Marcus Johnson (00:04):

Hello, and welcome to a special edition episode of the eMarketer podcast Behind the Numbers. I'm Marcus Johnson, and today I'm introducing a special episode from the eMarketer Creator Trends 2026 Virtual Summit. In this episode, eMarketer principal analyst, Max Willens unveils new forecasts that reveal where creator spending is accelerating, including new category breakouts for 2026. I hope you enjoy.

Max Willens (00:29):

I'm really excited to dive into what we see shaping the creator economy and marketer's investment in it for you all today. There's a lot that I'm going to try to cram in here, but we'll give you kind of a sneak preview in the form of an agenda. We're going to start off by talking about how creators have come to become these central components, not just of the media ecosystem, but of entertainment and increasingly retail as well. We're going to also double click on that to discuss how this scaling and diffusion across lots of different industries has affected the results of creator marketing and also the strategy that underpins it for marketers and advertisers. We'll follow that up by looking at a really important balancing act that marketers, advertisers, and creators are all going to have to walk as we move into an era where AI mediates and forms and powers a lot of portions of the creator economy and what that means.

(01:34):

And then of course, because we're trying to be helpful here, we'll leave you with some takeaways, which will hopefully give you some action items when we get out of here. So, let's start by talking about where the creator economy actually sits today. I would say that it would be safe to say that creators have really graduated from being a bright, shiny object in the eyes of many CMOs several years ago to really becoming a critical plank in most marketing strategies today. So, we're about a year removed from Unilever declaring that half of their ad budget would be going to creators. And they're not the only company to commit that kind of budget to creators for what it's worth. But since that declaration, there's been a lot of information that's come out about how creators are becoming more integral to different parts of media and entertainment and even beyond those two industries as well.

(02:28):

So, let's start with some top line figures from our brand-new forecast. The headline here does say it all. We're talking about at least $21 billion going into the pockets of U.S.-based creators in 2026. I want to linger a little bit though on how quickly we've gotten to this already very large number, which as you can see, is poised to grow quite healthily for the next several years as well. But basically we're looking at a pile of money that nearly doubled between the years of 2022 and 2025, and it will have more than doubled over the course of four years by the end of 2026. By 2028, it'll be over 26 billion.

(03:15):

And one thing that's worth asking while we're here and looking at this top line figure is, how does this compare to other spending areas? And one of the sort of exciting but also frustrating things about creators is that there isn't really a tidy comp, right? If you were to compare this directly to the amount that advertisers spend on social media, that doesn't quite work, because there's a lot of different ways that advertisers can spend there. If you compare it directly to online video spending, there again, it doesn't quite fit for a lot of different reasons. But a comp that I've been increasingly drawn to lately is comparing these figures to web publishers, programmatic display revenues.

(03:56):

And the reason that I like this as a comp is that for a long time, going on 10 years, brands understood that if they wanted to sort of raise their profiles among consumers on the internet, they would have to go to media companies, right? They went to legacy folks like Time or Meredith or The New York Times. They went to digital upstarts like Buzzfeed or Vox or VICE. And that kind of instinct that advertisers had fueled many, many years of really, really healthy programmatic digital growth.

(04:32):

But what you see here in this set of group bars here is that advertiser tastes are changing, right? So in 2022, web publishers took in an overall amount of revenue that was about 44% greater than the amount creators took in. In 2026, excuse me, it's only going to be about 26% more. By next year it's going to be just 23%. And really what this is, in my eyes, is a sort of visual representation of changing advertiser tastes. And they've changed to the point that now creators are on this short list of needs for a huge share of the buy side. How big? According to recent data from the IAB, we're talking about basically one out of every two marketers thinks that creators are a must have investment. It's worth noting here as you look at the slide that about four of the seven options that got at least 30% of the vote are also places where investing in creators potentially makes those investments or those activations even more powerful.

(05:39):

So, social media is probably the most obvious and cleanest integration, but as we'll discuss later, a lot of people are figuring out ways to incorporate creator spending into their CTV activations, into their commerce media, even into linear television. And so, as high as this number is, in large part because of that flexibility, and we'll talk more about this in a moment, but because of those things, I think it's not unreasonable to expect that even with 48% of creator or advertisers saying creators are a must buy, I think that number could be even higher next year. And another reason that I think that is because of another question from that same IAB research for their respondents where they basically asked them which spending areas they expected they were going to devote more time, resources and energy to in 2026.

