By Jo Wong, General Manager, POP.STORE
Last month, something interesting happened at the London Marathon. Kenya’s Sabastian Sawe crossed the finish line in 1:59:30, becoming the first man in history to run a marathon in under two hours in an official race. Tigist Assefa set a women-only world record the same day. Both were wearing Adidas. By Monday morning, Adidas shares had climbed nearly 2%.
That’s not luck. That’s what ambassador marketing looks like when it works.
I’ve been watching influencer marketing evolve for years, and what happened in London is a useful case study in how far we’ve come from brands paying for placements on a creator’s feed. That model was always fragile: one post, one moment, then over. Consumers got wise fast. You can feel the difference between someone who genuinely uses a product and someone who was handed it last Tuesday. That gap in trust is now expensive.
The shift from influencer to ambassador is fundamentally a shift from broadcasting to relationship-building. Adidas didn’t hand Sawe a pair of shoes the week before the race. The Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3 is the product of years of R&D, and the athletes wearing it had trained in it. When Sawe crossed that line and Assefa held her shoe up to the cameras, it wasn’t manufactured in a marketing meeting. It was real, and audiences can feel the difference.
So what does this mean for creators trying to build partnerships that actually hold?
Work with brands that genuinely reflect who you are and what your community cares about. This sounds obvious, but it’s harder than it looks – the temptation to take any deal is real, especially early on. Your audience builds a relationship with you based on trust, and that trust is the only asset that compounds over time. A mismatched partnership doesn’t just underperform. It chips away at the thing that makes you worth partnering with in the first place.
Prioritize consistency over volume. One piece of content that shows a brand woven into your actual life will always outperform five posts that read like ads. The brands worth working with aren’t optimizing for impressions. They want creators who can sustain a story, give real feedback, and bring their audience along rather than just pushing them toward a link. Criteria has moved well beyond follower count. Engagement rate, audience loyalty, niche credibility, and values alignment are all in the mix now.
At POP.STORE, we think about this every day. Our ECHO-ME platform uses agentic AI to do something that used to require a full team: it reads a creator’s audience in real time, ranks followers based on their propensity to buy, and triggers the right engagement at the right moment; pushing a deal or brand mention to the fan most likely to act, not just whoever happened to be online. ECHO-ME makes that possible at scale. It’s the difference between broadcasting a partnership to everyone and activating it for the right person at exactly the right moment, which is, not coincidentally, exactly what Adidas did in London.
That Adidas moment didn’t happen because of a campaign. It happened because the brand built something worth running a world record in, and then found people who were genuinely going to run it. That’s the whole game; find the intersection between what you actually believe in and what your audience actually needs, and stay there long enough to let it become real.
