There’s a line in the IAB’s latest creator economy report that made me sit up. Nearly half of the brands spending money on ads now call creator marketing a “must buy” – ranking it behind only social media and paid search. Not a nice-to-have. Not a test budget you’ll review next quarter. A must.
If your brand is still treating creator content as an experiment, that one number should change how you plan for 2026.
What a “must buy” actually means.
For years, creators sat in the “let’s try it and see” column of the media plan. The IAB’s 2025 Creator Economy Ad Spend & Strategy Report puts a stop to that. 48% of ad spenders now class creators as a must buy, sitting just below social and search in priority.
The spend backs it up. Creator ad money has more than doubled since 2021, from $13.9bn to $29.5bn in 2024, and the IAB projects it reached $37bn in 2025 – a 26% jump in a single year, growing about four times faster than the media industry overall. When budget moves like that, it’s not a fad. It’s a channel.
Brands are using creators across the whole funnel.
Common myth: creator content is only good for awareness. Nice reach, fuzzy results, hard to tie to a sale. The data says otherwise. Yes, brands still use creators most for building awareness (43%) and reaching new audiences (41%). But more than a third are using them to build reputation and trust (35%), and nearly a third to drive online sales and conversions (32%). Four in ten buyers name overall ROI as their single most important measure of success.
Read that again. Brands are holding creator work to ROI, and still buying more of it. That only happens when it pays.
The AI twist that works in your favour.
Here’s the part I love, as someone who films and edits every project herself. Three in four brands are using or planning to use AI somewhere in their creator marketing. Sensible enough – trimming an edit, drafting a brief, tweaking a caption for a different audience. But 95% of them have concerns about it. And their single biggest worry? Losing the human connection.
That human connection is the whole reason brands invest in creators in the first place. Real people, real recommendations, content that feels like a friend telling you about something rather than an ad shouting at you. AI can speed up the boring bits. It can’t be trusted with the thing that makes UGC actually work. The brands winning here use AI to move faster behind the scenes and keep a real person in front of the camera. If you want the longer version of that argument, I wrote about why 78% of marketers still choose human UGC over AI content.
What this means for your next campaign.
If creator marketing is now a must buy, the question stops being “should we try UGC?” and becomes “how do we do it well?” Three things I’d hold onto.
Pick the right creator, not the biggest one. The IAB found a third of brands say their hardest job is finding the right person to work with, and that creator reputation (58%) and audience alignment (56%) matter more than raw follower count. A creator whose audience actually looks like your customer beats a bigger account every time.
Brief for the platform, not the boardroom. The content that performs is native to the feed – built to sit there, not interrupt it. Vertical, sound-on, hook in the first two seconds, a real face and a real opinion.
Measure it like you mean it. Brands are judging creator work on ROI now, so agree what you’re tracking before a single clip is filmed – sales, sign-ups, saves, whatever moves your business. Vague goals get vague results.
The takeaway for 2026.
Nearly half of ad buyers already treat creators as essential, spend is climbing four times faster than the wider industry, and the one thing brands are most afraid of losing is the human touch. That’s a clear brief: invest in creator content, and keep it genuinely human.
If you want creator content that earns its place on the media plan – filmed, edited and ready to post, made by an actual person – that’s exactly what I do. Take a look at my pricing or email me at [email protected] and let’s talk about your next campaign.