(06:29):

And what you can see is that far and away, the biggest share went to creator or influencer partnerships. That share not coincidentally jumped nine percentage points from year over year. And so this is another reason to think that the creators are going to come in an even greater share of mind and spend moving forward. So, let's pause for a moment and ask ourselves a question. Why is this happening? Why are creators which were already so top of mind, already an essential spending area for such a huge part of the media and marketing world? Why do they continue to get so much more attention? And the sort of simple short answer is because of the cache that creators already enjoy, right? So this is from primary research that we conducted over the summer where we asked about 1,400 U.S. adults how they discover products on the internet.

(07:23):

And what you can see is that a plurality of Gen Z and millennial respondents said that when they are looking on social media, they discover stuff mostly through creators, significantly larger shares pointed to creators versus using social media as a search surface or by interacting with people that are interested in the same things that they're interested in.

(07:46):

But what everybody understands is that creators, as powerful and kind of visible and important as they've become on social, have long since transcended and escaped from social as a place to activate. So, if you had been keeping a list all year of all the different ways that creators have infiltrated the media entertainment and retail ecosystems, you'd see that they have really become much more visible in all three spaces. So you had things like Pax on a Nordstrom, either launching or partnering with influencer collectives to sort of incorporate them into their operations. You had retail media networks like Walmart Connect overhauling the way that advertisers can connect with creators within their infrastructure. And then you look at the next column at entertainment and you have legacy entertainment giants ranging from Fox Entertainment to theater chains like Regal and AMC, figuring out how to partner with creators to get their works onto their screens.

(08:53):

And even the large social platforms too, which again are sort of the bedrock of this economy in lots of ways. Five of the six big social platforms in the U.S. made major changes to the way that their systems worked to make them more hospitable to creators, to kind of continue to foster collaboration and deal making between creators and advertisers. And so, all of this is instructive by itself, but I also want to call out the four things that I've starred here on this graph because those four companies did things that represent what I think of as being pretty novel interminglings or collaborations between retail and entertainment and media and the gravitational force that sort of made those collisions possible came from creators. I think about native or Maybelline committing to sponsoring microdrama series, starring creators that sort of put their products at their heart. That's real kind of next generation thinking about media entertainment and commerce.

(10:00):

And the thing that stirred it all together was creators. And so if you take all this stuff that we've laid out the last few minutes and you look at this landscape that is now so dotted with different creator activations and influence, and CMOs across the country have sort of seen this influence and pervasiveness and they've acted accordingly. And one of the ways that they've been doing that is they've been sort of taking the investment that they've made in creators and spreading the results of it out far and wide.

(10:34):

So, this is data that I got from CreatorIQ. They asked several hundred brands, whether they repurpose the content that they get from creator marketing, and 98% of the respondents said yes. That in and of itself I think is kind of an impressive number, but I wanted to linger on where those respondents said that they repurposed their content too.

(10:55):

Some of this is pretty straightforward. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to think of taking a creator testimonial and slapping it on your website, or cutting portions of it up and redistributing them as a paid campaign on social media. But when you look at over a quarter of the respondents saying that they use creator content for TV or OTT, or more than a fifth of the respondents saying that they're putting this stuff into print context, that to me is really a powerful testament to not just how kind of visible creators are, but also how a main reason why they're so top of mind for advertisers because creator content is so extensible and so easily transposable, right?

(11:42):

And so, but if you needed still more reason why CMOs are interested in creators and creator spending, it's because LLMs and AI engines really, really like sites that depend, really, really heavily on creator content, right? So this is data that comes from Semrush where they basically presented data on the 10 domains that are cited most frequently in AI engine responses. And what you can see from the bars that I've highlighted in red is that a full half of the domains that are cited most frequently are really just gigantic repositories or gateways to creator content, right? So Reddit, YouTube, Google, Facebook, Amazon, all of these are sites that are either bedrocks of creator content or that are putting creator content more and more front and center all the time. And so you add all this up and it's not surprising that brands are trying to direct as much budget as possible to creators, right? But what's notable is just how novel and creative they're getting in terms of finding the money needed to feed this beast, right?

