When BYD brought the DOLPHIN SURF to the Netherlands, Amsterdam PR agency Dijksman Communicatie had eleven creator slots and one launch to spend them on. No long-term programme to fall back on, no second wave to correct a bad pick. Discover how the team used the Stellar platform to vet every profile before the budget was committed, then found in the reporting that seven Reels had produced 87% of the campaign’s entire media value.
The DOLPHIN SURF campaign was a stand-alone launch built to create awareness around a new model in the Dutch market. It was not part of a longer influencer programme, and there was no second phase.
There were also no predefined quantitative KPIs. No reach target, no engagement target, no EMV number to hit. The expectation was to generate relevant visibility and engagement around the launch through a carefully chosen group of creators, and nothing more prescriptive than that.
That sounds comfortable and it really is not. A campaign without a target cannot fail, but it cannot teach you anything either, and it leaves the agency with no way to show a client what the money bought. Everything then rests on two things: choosing the right creators, and being able to measure what they produced.
Stellar is where Dijksman handled both, and the platform gave the team four things:
The campaign window stayed open until 30 June, deliberately, so creators could publish on their own schedule rather than to an agency deadline. In practice none of them needed it. All 39 pieces of content landed between 22 and 30 May, with just over half arriving on launch day itself.
That tells you something about how a launch moment actually behaves. Attention around a new model is concentrated and short, creators know it, and content that arrives a month later is talking to a different conversation.
Across the eleven creators and a combined following of 213.38K, the mix came out at 7 Reels and 32 Instagram Stories. Stellar captured all of it as it went live, including every Story before it expired, which on eleven accounts over nine days is the difference between a report and a week of manual screenshotting.
The campaign landed above what the agency considers an average result, and the client was satisfied. But the totals are not the interesting part of this report.
Reels made up 17.95% of the content and generated 86.98% of the earned media value. Seven pieces out of thirty-nine carried close to nine tenths of everything the campaign was worth. They also delivered all 47.71K video views and every one of the 685 engagements, at a 2.33% engagement rate.
The thirty-two Stories did real work too, putting the car in front of 108.69K people, roughly four fifths of the campaign’s total reach. What they did not do was convert that exposure into anything measurable. They returned 13% of the EMV and no engagement at all, because a Story is seen and then gone.
So the two formats are not interchangeable, and briefing them as though they are is where value quietly disappears. Stories deliver presence: broad, brief and repeated. Reels deliver everything else. On this campaign, a format that accounted for less than a fifth of the deliverables produced almost all of the return.
That is the finding that justifies the reporting on a campaign with no ROI attached. EMV gave Dijksman a comparable media value to put in front of the client. The format split gave them something more durable: a clear indication of which formats generate the most value and a reason to weight the next brief differently before a single creator is booked.
Small campaigns are where selection matters most. With eleven creators and one launch window, there is no volume to average out a bad choice and no second phase in which to fix it.
Dijksman Communicatie handled that by moving the analysis forward. The audience and content checks happened before the contracts rather than in the post-campaign report, which left the reporting free to answer a more useful question than whether the campaign worked. It worked. What the numbers showed is that seven Reels carried 87% of the value, and that is a lesson the agency now takes into every brief that follows.
A launch gives you one shot at attention. Knowing which format turns it into value is what makes the next launch better than the last.
We love to get to know you, understand your team’s goals, and show you how Stellar can support your influencer marketing more efficiently, starting at €299 per month.
In a short demo, we’ll walk you through the platform and explore how your team can save time, find better creators, and prove campaign impact with more confidence.
In just 30 minutes, we’ll show you how Stellar helps you save time, choose better creators, and prove the real impact of your influencer marketing.
