Influencer and affiliate marketing have traditionally occupied different corners of the marketing mix. One focused on reach, creative storytelling, and cultural relevance, while the other was built around attribution, conversions, and measurable revenue. That division is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain as creators influence every stage of the customer journey, from initial discovery to final purchase.
Brands now expect creator programs to deliver cultural impact and commercial outcomes at the same time. They want compelling content and trusted recommendations, but they also want to understand which creators bring in new customers, generate sales, and justify continued investment. Agencies are evolving around those expectations.
That shift provides the context for Acceleration Partners’ appointment of Suzannah Tarkington as Vice President of Influencer. Tarkington brings more than a decade of experience across influencer marketing, media, and advertising and will be responsible for scaling the agency’s full-funnel Performance Influencer offering.
The appointment is not simply about adding another experienced creator marketing executive. It signals that Acceleration Partners is treating influencer marketing as a distinct growth practice requiring executive ownership, operational infrastructure, and financial accountability.
Why Acceleration Partners Is Expanding Its Influencer Leadership
Acceleration Partners has spent much of its history building and managing performance-based partnership programs. The agency now works with more than 200 brands across over 40 countries, covering affiliate, influencer, content, performance PR, and other partnership channels. Its programs generated more than $8.6 billion in client revenue and 110 million conversions in 2025.
Influencer marketing is becoming a more important part of that broader operation. AP positions its Performance Influencer service as a full-funnel offering designed to move influencer marketing beyond reach and engagement. Its objective is to build creator programs that can generate awareness while also contributing to customer acquisition, conversions, and revenue.
Tarkington’s responsibilities reflect the scale of that ambition. She will own the vision and commercial outcomes of the influencer organization, including its P&L, client growth, team development, operating model, industry positioning, and long-term strategy. She will also work with AP’s sales and marketing teams on new business, influencer-led pitches, thought leadership, and the agency’s wider market positioning.
That makes the appointment as much a business decision as a marketing one. AP is treating influencer marketing as a growth practice with its own financial targets, leadership structure, and commercial expectations, rather than an additional service attached to its affiliate operation.
Tarkington Brings Seven Years of Creator Program Experience
Before joining Acceleration Partners, Tarkington spent seven years at influencer marketing company Fohr, where she joined as its 26th employee and eventually became Senior Director of Client Services. During her tenure, she helped scale the client services team fivefold and worked on creator programs for Sephora, DICK’S Sporting Goods, Pandora, The RealReal, Colgate-Palmolive, and COTY.
Several of those programs demonstrate the range of experience she brings to AP. Tarkington helped launch and operate Sephora Squad, an application-based beauty ambassador program built around year-long paid creator relationships. Instead of choosing creators primarily by follower count, the program used applications and audience testimonials to assess each applicant’s connection with their community.
Fohr’s technology helped Sephora verify creator reach and evaluate thousands of applications at scale. Sephora Squad grew from 27 to 72 members during its first three years, and 79% of the creators selected in 2021 were BIPOC.
Tarkington also helped expand the DICK’S Sporting Goods Varsity Team to more than 10,000 applicants and contributed to influencer retail media offerings for Sephora and DICK’S. Her work with The RealReal explored the use of predictive intelligence in creator selection, demonstrating how campaign data could be used to inform casting and investment decisions before a campaign launched.
These programs required more than matching brands with influential people. They involved creator recruitment, technology, campaign operations, community development, long-term relationship management, and measurement. That experience is relevant to AP’s current direction as brands move from isolated influencer activations toward larger, always-on programs.
Performance Is Becoming the Organizing Principle
The term “performance influencer” can easily sound like another piece of marketing terminology, but it describes a meaningful change in how creator programs are planned and evaluated. Traditional influencer campaigns often begin with a fixed budget and a list of content deliverables. Creators are paid for producing that content, while brands evaluate the results through reach, impressions, engagement, and earned media value.
A performance-led program begins with a different question: what business outcome should the creator partnership produce? That outcome could be a sale, subscription, app installation, qualified lead, or new customer. Once the objective is established, creator selection, compensation, content formats, tracking, amplification, and optimization can all be structured around it.
