: the rest of marketing has spent years chasing bottom-of-funnel. Now the creator space is being asked to meet that standard — while paid media is simultaneously being told to invest more in awareness. The tension runs both directions.
For NCL, the answer was to build a system that works across the whole funnel.
Five practices. One system.
The session walked through the framework NCL and Trevant have built together: five practices that, deployed together, turn a creator program into a performance channel.
1. The brief is a guardrail, not a leash.
NCL's head of influencer marketing built internal alignment around one idea: give creators the liberty to be authentic. "A well-crafted brief really does its job when we focus on the areas by providing liberty to creators," Roca said. "That's where we unlock the true power of creators." The brief sets brand guardrails and key messages. It doesn't script the content.
2. Match the content to the job.
Upper-funnel awareness and conversion-driven content need different briefs, different creators, different concepts. NCL organized content into a three-act structure: announce, enter, last-chance — each with a distinct objective. One of the top performers ran a de-influencing angle: "Why you shouldn't go on an NCL cruise" — then spent the video raving about it. Myth-busting content that moved audiences through the funnel by meeting them where they already were.
3. Test small. Scale investment toward what performs.
NCL can't give every creator a cabin. Those cabins are inventory, and finance tracks every one. The test-and-learn model borrowed from paid media: start with a small set of creators, see what drives performance, then scale budget behind the winners. The creative and the spend move together.
4. Build a creator community, not a contractor list.
"One of our ultimate goals is to make sure we can land on a set of creators that we continue to work with," Roca said. Long-term relationships mean creators have skin in the game. They get access to performance feedback, not just their own social analytics, but what happened downstream. That feedback loop, Coughlin noted, has "turned mediocre performing content into great performing content."
5. Run organic and paid as one system.
The organic creator content feeds the paid strategy. The paid strategy drives signals that inform future creator briefs and partnerships. "That feedback loop is one of the most overlooked parts of the process," Coughlin said, "especially when it comes to driving strong performance with creators." Treating them as silos kills the compounding returns.
The number that changed the conversation.
What does the system actually produce? Coughlin put a number on it on stage:
45%
more efficient bookings vs. NCL's internal paid CPA benchmarks — sometimes higher.
The results have driven growing investment in the program internally — and creator activations are now central to NCL's upcoming product launches. On September 3rd, NCL is launching a new water park — Great Tides at Great Stirrup Cay — with 15 creators on board for the opening.
"Walking into a meeting where we're providing a look back of performance and saying that creator and social is outperforming every other channel — that actually gets folks to double-click into what could we be doing more and different in this space."
What comes next.
The next frontier for NCL's creator program is attribution — being able to tie a booking directly back to a specific creator. "Creators need that credit," Roca said. "The next phase is going to be understanding how we can tie back that booking to a creator." The industry conversations are already underway.
Coughlin closed the session with the one thing she'd leave the room with:
"There is no one silver bullet when it comes to driving performance with creators. It's a lot of intentional decision-making, optimizations, partnerships — and the real desire to make it work."
Kristina Coughlin is GM of Trevant, a creator marketing agency built to deliver proof at every stage of the funnel. Mike Roca is VP of Media at Norwegian Cruise Line.