How Pureplay cut wasted influencer spend by 71%

The challenge: great impressions, terrible conversions

Pureplay Skin Science had grown quickly. By 2024, they were running 40–60 influencer activations every month across Instagram and YouTube — a mix of micro-influencers, mid-tier creators, and occasional macro partnerships. Their content was strong. Post aesthetics were on-brand. Impressions were climbing.

But conversions weren't following. The team would see a post perform well on engagement rate but generate almost no traffic or purchases. Their cost-per-acquisition on influencer campaigns was 3× higher than on paid social, and the marketing team was struggling to justify the channel to the CFO.

🔍 The problem they suspected
High follower counts were not translating to real audience
            engagement or intent to buy
Some creators may have purchased followers to inflate their
            apparent reach
No systematic way to verify audience quality at the scale of
            40–60 monthly activations
Manual vetting was taking 2 weeks per campaign brief — too
            slow to act on real-time opportunities

"We had a gut feeling that something was off," says Neha Malhotra, Head of Marketing at Pureplay. "Some of our best-performing posts by engagement were producing almost zero traffic. That disconnect doesn't make sense unless the audience isn't real."

What Dreabee's analysis revealed

Pureplay's team ran a retrospective analysis of their previous 6 months of creator partnerships using Dreabee's Audience Quality scoring. The results confirmed their suspicion — and then some.

"We discovered that 38% of the creators we'd paid in the previous two quarters had audience quality scores below 60. That means the majority of their followers were either inactive, bought, or bot accounts. We'd been paying for ghost audiences."

Neha Malhotra

Head of Marketing, Pureplay Skin Science

The analysis also surfaced a secondary pattern: the creators who had genuinely outperformed — real traffic, trackable conversions, repeat purchases — all had quality scores above 80. They were typically mid-tier creators with smaller but more engaged, authentic audiences. Not the biggest names. Not the most expensive. But the most real.

How they fixed it with Dreabee

Pureplay implemented a new creator approval workflow with a hard quality gate. Any creator being considered for a paid activation had to pass a Dreabee quality check before moving forward — regardless of their follower count, aesthetics, or previous brand deals.

The new workflow

Step 1: Creator is shortlisted by the team
            based on content fit and niche alignment
Step 2: Dreabee quality check runs
            automatically — takes under 60 seconds per creator
Step 3: Creators with a quality score below
            72 are automatically declined, with no exceptions
Step 4: Approved creators enter a
            standardised brief and contracting process
Step 5: Post-campaign: Dreabee tracks
            performance and feeds learnings back into the quality threshold calibration

They also used Dreabee's influencer discovery to proactively build a vetted creator pool rather than reactively vetting inbound applicants. By filtering for quality score above 80, engagement rate above 4%, and audience location in India, they built a bench of 180+ pre-approved creators they could activate quickly without a slow vetting process.

Results: before and after

Three months after implementing the quality-gated workflow, Pureplay ran a performance comparison against the equivalent period the previous year.

Metric	Before Dreabee	After Dreabee (Q1 2025)
Average creator quality score	61 / 100	84 / 100
% budget on low-quality creators	38%	11%
Campaign ROAS	1.4×	4.2×
Cost per acquisition (influencer)	₹840	₹290
Influencer vetting time	2 weeks / brief	2 hours / brief
Pre-approved creator bench	0	180+

"The ROI was faster than we expected. Within the first campaign run on quality-gated creators, we saw the difference. It wasn't subtle — our CPA dropped by more than half."