Influential

Influential is the enterprise AI influencer marketing platform that combines IBM Watson AI with the industry's richest influencer data to match brands with the right talent for measurable business impact. Founded in 2013, Influential operates at global scale and is trusted by over 60% of the Fortune 500, confirmed on the vendor homepage. The platform is now delivered under the Captiv8 brand (G2 listing: Influential powered by Captiv8), which unifies creator discovery, campaign execution, and performance intelligence in a single enterprise platform. Influential campaigns have generated $2.5 billion in measurable sales for partners, confirmed on the vendor website. Named customers from published case studies and testimonials include e.l.f. Cosmetics, Walmart, Reese's (Hershey), Experian, and Hyundai. The platform maintains a network of 15 million+ creators with API partnerships across all major social platforms. Core AI capabilities start with IBM Watson-powered audience matching, which includes psychographic analysis, personality scoring, and dimensional profiling across adventurousness, excitement, and harmony. AI image recognition handles photo content analysis covering objects, actions, emotions, and brand logo detection. Computer vision provides content scoring, and data science models drive performance prediction and engagement analysis across organic and paid placements. The 100B+ data points searched claim is confirmed on the vendor website and covers creator content, audience data, and brand-influencer fit signals. Campaign types include organic creator partnerships, paid media amplification of creator content, broadcast integrations, commerce and retail activations, platform first-look campaigns, and scaled content production. The platform provides real-time reporting with conversion tracking across online and offline metrics through preferred partnerships with Circana, Advantage Solutions, Amazon, and LiveRamp. Pricing is enterprise-only with no public self-serve tier and no pricing information on the vendor website. Enterprise engagements begin with a 30-minute discovery call via the vendor website contact form. Influential publishes no implementation duration, and G2 reviewers report a median time to implement of 2 months. The Subscriber Agreement states that fees are charged on an annual or monthly basis depending on the subscription, that accounts auto-renew by default, and that payment is taken by card through a third-party PCI-compliant processor. Ongoing campaign management is a sustained partnership rather than a one-time software deployment. Total cost of ownership includes platform fees and media spend, which can materially exceed platform fees depending on campaign scale and paid amplification objectives. Influential is not the right fit for SMB and mid-market brands or for teams that need self-serve access to an influencer discovery database without managed services engagement. Aspire serves mid-market ecommerce and DTC brands with self-serve creator management and Shopify integration. Grin serves ecommerce brands with direct platform access and affiliate-style performance tracking at lower entry costs. CreatorIQ provides self-serve enterprise access with strong data APIs for brands that want to build internal influencer programs without managed services dependency. For brands specifically focused on TikTok creator performance at scale, Billo and similar platforms serve the performance creative layer at lower commitment. Current state Q3 2026: Influential operates the Captiv8 platform. The captiv8.io security page states the platform is pursuing SOC 2 alongside AWS Foundational Security Best Practices, CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark and OWASP Best Practices, so no completed third-party attestation is claimed. GDPR rights are published in the privacy policies on both domains and CCPA and CPRA rights in a dedicated California privacy policy. The platform holds official partnerships with WME (celebrity talent at preferred rates), Teamworks (150K+ NCAA athletes via the NIL desk), and all 1,200 active MLBPA players. Diversity commitments are documented: $100M+ in payouts to diverse creators, 91% of campaigns featuring at least one diverse creator, and preferred partnerships with Group Black, UMG, ESSENCE, and Black Menswear.