(12:52):

So, this again is from the same creator economy, or excuse me, CreatorIQ research. And they found that a large, large percent of respondents are planning on raising their investment in this space. A not insignificant percentage said that they've just found incremental net new funds, right? About 40%, but big, big chunks of the respondents also said that they are pulling money out of pretty dependable workhorse channels, right? Things like marketing staples like email marketing or direct mail, even legacy spending areas that are probably right for some redistribution like printer broadcast advertising, but even MarTech budgets are sort of susceptible to this.

(13:36):

But moving to the next section here, when you think about what all this means that creator economy is top of mind for CMOs, that they all considered a must have spending area, that they're redistributing that content across lots of different digital and even legacy channels, and that they're pulling budget from every place they can grab it to fuel all this spending.

(14:01):

What this leads to is an increase in expectations and pressure too, right? Especially for brands that are sort of in the middle of scaling up their creator marketing or feeling like they're building the plane while they're flying it. This kind of pressure could potentially feel quite acute, because the world of creator marketing in response to, or as a result of all the stuff I've said, has grown more competitive, it has grown more crowded. And in some cases it's grown more complicated too, right? And a big reason for that is that brands are just having to manage a lot more creators than they once did, right? And a key reason for that is because of a significant shift that we've seen in terms of the way that brands think about creators as a channel, right? So I would say that at a high level, the media and marketing and advertising worlds have moved from bringing a kind of legacy digital thinking to creators that have kind of hunting for cheap reach, and they've now more oriented themselves around the priority of seeking deeper alignment, right?

(15:04):

And I think that this is illustrated really neatly in this data here. This is from that IAB research I mentioned a couple of times before. They basically asked brands which of the following attributes was most important when it came to decide whether or not they were going to invest in a creator? And the lowest share of the respondents went with follower count, right? Conversely, a plurality of the respondents selected creator suitability. And I think if you'll go along with me, I would submit that a full half of the respondents chose what I would call fit traits, right? So campaign fit, aesthetic alignment with your brand, brand affinity or history of posting about a client. All of these things are, rather than factors that lead to cheap reach, there are things that are meant instead to hone in on convincing and resonating with consumers, right? Because if you live in a situation where this content is so easily extensible and transported and repurposed in a lot of different contexts, it makes sense that suitability would become really, really important, but marketers still have to hit their numbers, right?

(16:18):

And that's created a really interesting shift. Today, we think that most brands work with lots of different kinds of creators. This is IAB data, which I found pretty helpful. They asked about the kinds of creators that brands work with us divvied up by a sort of follower range. And this is very useful, but to me it only tells part of the story, right? Because hearing what kinds of influencers brands work with by size is to me less important than understanding how many of each type they work with. And if you look at other sources of data, what you see is an explosion of spending on partnerships with smaller creators.

(16:58):

This is data that I pulled out of a report by Gospel. It is YouTube data, which I will acknowledge is different from social in lots of different ways, but I think that it's directionally useful here. So, what they did is they looked at sponsored videos published on YouTube in the first half of 2024, and then they compared that data to sponsored video publishing on YouTube in 2025. What they found at a high level was a 54% increase in the number of sponsored videos published overall. But if you double click into it, what you see is that the distribution of these videos published is not equal, right? The number of videos published that reached much smaller audiences was much, much, much bigger than the number published that reached larger groups.

(17:46):

Now again, this is directional, but I think that it's a good way to illustrate something that we see in our own forecasting data, which is this really rapid shift toward large scale spending on smaller creators. This is basically an area chart that shows share of influencer marketing spend divvied up by creator tier, essentially.

(18:12):

And what we see, and we indicated in the headline, is that effectively half of the money in 2026 is going to go to nano and micro influencers. These are people that might only have a couple of thousand followers to their name, right? These are not people that have 10 million followers on Instagram or 25 million followers on YouTube. These are people that reach a very small, very passionate, very engaged segment of people. And this is in and of itself just wild to me, but I think it's wilder still when you compare it to the share that they enjoyed just a couple of years ago. So in 2021, that same cohort of advertise or of creators was pulling in less than a fifth of all the spending.

(18:55):

Now again, when you think back to the things we've been discussing, this makes a lot of sort of strategic sense, right? If you're maximizing for affinity, for community, for people that can help with consideration, maybe conversion in addition to just reach, you want to reach these kinds of people, but again, we're still talking about a business where you need to hit your number marks. And the reality too, that a lot of marketers are contending with is that the data shows that relevance and the organic engagement that that is supposed to drive isn't good enough in and of itself anymore. So this is data that I got out of a report that Tracker published a little less than a month ago. And what it shows is that a lot of brands' creator content just didn't deliver the same impact and performance that it did last year, right? So that's the year-over-year performance that's charted in the Y-axis of this chart.

