Creator marketing has the reach — CMOs want the rigor

What matters now is control, consistency and minimizing risk.

“Last year we started to test doing more work with creators — that worked and we were able to secure more funding for this year,” said Matthew Dacey, Tripadvisor’s CMO.

With that momentum comes growing complexity. What started as a hands-on effort to find creators who genuinely love travel has evolved into something more formal. Tripadvisor now leans on agencies to help manage the workload — a sign that the media channel is maturing, and with it, the need for structure.

“A year ago we were doing that by ourselves but we quickly realized how painful that was,” said Dacey.

Not long ago, a comment like that would’ve stood out. Now, it’s standard. Creators are no longer sitting at the edge of media plans, they’re baked in. For some brands like Unilever and L’Oréal, they’ve become the focus of standalone teams. At others like Heineken, they’re quickly becoming faces of global campaigns.

“On global campaigns, Heineken is integrating creators, casting them into things like TV ads as well as all of the other creative assets that are going out,” said Thomas Walters, CEO of Billion Dollar Boy, the creator agency that’s working with the brewer on those plans. “Separately, we have scaled crazy campaigns happening at a local level where the creators are creating content themselves based on the overarching brand platform.”

If that sounds like an outlier, the budgets tell a different story. In the U.K., a third of marketers spend between £764,000 to £2.3 million on creator marketing annually. In the U.S., the pattern holds, with 34% of marketers investing between $1 million and $3 million, according to a Census-wide survey of 2,000 marketing and procurement professionals commissioned by Billion Dollar Boy.

“There’s been an uptick in conversations around the vetting and governance of creators from marketers who want to make sure that the processes are working in the right way,” said Christina Kavalauskas, executive strategy director of social and creator at Deloitte Digital.

This isn’t a sudden shift. It’s the result of years of gradual recalibration — from the pandemic to the rise (and fall) of creator houses. All of it has nudged creators to a tipping point: WPP expects ad revenue from user-generated content — from videos to podcasts to social posts — will surpass that of professional media this year. That kind of scale brings results but also trade-offs.  

“As a result there’s a lot of cringe and inauthentic content that may not be contributing to business outcomes or to brand persuasion,” said Taylor Michelle Gerard, vp of creative and creator at Blue Hour Studios, the content and creator marketing division of Horizon Media.

Marketers, in other words, are becoming more selective. Reach alone isn’t enough. What matters now is credibility, fit and a clear return on investment.

Take Bose. The audio brand treats some creators as performance partners, investing in affiliate-style deals where commissions are tied to actual sales, not just vibes or vanity metrics.

“The best creators we work with have affiliate-like agreements where they can track sales through links [on their posts] and are subsequently compensated accordingly,” said Jim Mollica, Bose’s CMO and president of luxury audio.

For a brand with a creator network that generates around 10,000 pieces of content per month, that kind of accountability matters. Being able to tie output to outcomes helps make the investment easier to defend — and more effective to scale. 

That shift — from creators as mouthpieces to media partners — comes with new expectations. And with that move comes a demand for better proxies of performance — and clearer value.

“We’re talking to clients about this — the idea of shifting away from the follower count fallacy, “ said Michelle Gerard. 

To get there, agencies are pushing hybrid compensation models: a base fee tied to media metrics like CPMs or CPVs plus performance-based outcomes. The bet is that creators will deliver more when their incentives are tied to what matters.

“We feel like we’re getting closer to fair compensation at very efficient flat fees with a bonus on top based on what that creator is doing really well,” continued Michelle Gerard.

In the end, creators didn’t disrupt the system — they became part of it.