A year after Unilever, the ad-funded creator economy is still catching up to its own ambition

Then in March 2025, Fernando Fernández walked into his first weeks as Unilever CEO and handed the industry exactly what it had been asking for: a declaration, from one of the world’s largest advertisers, that creators were now the centre of gravity. Fifty percent of the media budget to social. Twenty times more creators. One influencer in every postcode in India, every municipality in Brazil. 

The ambition was grand. The industry reacted accordingly. Hot takes flooded social media. Pitch decks were updated overnight. Creator marketers took to conference stages across the world, all citing the same moment as proof that the channel had finally crossed over  from experiment to expectation, from line item to strategic pillar.

“Having set up the influencer programme initially at Unilever I’ve been reading with interest the coverage about their increased investment in social and influencer,” said Alex Tait, founder of Entropy Consulting and a former media director at Unilever. “As they are heading into their first full year of this model, and with various other brands having followed a similar strategy,  I think we’ll see a reckoning over the coming months.”

To understand why, it helps to go back to the moment itself – and what actually followed it.

Billion Dollar Boy grew its business by a third in the six months after Fernández spoke. Brands that had never seriously considered the channel – traditional FMCG, financial services, automotive – started sending RFPs, some telling Agentio CEO Arthur Leopold directly that Unilever had made them realize how underinvested they were. Creator marketers who had spent years making the boardroom case found themselves being summoned to it instead. Specialist roles and teams were spun up across the industry. CEOs even started talking about creators on earnings calls. 

All of it happened. And all of it had been happening before Fernández said a word.

Linqia’s RFPs grew — but they had been growing for five years. Reign Maker launched in October 2025 — but CEO and co-founder Jonathan Chanti had been building it since before Fernández spoke. Blue Apron took creator marketing in-house – but Coca-Cola, HelloFresh, Red Bull and Pernod Ricard had done it years earlier. For many, the channel had simply become too big, and the case too obvious, to keep at arm’s length. Unilever didn’t cause any of it. But after March 2025, pretending otherwise got a lot harder.

“Unilever’s announcement was a directional signal, not an operational plan,” said Jamie Gutfreund, founder of creator marketing firm Creator Vision. “It told the market where things were going, not how to get there. The more interesting question now is not ‘did they do it’ – it is ‘did they build the systems required to do it well’. That is not a Unilever question. That is an industry question.”

And it is one the industry is still struggling to answer. To make that kind of commitment work – really work – marketers need to know what they paid every creator, how every piece of content performed and what business result it drove. That data needs to be captured, standardized, and actually informing decisions rather than ageing quietly in a spreadsheet. Organic and paid need to operate as one. Creator results need to be tied directly to business performance. The view needs to stretch across markets, brands and partners without anything falling through the gaps.

Most brands cannot do any of that. Not for lack of will but for lack of plumbing — and in the creator economy, that pumpkin doesn’t exist in one place. Platforms like Traackr and Creator IQ can serve as a foundation, but no single partner can do all of it. The rest has to be stitched together: affiliate seeding tools here, paid media integration there, attribution somewhere else entirely. A brand serious about doing this properly isn’t buying a system. It’s building one, assembling point solutions that were never designed to talk to each other, run by teams that often aren’t talking to each other either.

The organic team pulls one way. The paid team pulls another. The media agency owns the YouTube budget. The creator marketing agency owns the integrations. And somewhere in the gap between all of them, the data that would tell a CMO whether any of it is working gets lost.

The consequences of that gap became apparent quickly.

“One brand came to us asking to activate dozens of creators across multiple markets with near real-time optimization – basically treating creators like a paid media channel,” said Jonathan Chanti, the CEO and co-founder of Reign Maker Group. “When we dug in, they didn’t have the internal workflows, measurement model, or even approval processes to support that. That disconnect – ambition versus operational reality – has been a recurring theme since Unilever made its move.”

The ambition, it turns out, was the easy part.

“What we found in a lot of cases is that people hear fifty percent and they think they need to increase volume,” said Leopold. “That’s led to a lot of spray and pray with micro and nano influencers rather than understanding why creators are effective in the first place and then finding ways to actually partner with them at scale.”

It’s the reckoning Tait was pointing to. Having spent years working with brands to understand the incremental return from influencer activity, he has watched investment outpace the tools used to evaluate it. The gap between what brands are spending and what they can actually prove is widening,  and after a year of Fernández-fuelled ambition, it is becoming harder to ignore.

“What we’re seeing from a platform perspective is less about ‘growth of the creator economy’ and more about a restructuring of how marketing budgets are allocated,” said Steve Lammertink, CEO of The Cirqle, a performance marketing platform for advertisers to partner with creators. “Large advertisers like Unilever aren’t necessarily increasing total spend, they’re reallocating from traditional paid media, TV and agency-driven production into creator-led content that can be deployed across paid channels.”

What that reallocation actually looks like inside Unilever is difficult to say with any precision.

A year on from the announcement, the company has offered no public accounting of its progress against the 50% target. What exists in the public domain — interviews, keynote appearances, the occasional case study — offers broad brush strokes rather than a clear picture. But those strokes do suggest something more considered than the headline numbers implied. The goal isn’t to buy more creators. It’s to build brands that creators want to talk about without being asked. Desire at scale. Brands that don’t just get seen — they get shared.

“The biggest misconception is still treating creator as a line item,” said Matt Barash, chief commercial officer at creative ad tech platform Nova. “It’s not a channel, it’s a production model. The output isn’t just influencer posts. It’s a continuous stream of creative that can power social, CTV, retail media and programmatic.”

That is, in some ways, the most honest measure of where things actually stand a year on from Fernández’s announcement. The gap between what brands say they want to spend and what the ecosystem can absorb remains vast – and closing it will require more than ambition.

“There are only a handful of moments that truly shift the trajectory of this industry,” said Thomas Walters, CEO of Billion Dollar Boy, which is working with Unilever on its creator plans. “The onset of Covid was one. This is another. “It has firmly established creator marketing as a primary channel for growth – not an add-on or a test bed, but a strategic driver of performance and cultural authority. It’s also given brands permission to move faster, with greater confidence and greater investment.

Creators had already become too big to ignore. Now, for a different set of reasons entirely, it has become too important to get wrong.