(19:48):

And that fact in and of itself is worrisome, right? But when you incorporate in what the X-axis of this chart is showing, then it becomes quite a bit more disturbing, because the X-axis basically charts growth and volume of followers for those industries, right? So, it's one thing to have the performance of your creator content drop five, 10% year-over-year, but when that's accompanied by a 40 or 50 or even 60% increase in the volume of people that your creators are supposed to be reaching, that's a big problem. That's something that a lot of brands are having to wrestle with. And increasingly what a lot of marketers are doing to sort of solve for this is they are spending more money to reach people through advertising. So, what that means, as you can see from this chart here, which is also pulled from our forecast, is that brands are having to spend substantial sums of money on amplifying or distributing creator content, so much that we think that by next year, the amount advertisers spend on distributing influencer content will exceed the amount they are paying the influencers to make it.

(21:04):

As you can see from the chart, if you kind of look at the lines carefully, this didn't happen out of nowhere. If you isolate what we see this year, it's basically going to be neck and neck. And I think that if we pause here for a moment and think about this, you could say that this is not necessarily a bad thing. A kind of glass half full interpretation of this revisit something that I mentioned earlier, which is just about the highly flexible and malleable and extensible nature of creator content, right?

(21:36):

If we live in an era where creative is the new targeting, and it's important that you be able to reach lots of different kinds of people with different creative, being able to say, "Look, creator content is great for those reasons. And so we've just hit upon a kind of vein of raw material that's really valuable, and so we're going to spend a lot of money to get the most out of that investment, right?"

(22:02):

A more glass half empty interpretation is, "I, as an advertiser, I'm now having to spend more to reach the same amount of people that I was able to reach with organic means two, three, four years ago." Depending on the brand, the context, the vertical, I would say that both of those interpretations are probably true to differing extents.

(22:21):

But when you think about being in a situation where even some of that glass half empty version is true where you're having to spend the same amount to reach the same amount of people, that's a tough thing to explain to a CFO. And it's especially tough when you consider how much trouble a lot of marketers are still having with measuring the efficacy of creator marketing as an investment, right?

(22:44):

So, this again returns to the IAB data. They basically asked their respondents what the top three pain points or challenges were when it came to measuring the efficacy of spending on creators. And so a plurality selected proven ROI, but when I look at this chart, my eyes are drawn less to the top or largest bar and more to the thickness of all of the bars on it. So, there's 10 responses, 10 options here, I should say, and seven of the 10 were selected by at least a quarter of the respondents.

(23:21):

And what that says to me is that there isn't just one problem with measuring the efficacy of creators. There's actually lots of different challenges with measuring them. Now, there's a, I would say a very encouraging reason for this, which is that overall brands are now using creators for tons of different things. This is unsurprising given all the stuff we've been talking about for the last several minutes, but when you look at the different kind of goals that creators are being used for today, what you see is a full embrace of using them for full funnel activation, right?

(23:57):

You've got upper funnel objectives like building brand awareness, but you also have midfunnel stuff like driving consideration, increasing social media engagement, and even to my mind, a really encouraging and interesting array of bottom funnel goals, right? Including some which are hard to measure no matter what, like driving foot traffic using creators is to me a testament to how much faith brands have in creators' ability to drive results for them.

(24:27):

But I don't want to lose sight of the fact that we have also spent the last several minutes talking about this space getting a lot more competitive, a lot more complicated, a lot more expensive. And so you add all of those things together and it's not surprising that a lot of marketers are going to look at circumstances like that and start fumbling around for an easy button like AI, for example. I could have done an entirely separate presentation on AI and creators, and if that's something you're interested in, you should watch your inboxes because there's something coming on that later this year. And I do not have time to go over everything, but in the face of all this complexity, I wanted to quickly go over the role that AI is playing in creator marketing right now and why brands need to pay really close attention to that role.

