Benefit Cosmetics · Customer story

How Benefit Cosmetics Uses Creator Intelligence to Find, Vet and Track the Right Creators at Scale

Benefit uses Plot Creator Intelligence to source, vet and track creators based on what they actually say, show, use and do across social video.

50K+

creator community activated

32.2M+

views from a newly discovered superfan

+198%

to sales forecast on POREfessional Degunker

“Some of our most valuable creators were already using and loving Benefit. We just couldn't see them. Plot helps us uncover those people earlier, understand why they're a fit, and build relationships with creators we may never have found otherwise.”

Toto Haba · SVP Growth & Digital Transformation, Benefit Cosmetics & Fresh Beauty

The challenge

Finding the right creators, not more creators.

Benefit Cosmetics runs its creator program in-house across more than 50 global markets, managing a community of 50,000+ creators. At that scale the challenge isn't finding more creators. It's identifying the right creators for the right opportunity and understanding why they're a fit. Traditional creator tools rely heavily on follower counts, engagement rates, audience demographics, categories and keywords. But some of the signals Benefit cares about most live inside video content: what products creators actually use, what they talk about, how they create, and whether they're already organically engaging with the brand.

With Plot Creator Intelligence, Benefit can source, vet and track creators based on what they actually say, show, use and do across social video—surfacing who’s worth pursuing and giving the team deeper context to decide who to work with.

01 · Creator Sourcing

Source creators others miss

Benefit's team can search for creators conversationally using AI, refining criteria as they go rather than relying solely on predefined categories, follower counts or keywords. Because Plot understands what's happening inside video (not just what's tagged) it can surface creators who genuinely use Benefit products without ever mentioning the brand by name. One example is @samaraispinkk who has 6.1M followers and is now one of the top creators for Benefit Cosmetics. She was an organic superfan who consistently featured Benefit Cookie Highlighter on her makeup table while telling stories about her life. Plot's AI agent identified that pattern from her content alone and surfaced her to Benefit's team as a creator worth pursuing. In just three months, she featured Benefit seven times, generating 32.2M+ views. Benefit has built a relationship with Samara and has turned an organic superfan, who could have gone undiscovered, into a valuable member of its creator community.

02 · Vetting

Deeply vet against any brief

Finding someone is only the beginning. Benefit also wanted to source a group of creators who genuinely fit the brand and the specific needs of a campaign. For the launch of POREfessional Degunker, Benefit needed something far more specific than a traditional "beauty creator." The team wanted creators who were skilled at close-up, macro product demonstrations and who also regularly featured boyfriends able to deliver the product's dramatic pore-clearing payoff. That's three criteria stacked at once and none of them show up as a follower count or a category tag. Plot analyzed the creator’s content itself for that exact intersection and returned a sourcing list of matching creators—the kind of brief that would take a human team weeks to hand screen. The resulting boyfriend content exceeded all marketing goals and the campaign delivered +198% in sales versus the original forecast after 3 months. Creator Intelligence brings sourcing and vetting together this way. The search handles the narrowing across criteria no filter menu could express. Benefit's team still makes the final call on who to work with.

03 · Campaign Tracking

Track every activation, even when it’s untagged

Plot helps Benefit track what happens after a creator is activated, whether through a paid campaign, product gifting, or an organic relationship. Traditionally creator tracking relies on @mentions, campaign hashtags, or manually submitted links. That means when a creator receives a product and posts about it without tagging the brand, the content and its impact can easily go unseen. Plot automatically captures both tagged and untagged creator content, giving Benefit a more complete view of every activation. In fact, Plot found that approximately 50% of Benefit’s brand conversation is untagged. That visibility also helps Benefit understand how creator relationships develop over time. Plot identified that creator @laurapayton had organically mentioned Benefit 12 times before the brand deepened the relationship. Benefit sent her a personalized pink hat inspired by her “Maidinfluence” content, and her subsequent Benefit mentions increased +250%, generating approximately 13M additional views. That means Benefit can see what creators actually post after a product is sent or a campaign goes live, including the content that never tags the brand.

The results

With Plot Creator Intelligence, Benefit can source creators based on what’s actually happening in their content, deeply vet them against specific brand and campaign criteria, and track every activation across tagged and untagged content—bringing the entire creator lifecycle into one intelligent workflow.

Benefit Cosmetics’s creator intelligence results:

32.2M+ views from seven organic appearances by a newly discovered Benefit superfan
+198% to sales forecast from the POREfessional Degunker creator strategy
250%+ increase in mentions and ~13M additional views after nurturing an emerging advocate
~50% of Benefit brand conversation is untagged, revealing creator content traditional tracking could miss

Find the signals your customers are already sharing.

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