This research is based on unique data collected from our proprietary audience of publisher, agency, brand and tech insiders. It’s available to Digiday+ members. More from the series →
Keeping the complexities of marketing channels in mind, Digiday+ Research has analyzed strategies and challenges across leading marketing channels — like retail media, CTV and social media — to identify key trends and best practices in our CMO Strategies series.
In this installment, Digiday+ Research focuses on an analysis of creator marketing and its role in marketers’ playbooks.
Creator marketing is booming, and it’s no longer confined to social media feeds. U.S. brands are expected to spend $13.7 billion on influencer marketing by 2027, according to eMarketer.
While Instagram, TikTok and YouTube remain dominant social platforms for influencer partnerships, creators are increasingly being used across other media channels, including retail media, CTV and display ads.
Digiday+ Research’s report on creator marketing analyzes the types of campaigns marketers are partnering with influencers on, their top success metrics for those campaigns and the challenges they face with influencer campaigns.
To map out marketers’ current digital playbook, Digiday+ Research sent out three surveys asking 125 respondents about past and upcoming investments, marketing channel tactics and preferences and business challenges.
Digiday+ Research also conducted interviews with executives from the following companies:
- Duolingo
- Milani Cosmetics
- Ruggable
- Strava
- Tinuiti
- Ulta
- YouTube
Social media remains the dominant media channel for brand-creator collaborations, according to Digiday’s survey. Ninety-six percent of respondents said they are partnering with influencers to create content for social media.
As brands continue to invest in creator partnerships on social media, platforms themselves are taking a more active role in facilitating those relationships. In March 2026, YouTube released a Gemini-powered Creator Partnerships suite of tools designed to help brands more easily find the right creators to work with and to automate parts of the process like matching and campaign management.
“We have a deep roster of creators excited to work with brands, internal experts to help guide that process and a tech infrastructure to optimize and measure those collaborations,” Brian Albert, YouTube’s managing director of U.S. video deals and creative works, said in an email.
TikTok is making similar moves. At the IAB NewFronts in March 2026, the platform unveiled two ad products intended to connect brands and creators — Pulse Mentions, which places a brand’s ad near creator content where the brand is actively being discussed, and Pulse Tastemaker, which places a brand’s ad directly after videos from a group of select creators.
In May 2026, the company launched TikTok Go, a feature that lets users book travel and activities directly through the platform, turning influencer content into opportunities to create bookings and revenue for merchants.
As creator marketing becomes more tightly integrated into commerce, retail media networks are emerging as another key partnership channel. Seventeen percent of survey respondents said they are partnering with influencers to create content for retail media — making it the second most used media channel for creator-brand partnerships.
The convergence of creator marketing and retail media is increasingly being formalized through data partnerships. In January 2026, Omnicom Media announced a partnership with Meta that links Walmart Connect’s first-party purchase data with Instagram creator campaigns, allowing marketers to better connect influencer activity with sales outcomes. The company struck a similar agreement with TikTok the previous year, underscoring growing demand from advertisers for more measurable creator marketing programs.
As brands expand their creator marketing strategies, they are increasingly tapping influencers for more than just awareness campaigns. Many are partnering with creators to help drive seasonal campaigns, support product launches and, in some cases, even help develop products — indicating the continued role creators play as trusted experts and advisors.
The majority of survey respondents (88%) said they work with influencers for seasonal campaigns, while more than three-quarters of respondents (78%) said they work with influencers for product launches.
Retailers like Best Buy are putting these strategies into practice. In September 2025, Best Buy partnered with sports and entertainment creator group Dude Perfect to give brands the opportunity to be showcased on Dude Perfect’s YouTube channel during seasonal events, including the NFL season and the holidays.
In the same month, Albertsons Media Collective, the retail media arm of major grocery retailer Albertsons, partnered with influencer marketing agency Linqia on a campaign that spotlighted Lunar New Year traditions using Linqia’s content creators. The campaign saw three times more engagement on Instagram and four times more engagement on Facebook compared to benchmarks, according to Albertsons.
