The Shelf Wins Adweek Experiential Award and Earns Drum Awards Finalist Recognition
Industry honors recognize The Shelf’s creator-led performance model
ATLANTA, Feb. 04, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Shelf, a performance-first influencer marketing agency, has been recognized with multiple top industry honors in 2025, including a win at the Adweek Experiential Awards and finalist recognition at the Drum Awards, underscoring the agency’s leadership in creator-led marketing built for measurable growth.
The agency won Best Activation in Support of Sustainability at the Adweek Experiential Awards for its work with Natura. The Shelf also received Drum Awards finalist recognition in Retail & Consumer Products for its work with Weekday and was named a finalist for Micro-Influencer Campaigns with Gregory Mountain Products. Additional recognition includes a Platinum MarCom Award for its work with Self Financial.
These honors reflect a broader structural shift underway in performance marketing. As major platforms increasingly automate campaign structures and reduce targeting controls, the primary driver of results is no longer audience selection, but creative’s ability to generate interpretable, real-time performance signals.
Recent platform shifts, including Meta’s Andromeda update, have accelerated a reality many brands are now confronting: when targeting precision fades, platforms can only optimize what content behavior reveals. Creative is no longer just a message delivery mechanism; it is how platforms determine what to show, to whom, and at what scale.
In response, many brands have increased content volume, assuming more output would compensate for fewer controls. But performance gains have remained inconsistent. According to The Shelf, the issue isn’t a lack of creative, it’s a lack of structure. Without systems designed to test, interpret, and compound creative insight at speed, brands struggle to convert content into durable performance signals.
This is where The Shelf’s operating model differs. Before a single creator is activated, the agency begins with social listening and market intelligence to map interest clusters, the behaviors, language, and communities shaping how audiences actually think and buy. Built around creator-led relevance and performance-informed iteration, the agency’s approach treats creative as a source of intelligence, not simply an output. The Shelf aligns brands with creators embedded in interest-based communities and briefs them using real behavioral insight. From there, narrative variations are rapidly tested to generate early performance signals that inform what scales next.
The results have been repeatable across categories and regions. Over the past year, this approach produced sustained ROAS across multiple geographies in the U.S. and Europe for fashion and retail brands, breakout organic reach at retail scale through creator-led campaigns that drove more than 40 million organic impressions, and consistent performance lifts through creative iteration, including periods where optimized creative delivered ROAS of up to 23x during peak seasonal windows and sustained efficiency in the week that followed. Early engagement signals such as saves, shares, and long watch time proved to be reliable leading indicators of downstream efficiency.
“These platform changes didn’t make marketing harder, they made weak systems visible,” said Atul Singh, Co-Founder and CEO at The Shelf. “When targeting control fades, the only thing platforms can optimize against is signal. If your creative can’t generate meaningful signal, the platform can’t learn from you. We built our model to turn creative into intelligence long before platforms forced that shift.”
As performance marketing becomes creative-led by design, the brands that win will be those with systems built to identify the right creators, pair them with the right creative, and learn from performance in motion. In that environment, structure, not scale, defines the advantage.
To view recent award-winning creator campaigns and performance insights from The Shelf, visit campaign insights and highlights.
About The Shelf
The Shelf is a performance-first influencer marketing agency built at the intersection of culture, data science, and creative strategy. The agency specializes in creator-led programs designed to drive scalable, full-funnel performance across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. With hundreds of campaigns executed across retail, CPG, fashion, and financial services, The Shelf applies a disciplined, insight-led approach to creator marketing. The Shelf is an official TikTok Marketing Partner.
To learn more, visit https://www.theshelf.com/
COMPANY The Shelf
EMAIL media@theshelf.com
WEB https://www.theshelf.com/
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