Creator marketing has reached the point where the question is no longer whether brands should invest. They already are.
U.S. creator ad spend reached $37 billion in 2025 and is projected to hit $44 billion this year. Nearly half of creator ad buyers now consider creators a “must buy,” ranking the channel just behind social media and paid search.1
At the Creator Economy Academy at POSSIBLE Miami this year, one theme kept surfacing: brands are buying access to relationships, not simply reach. Visibility alone does not guarantee belief. The advantage will come from understanding whose relationship with an audience a brand has earned the right to enter.
Reach Can Be Bought. Trust Has to Be Earned.
CreatorIQ reports that 71% of organizations increased influencer marketing investment year over year, while average reported budgets rose 171%. Nearly two-thirds of that increased investment came from budgets previously allocated to paid and digital media.2
As creators become a bigger part of the media plan, selection matters more. Brands need to understand the relationship a creator has built with their audience and whether the brand has a credible role within it.
Cultural relevance is central to that decision. It emerges through the interaction of the creator, the community, and the moment. A creator’s lived experience, cultural fluency, and understanding of their audience influence how naturally they can connect a brand to the people it wants to reach.
When the Creator Is the Consumer
The strongest creator partnerships often start with a genuine connection to the product.
In one of our creator programs, we discovered a creator through ongoing UGC research while he was already considering a purchase within the category. We invited him to document that journey with his audience and shared our client’s resources to help inform his research.
His content reflected a real consumer decision rather than a scripted endorsement. Eventually, he made the purchase.
The creator journey became the consumer journey.
Our broader program reinforced the value of cultural and audience relevance. Spanish-language and culturally relevant content over-indexed for engagement, while long-term creator partnerships built credibility over time.
The Right Audience Is Not a Demographic
Creators connect with audiences through shared interests, identities, and life experiences.
Sharing an audience’s language or identity does not automatically mean a creator has a meaningful connection to every subject or cultural tradition. A Hispanic creator may speak Spanish and have strong cultural credibility with their audience, but that does not mean they can authentically represent every Hispanic cultural tradition. Día de los Muertos, for example, is deeply rooted in Mexican culture and carries specific historical meaning that a Cuban, Colombian, or other Hispanic creator may not be able to genuinely express.
Cultural relevance depends on specificity. Effective selection requires it.
A bilingual lifestyle creator can bring language and cultural context to a product. A finance creator can explain the economic decision behind it. A parent can show how it fits into family life. The value comes from the creator’s credibility and ability to connect the subject to their community’s lived experience.
When that connection is missing, audiences can identify the mismatch. You cannot brief someone into being authentic; the relationship, perspective, and cultural understanding must already be there.
Build for the Job, Not the Follower Count
Creator selection should start with the job the partnership needs to do and the relationship a brand needs to build.
For broad awareness, scale may be right. For category credibility, expertise matters more. For a particular market or multicultural audience, local relevance, language, and cultural fluency are critical. For consideration or conversion, genuine lived experience can carry more weight than a large following.
IAB identifies finding the right creators as one of brands’ biggest obstacles to scaling programs effectively.1 Selection should look beyond performance metrics to audience quality, geographic relevance, category credibility, brand alignment, and the potential for a relationship to grow over time.
At POSSIBLE, TikTok’s Nikki Scott offered a useful framework: start with a Venn diagram of values and find the creators who sit inside the overlap.
The Value of Longer Relationships
Brands should prioritize fewer, stronger creator relationships over a constant cycle of one-off partnerships. Repeated collaboration builds accumulated brand knowledge, makes creative development more effective, and can strengthen credibility with audiences over time.
One partnership with a Spanish-dominant creator demonstrated the value of continuity. After working with the brand multiple times, he served as an on-air host and developed a recurring narrative connecting campaign content. His knowledge of the brand and its voice helped him bring stronger creative ideas to the partnership. Follow-up content delivered a stronger engagement rate and more comments than other creator executions. The ongoing relationship gave the brand greater audience permission, while the narrative created a consistent thread across the campaign.
These relationships can also inform paid creative, owned content, earned storytelling, events, and product feedback. In a CreatorIQ study of 100 paid-media leaders and executives in the United States and United Kingdom, creator content accounted for an average 44% of paid-media creative; 92% said they used creator content in paid media in some capacity.3
The Opportunity Ahead
Creator marketing does not have an investment problem. The investment is there.
The next advantage will come from how intelligently brands spend it: understanding who the creator is, why their audience listens, what community they have built, and what makes the partnership credible.
The brands that win will understand which relationships can move people, shape culture, and create meaningful connections with their brand.
Sources
- IAB, 2025 Creator Economy Ad Spend & Strategy Report, November 2025.
- CreatorIQ, The State of Creator Marketing Report 2025-2026, October 2025.
- CreatorIQ, Creator Content Now Powers 44% of Paid Media Creative as the Traditional Marketing Funnel Compresses, CreatorIQ Report Finds, June 2026.