Beyond seasonal campaigns, brands are increasingly bringing influencers into their product-launch efforts. Some marketers are even co-developing product lines with creators.
Home goods brand Ruggable partnered with online chef and influencer Dan Pelosi on a co-created product collection after noting strong performance on his ShopMy page. The ShopMy platform allows consumers to purchase products specifically curated by creators, stylists, brand founders and celebrities, and it connects creators with brands so they can monetize product recommendations through affiliate links and partnerships.
“What ShopMy has allowed us to do is scale our influencer program by 20 times,” said Lauren Sherman-Kaoud, Chief Marketing and Creative Officer at Ruggable. “On top of that, we’re using that data to do deeper collaborations with creators. … This is specifically a micro influencer product collaboration strategy.”
As creator marketing matures, brands are also becoming more sophisticated about how they categorize and partner with creators based on campaign goals. Milani Cosmetics’ Chief Marketing Officer Jeremy Lowenstein said he groups creators into three buckets. “The first group consists of creators who help shape brand perception and communicate brand values. The second includes creators who educate consumers about products, such as makeup artists,” Lowenstein said. “The final category is affiliate-focused creators whose primary role is driving sales through livestream shopping and other commerce-focused formats.”
External influencers remain advertisers’ primary collaborators, but a growing number of brands are relying on a mix of external and in-house creators to create content. Sixty-nine percent of survey respondents said their company works with external influencers, while nearly one-third of respondents (29%) said their company works with both in-house and external influencers.
In an effort to grow their external influencer partnerships, some marketers are establishing creator programs. Unlike one-off influencer campaigns, these programs are intended to build long-term creator-brand relationships by providing creators with incentives such as product education, commissions and early access to promotions. In exchange, creators are expected to produce content, drive engagement, influence purchases and build community.
Fitness app Strava’s creator program has specific requirements about who can participate. “Everybody that we work with has to authentically use Strava,” said Louisa Wee, Chief Marketing Officer at Strava. “Oftentimes, we are pulling from a network that either has a pro designation — an Olympian, for example — or a verification process to be part of our network. There’s a stringent standard.”
Strava typically partners with creators for product activations, according to Wee. “They authentically use different features, experiencing new sports or features that would help them be better at their sport of choice,” she explained. “If they can authentically tell a story, we are open to using them, not just to leverage their own social media following, but to create the content that we can then use across multiple channels.”
YouTube has more than 3 million creators in its YouTube Partner Program, according to the platform. YouTube’s Albert said that viewers can tell when content has been overly produced and that genuine videos perform best. “When brands micromanage a creator’s script, the audience smells the ‘ad’ and moves along,” he said. “The challenge for marketers today is learning to brief goals, not words, and trust the creator to translate the brand’s DNA into their own unique dialect.”
Ulta Beauty has creator programs for both external and in-house influencers. The content appeals to consumers in different ways, according to Kelly Mahoney, CMO at Ulta Beauty. “Our associates are already trusted creators, experts and storytellers whose authentic content and personal connections resonate deeply with beauty lovers,” Mahoney said in an email. “The Ulta Beauty Collective [for external influencers], meanwhile, brings together creators who help us show up authentically across culture, trends and beauty conversations happening across social.”
Relying on employees to act as creators reflects a broader shift toward expertise-driven content. “There are brands that use in-house employees as content creators through their channels, whether it’s chemists [or another type of expert]. I’ve had my product development people doing product education,” Milani Cosmetics’ Lowenstein said. “The influencer world has helped, organically, and sometimes not organically, to amplify the brand message. As an industry, we’ve leaned into cultural conversations because algorithmically, that is what has resonated on those platforms.”
While not a human influencer, language learning app Duolingo’s Duo owl character has resonated with audiences since its debut in 2011. According to Duolingo Chief Marketing Officer Manu Orssaud, the well-known company mascot has also become an influencer in its own right.
