IAB Creator Upfront: Why a half-built infrastructure is holding back CFO buy-in 

The inaugural IAB Creatorfronts, with speakers from Meta, Agentio, and YouTube, focused on how to build the tracks for the $44 billion creator train: standardized definitions, cleaner measurement and more proof of effectiveness across paid, owned and earned. 

Some of the content covered well-trodden territory – Spotter’s brief presentation included a sizzle reel already shown at their own Upfronts earlier this year, and the announcement that creators are the “future of Hollywood” has been doing the conference circuit for a while. But for slightly stubborn CFOs, the repetition might be the point. The event underlined that the creator space is at a crossroads: it needs better infrastructure and clearer expectations and measurement if it’s going to keep growing safely and at scale. 

Where deals are breaking down 

IAB president James Douglas told Digiday the trade body launched Creatorfronts to give buyers a chance to hear what’s top-of-mind in this ecosystem – and hear more about the biggest friction points getting in the way of spend. On stage, Douglas announced the Trusted Creator Brand Deal Initiative, a survey that the IAB is using to map where deals are breaking down across the supply chain.

Even the early responses to the survey aren’t exactly shocking, said Douglas.

“It’s not hard to point and see where we could fix and improve and create better standards, better visibility, better ways of working,” he said. The preliminary survey results show three obvious but stubborn problems: discrepancy in what counts as a view, how performance is measured and creator buyability. 

The IAB isn’t offering solutions or standards yet. Douglas said the survey will help set priorities for Q4 and into next year. With the survey results in hand, he plans to lean on creator company boards and communities to help build out committees to dive into these issues. 

“The final piece of the puzzle is how do we actually pull creators more aggressively into productive engagement and discussions with brands and with agencies?” Douglas asked. 

The pitch is straightforward – better standards make the $44 billion creator industry easier to scale and easier to measure, which means everybody in the ecosystem wins. 

Douglas pointed to the ever-present creator pricing problem as an example of a key component of the economy that needs more guardrails. 

“We’re not here to try and regulate creators – part of the beauty of this marketplace and the beauty of how creators bring to life so much content, entertainment and fandom is that it’s unique and different and open,” Douglas said. 

“But there has to be infrastructure,” he added. “Improvisation is easy when a market is small. But at $44 billion, it’s going to break, and it’s not going to be fair and equitable and truly opportunistic for everyone.”

Convincing the CFO

Building that infrastructure and consistency is ultimately about selling the CFOs on creators. Though none of the talks Digiday attended provided answers on how to define measurement (expect some guidelines to come with the IAB’s Trusted Creator Brand Deal Initiative survey results), there was clear intent to prove that creators can turn attention into action, not just vibes.

On stage, Ankur Goyal, CMO of Ultra Pouches, laid out the gap between the attention creators earn and the marketing budget brands give them and how he’s worked to close that gap internally.

“The first thing we have to separate to get started with creators, is thinking of creators not just as a channel but a tactic or a strategy within channels…creators became our creative production house for so many of our paid channels already,” Goyal said. 

Thinking about creator budgets as a creative production line item may help convince CFOs to invest, as well. 

“Creators are the best at making the creative for your gigantic media investments on all these channels,” Goyal explained. “Think about how much you’re spending on creative production fees…no one blinks an eye at paying a bunch of money for a studio. But they blink an eye for a creator.”

Goyal also stressed that brands looking to experiment more with creators start small – don’t chase the mega creator when you could have even more engagement with smaller creators that help you test the waters and figure out what works. 

The hard-to-convince CFO loomed over the entire day of IAB Creatorfronts.

“This is the part all your CFOs care about,” said Karin Tracy, group lead of retail and ecommerce at Meta, before showing the results of the company’s creator commerce initiatives, which included a 19% reduction in cost-per-action. 

Legal experts stressed that there is legal protection for publishers and increasingly concrete standards when it comes to brand safety, AI use and licensing. 

Pricing and its inconsistencies kept bubbling up as a limiting factor in creator deals. Douglas told Digiday that some IAB board members still don’t know how much they’re actually spending on creator marketing. Establishing more standards would get more CFOs on board, he added. 

“What’s the true cost of a creator, and how do we use some of those opportunities in the ecosystem to drive towards better standards?” he said, adding that building those standards can raise all boats. 

“Where are we getting stuck? Where are the barriers? How do we remove them? Those are the things I’m super keen to dive into.”