Decide whether to invest in creator sponsorship marketplace for project managers to improve appointment attendance

Problem Statement Description

You are evaluating whether a product team should invest in a creator sponsorship marketplace capability aimed at project managers who coordinate sponsorship campaigns, creator approvals, kickoff calls, content reviews, and stakeholder meetings. A key business problem is poor appointment attendance: creators, sponsors, agencies, and internal project owners may book meetings but fail to attend, causing campaign delays, lower marketplace trust, operational rework, and missed revenue opportunities.

The investment could involve marketplace features, scheduling workflows, reminders, incentives, reputation signals, creator/sponsor matching changes, calendar integrations, or operational tooling. The strategic question is whether this is the right area to fund versus other ways to improve campaign completion, creator liquidity, sponsor ROI, or marketplace growth.

You should make a clear recommendation on whether to invest, not just list pros and cons. Your reasoning should address the market and product opportunity, why appointment attendance matters to the marketplace, what alternatives exist, and what evidence or decision gates would make the investment worthwhile.

The experience should consider:

- The current workflow for project managers managing creator sponsorship appointments, including booking, confirmation, reminders, rescheduling, and follow-up

- The users and stakeholders involved: project managers, creators, sponsors, agencies, account managers, and marketplace operations teams

- The size and severity of the appointment-attendance problem, including impact on campaign delivery, revenue, retention, trust, and operational cost

- Strategic options, such as building marketplace-native scheduling tools, integrating with calendars, improving incentives/penalties, using reputation systems, or addressing upstream matching quality

- The company’s right to win in this space, including marketplace data, existing relationships, workflow ownership, and ability to influence both sides of the market

- Key trade-offs around user trust, creator experience, sponsor expectations, operational complexity, global scale, and potential gaming or unfair penalties

- Risks and decision gates, including adoption risk, measurable attendance lift, incremental revenue, marketplace liquidity effects, and whether the problem is frequent enough to justify investment

Your goal is to frame the investment decision, evaluate the opportunity and alternatives, and make a defensible recommendation with clear assumptions, success criteria, and next steps for validation.