“We have our own influencer. It’s the owl,” Orssaud said. “Often, the reason creators want to work with us is because they don’t necessarily see us as a brand here to make money or sell a product, but they see us as a brand that is actually famous for being a good content creator. It changes the game because it becomes more like two creators collaborating versus a creator and a brand collaborating.”
As creator roles expand and shift, marketers are divided on how to best measure the success of influencer campaigns. Almost one-third of marketers said their main measurement of success for influencer campaigns is impressions (28%), followed closely by conversions (27%). Watch time (17%), click-through rate (14%) and commerce or sales (13%) are their next-most important measurements of success.
These results indicate that creators are primarily being used at the top of the marketing funnel to enhance brand visibility, such as Milani Cosmetics’ use of its product development employees to produce educational content, or at the bottom of the funnel to drive conversions, like Ulta Beauty’s external creators who recommend products to consumers.
Social media algorithms also play a role in how brands choose which creators to work with and how they measure the success of those campaigns, according to Duolingo’s Orssaud. “We used to focus on working with an influencer with a big reach and a certain level of impact from an impression perspective. That type of strategy around influencers is dying,” Orssaud said. “It’s about the content that will get picked up by the algorithm. We prefer now to work with creators who are good at creating content and will distribute that content through new channels … [such as] brand new accounts they create in collaboration with us.”
Creator content varies by platform, as well, according to Ulta Beauty’s Mahoney. “What works on TikTok may not resonate the same way on Instagram or YouTube Shorts,” she said. “TikTok tends to reward more trend-driven, conversational and real-time content, while Instagram is often more inspiration-led and visually curated. So, we work closely with creators to make sure the storytelling, tone and format feel authentic to both the platform and the creator’s audience.”
Because Instagram’s creator content is typically intended to raise brand awareness and inspire consumers, the platform lends itself to top-of-the-funnel marketing, with impressions as an important metric. TikTok’s conversational nature and its TikTok Shop e-commerce feature make that platform particularly attractive for driving engagement and purchases.
Despite growing sophistication around platform strategies, measurement remains one of marketers’ persistent challenges across creator marketing. Unlike traditional digital advertising channels, where campaign performance data is readily available, influencer marketing often depends on metrics that remain largely inaccessible unless creators choose to share them. Thirty percent of marketers said insufficient data on influencer performance is the biggest challenge they face with influencer campaigns.
Without standardized performance data, marketers often struggle to determine the true value of creator partnerships and to justify spending decisions, according to Crystal Duncan, evp of brand engagement at performance marketing agency Tinuiti.
“Measuring influencer campaigns outside of last-click attribution is still a challenge for many brands,” Duncan said in an email. “Many are building influencers into things like MMMs, but it’s still challenging to understand the real value they drive.
“It is easier to measure influencer creative performance when content is whitelisted or used in paid media, but that only tells a portion of the story,” she added. “This also leads to issues with how much to pay an influencer for a partnership if we can’t validate the value, it’s hard to justify the cost, especially for larger or more expensive influencers.”
Lack of data transparency has prompted some platforms to take steps to bridge the gap. YouTube’s Creator Partnerships API, announced at NewFronts 2026, opens up creator performance data to a select group of third-party ad tech companies – who watches what, for how long and what that means for an advertiser trying to decide where to put money. It is not, however, an open door. Creators can opt out of being included, and brands must actively opt in.
Marketers’ second greatest challenge with creator marketing is market saturation. Fifteen percent of survey respondents said that a crowded market place is the biggest challenge they face with influencer campaigns.
According to April 2025 data from the Interactive Advertising Bureau, more than 1.5 million Americans work full-time as digital creators. Ruggable’s Sherman-Kaoud said the abundance of influencers is one of several challenges marketers face.
“It’s still quite laborious to run an influencer marketing program at scale — everything from finding and vetting talent, pitching opportunities, educating them, getting the product to them and getting them paid,” she said. “The biggest challenges really are more administrative. Influencers are incredibly powerful at scale.”