This does not mean every creator should work on commission or that awareness metrics no longer matter. Different creators perform different roles throughout the customer journey. Some are particularly effective at introducing a product to new audiences, while others influence consideration or consistently convert their followers into customers.
The difference is that those contributions are treated as parts of the same measurable system. Instead of evaluating every creator through the same metric, brands can determine where each partnership creates value and structure future investment accordingly.
Acceleration Partners has been building its influencer offering around that principle. Its recently published Performance Influencer Playbook argues that effective creator programs require long-term relationships, creator-level performance data, consistent investment, appropriate technology, and compensation structures connected to outcomes.
Tarkington’s appointment gives that model dedicated leadership. Her experience connects two parts of influencer marketing that are sometimes treated as competing priorities: culturally relevant brand building and measurable commercial performance. The opportunity for AP is to demonstrate that brands do not necessarily have to choose between them.
Influencer and Affiliate Are Moving Closer Together
The convergence of influencer and affiliate marketing did not begin with this appointment. Acceleration Partners has been moving in this direction for several years, including through its 2022 acquisition of Influencer Response and Volt Agency.
Those acquisitions added direct-response influencer program management and paid social amplification to AP’s existing partnership marketing capabilities. At the time, the agency explicitly positioned the move around the increasing overlap between affiliate and influencer marketing.
That overlap has since become more visible. Many creators now use affiliate links, storefronts, discount codes, and performance-based commissions alongside traditional sponsorship agreements. Affiliate teams, meanwhile, are investing more heavily in creator recruitment, social content, and creator commerce.
Brands are therefore often managing two programs that rely on the same partners but operate through separate teams, budgets, technologies, and measurement systems. Tarkington has described her objective at AP as helping brands bring influencer and affiliate strategy together through a single-agency solution.
The appeal of that model is operational as much as strategic. Instead of separating awareness campaigns from conversion programs, brands can evaluate creators across the funnel, use performance data to improve future partnerships, and compensate creators according to the role they play in the customer journey.
What This Means for the Agency Model
Influencer marketing agencies have traditionally differentiated themselves through creator access, cultural knowledge, campaign creativity, or platform expertise. Those capabilities remain important, but brands are increasingly asking agencies to provide the infrastructure expected from other performance channels.
They want consistent reporting, stronger attribution, predictable workflows, creator-level performance insights, cost controls, and a clearer relationship between investment and business results. As influencer programs become larger, brands also need support with contracts, payments, content approvals, creator retention, media amplification, and cross-market execution.
That creates a more demanding agency model. Influencer teams must understand online culture and creative development while also managing data, technology, affiliate infrastructure, program economics, and commercial growth.
Tarkington’s responsibilities reflect that transition. Her role includes campaign and client leadership, but it also covers practice development, margin management, sales support, team structure, and thought leadership. This suggests that influencer marketing is becoming less of an optional agency capability and more of a business unit with its own commercial expectations.
For brands, that evolution could produce more integrated programs and reduce the need to divide creator activity across multiple agency relationships. For influencer agencies, it raises the standard for what full-service support actually means.
The Next Phase of AP’s Influencer Strategy
Tarkington joins Acceleration Partners at a moment when influencer marketing is being asked to prove more without losing the qualities that made the channel valuable. Creators still need the freedom to communicate authentically with their audiences, while brands still need cultural relevance, memorable storytelling, and lasting relationships.
Those qualities must now exist within programs that can operate at scale and demonstrate business impact. That is the challenge Tarkington has been hired to address.
Her background shows experience building large creator communities and managing programs for major consumer brands. Acceleration Partners brings global partnership infrastructure, performance expertise, proprietary technology, and an established affiliate operation. Combining those capabilities gives the agency an opportunity to develop a more connected model for influencer marketing.
The success of that model will not be determined by whether AP can generate more creator content. It will depend on whether the agency can show brands how cultural influence, trusted recommendations, and measurable performance can work together as parts of the same growth system.