(25:14):

So to start off, let's just talk about what folks are using AI for currently, right? So about three quarters of influencer marketers use AI in some form or fashion. This is according to data from Linkia. And if you double click into what they're using it for, it looks a lot like what marketers use AI for in other channels, right? So, creative ideation, writing briefs, analysis to a lesser extent, some light creative repurposing. This all makes a lot of sense to me, doesn't really ring a lot of alarm bells. But what makes less sense to me is how many marketers seem to be thinking about AI as a solve to all of their problems, right? And you see this in one last data point that I'll share with you from CreatorIQ. So they asked their survey respondents how much they were in favor of completely automating their influencer marketing with AI, and 69% said that they were at least somewhat in favor of doing this.

(26:15):

And this to me is a very worrisome trend that should be watched really, really closely. To me, it speaks more to how complex and demanding influencer marketing and creator marketing have become, and how much that sort of demand and complexity seems to be outstripping or swamping over the upside and promise that creator marketing has. There are a lot of things that I think contribute to this response, but I would also say that brands, as they weigh whether or not to incorporate AI into their creator marketing efforts or how much further they should incorporate it, they need to remain really, really aware of how the public perceives AI in this current moment. So this is data that I gathered from Ipsos, which has been running what they call a consumer tracker, where they pull people every week on various issues. This is going back to COVID.

(27:13):

And one of the things that they've been keeping tabs on over that time is how Americans feel about AI and its place in society and a lot of different things. And one of the things that's emerged from these questions that they've been sending out to people is that while Americans see AI as a nice thing to use at work, maybe a little boost to their own personal productivity, they generally do not see it as something that is good, I would say, for us on the whole. You see 55% say that increased AI use will lead to more income inequality and a more polarized society. You have just 41% thinking that the potential benefits of AI will outweigh the potential job loss. And so, basically any brand that's thinking about making AI a more visible component of any part of their marketing should understand that they are potentially associating their brand with something that makes people think about polarization, makes them think about inequality. And creator content for all of the kind of positive attributes and magical qualities that it has, their content's not immune to this either, right?

(28:36):

So, Billion Dollar Boy and Muse published a report a couple of months ago about the role or impact of AI on the creator economy, and they found something that's consistent with lots of other research that I've found, including some from Ipsos, which was too old, but this rhymes with that, I think, quite consistently. So, basically what they did is they asked a bunch of folks whether they thought that they preferred AI-generated creator content to traditional creator content. And what this data shows to me is that any kind of early emergent curiosity or interest in the idea of creator content made by AI has deteriorated pretty substantially. And so, while there's a ton more to say about how AI and creators fit together and what those two things can do for one another, it's going to be, I think, really, really essential that marketers tread really lightly as they figure out the relationship between the two.

(29:39):

And that I think is a good transition into some recommendations for you all. There's a pretty diverse array of you tuned in here, and I recognize that that can make it hard to come up with things that are applicable to everybody, but here's some things that I think are worth thinking about. So, the first is setting an analytic foundation. As I touched on or closed my second section by pointing out, there's a lot of different things that creators can be used for. And so, it's really essential that brands build infrastructure that can support the measurement optimization and scaling of whatever it is that they're doing, and do so in a way that makes sense for their own individual goals as a brand.

(30:23):

The second, which is a related point, focuses on kind of scaling relationship management. As we move into this era where nano influencers, micro influencers are becoming more core to this whole strategy, and as those same people are used for lots of different things, it's going to be really important that as an organization you're able to kind of onboard people in a way that's efficient and compliant with all of the different kind of structures that your organization has.

(30:55):

And the third thing I want to bring up is, I think maybe kind of counterintuitive in light of the first one, and that's to sort of build and seek strong relationships. So, as creator marketing and as the creator economy kind of grows more into a scaled channel, there is going to be a temptation among some brands and advertisers to look at this as a channel that's going to become more transactional, more turnkey, more programmatic. But I think the key to building relationships and content that really delivers, really resonates is going to be driven by relationships that are very deep and very kind of multifaceted. And so, being able to find the bandwidth needed to seek out those creators and really, really nurture your relationships with them is going to be really, really important.

(31:46):

And finally, with that idea, this is sort of related. I think breaking out of feeds as much as possible is going to be really important. So, there's an easy version of this, which we already talked about during the presentation of kind of repurposing content that you've gotten out of your partnerships for different channels, but the more ambitious version will involve things like in-person activations, or working closely on product development with people. And it's going to be really exciting to see which brands make the most out of these relationships in all these different digital contexts.