New research shows creator marketing has become the connective tissue of modern advertising—with 92% of brands using creator content in paid media and more than 8 in 10 reporting at least 2x ROI

Creator content has moved from a brand awareness tactic to the operational backbone of enterprise advertising, according to new data from CreatorIQ's Creator-Powered Funnel report. Surveying 100 paid media marketers and marketing executives, the research reveals that the traditional marketing funnel has compressed into a creator-powered ecosystem where awareness, consideration, and conversion take place simultaneously across social media, paid media, and commerce.

The report finds that creator content now accounts for 44% of brands’ paid media creative assets on average, with 92% of paid media leaders and marketing executives using creator content in paid media in some capacity. As creator investment has deepened, reaching $6.6M on average, so has performance: more than eight in 10 respondents reported achieving at least 2x ROI from their creator marketing programs. These findings are reflected in new IAB research showing that creator advertising is now a core media channel, with spend reaching $37B in 2025 and projected to reach $44B in 2026—a faster growth rate than the broader advertising market.

“Today's consumers move fluidly across social platforms, the broader web, commerce experiences, and brand-owned channels, and brands need creative that can move with them," said Tim Sovay, Chief Partnerships Officer at CreatorIQ. "That's why creator content has become such an important part of the media mix. In paid social especially, brands are shifting budget toward creator-led ads because they deliver the authenticity and adaptability needed to perform across awareness, consideration, and conversion. As creator investment deepens, the focus is shifting from proving ROI to building the systems and workflows required to scale creator content across channels."

Creator Content Is Overtaking Traditional Ad Creative

As targeting advantages erode and consumers grow fatigued by polished advertising, creator content has become the performance-driven creative format of choice. Among surveyed marketers, 77% said creator content outperforms traditional branded ad creative, with 43% saying it performs significantly better. They also said creator content outpaces traditional creative on click-through rate (65%), conversion rate (58%), and CPM efficiency (50%).

The shift in budget allocation reflects the shift in performance expectations: two-thirds of increases in influencer marketing spend were reallocated from paid media channels, and four in 10 marketers now use creator content for the majority of their paid creative.

The Line Between Creator Marketing and Paid Media Is Disappearing

As creator content takes on a larger share of the paid media stack, the distinction between earned and paid is dissolving. Respondents were most likely to describe creator marketing as equally valuable for awareness and performance (36%)—a signal that the channel can no longer be neatly categorized as top-of-funnel. Brand lift and sales/revenue ranked as the top metrics for evaluating campaign success (58% and 54%, respectively).

More than half of surveyed marketers (57%) have fully integrated creator marketing into the same measurement framework as their broader paid media programs, measuring creator performance using the same dashboards and metrics as other paid channels.

Creator Content at Every Funnel Stage

Creator content now compresses awareness, consideration, and conversion into a single format deployed simultaneously across social, paid, and commerce. Marketers are running creator programs across every stage of the customer journey, with the mid-funnel consideration stage delivering the strongest measurable return—and 100% of respondents repurposing creator content across other channels, with paid social and digital advertising as the top destination (65%), followed by websites and landing pages (56%) and retail and commerce placements (47%).

Scaling is the New Challenge

ROI is no longer the question—operational complexity is. The biggest barriers to growth are measuring creator-driven paid performance separately from other creative (58%), securing usage rights (54%), and integrating creator tools with paid media systems (52%). Despite AI improving efficiency for 84% of marketers, teams still average four separate tools to manage creator workflows end-to-end.

"Forward-thinking brands extend the value of each creator partnership beyond the original post," said Michael Lambie, Head of Global Measurement & Insights at CreatorIQ. "Mature programs use benchmarks and performance data to inform creator selection, paid amplification, and investment."

Methodology

In partnership with Sapio Research, CreatorIQ conducted a survey of 100 marketing leaders in May 2026, including paid media managers, CMOs, directors of performance marketing, and VPs of growth across brands and agencies in the United States and United Kingdom. CreatorIQ also conducted original research on industry creator spend benchmarks in May 2026, drawing on aggregated and anonymized pay data for 38,100 creators across 59,600 campaigns from 2018 through early 2026.

Download the full report here.

About CreatorIQ

CreatorIQ is the operating system for creator-led growth, helping global brands and agencies transform creator marketing into an intelligence-driven growth engine. Powered by the Creator Graph™, which processes more than 250 million social posts daily across more than 15 million creators worldwide, CreatorIQ unifies fragmented platform data into a centralized intelligence layer and system of record for creator relationships, performance, governance, and commerce. More than 1,300 organizations—including Dentsu, Delta Air Lines, Google, Beiersdorf, Nestlé, and Wella—rely on CreatorIQ as the infrastructure to run and scale their creator programs globally. Learn more at www.creatoriq.com and follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram.

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