Social Rocket
Creator marketing continues to grow, but the infrastructure is not keeping pace with the budgets. At the first IAB Creatorfronts in New York, the focus was therefore not on new formats, but on the question of why large companies still struggle to evaluate creator investments using the same standards as other media channels.
Digiday reports three recurring problems: inconsistent definitions of views, different performance measurement, and a lack of comparability in how creators can be booked. The IAB now wants to capture these friction points more systematically and develop standards from them.
Creator budgets are growing faster than measurement systems
The scale explains why this topic is becoming more important. According to the official IAB Creator Economy Ad Spend & Strategy Report, the US creator advertising market is expected to grow to 43,9 billion US dollars around 2026. For 2025, the IAB had forecast 37,1 billion dollars.
Almost half of the surveyed advertising buyers already describe creators as a "Must Buy". At the same time, the IAB names measurement, standards and operational tools as the central areas where the market still needs to catch up.
The problem is therefore not a lack of interest, but a lack of comparability. A social view, a paid creator post, organic reach, whitelisting and creator content extended as ads can each follow different measurement logic. For large budgets, this quickly becomes a finance and controlling issue.
The IAB is examining where creator deals concretely fail
At Creatorfronts, the IAB announced the Trusted Creator Brand Deal Initiative. A survey is meant to capture where deals between brands, agencies, platforms and creators stall.
According to Digiday's initial feedback, the most important trouble spots are what actually counts as a view, how performance is assessed, and how creators can be bought in a plannable way. No concrete new standards exist yet. The results are initially intended to provide priorities for the fourth quarter of 2026 and the coming year.
This fits an earlier IAB analysis of creator measurement, in which the association describes fragmented metrics, platform silos and proxy KPIs as obstacles to fully integrating creators into company-wide media and attribution models.
ROI is becoming more important than pure engagement rates
The development is also visible among brands. In the IAB report, 40 percent of buyers name overall ROI as the most important KPI for creator campaigns. Online sales and conversions have long been among the most common goals.
This is a clear step away from the idea of evaluating creator marketing exclusively through likes, comments and reach. At the same time, caution is needed: not every creator campaign can be cleanly reduced to a last click. Brands therefore need different levels depending on their goal, such as brand lift, incremental sales, conversion, content usage and paid media performance.
This differentiation is also important when looking at current platform data. The Emplifi analysis of Instagram Collab Posts, for example, shows strong uplifts for creator-led collaborations, but it is an observational study and not proof that the collab format alone is the cause.
Creator content is becoming part of regular media production
Another point from the Creatorfronts report is especially relevant for marketing teams: creators are increasingly viewed not only as a media channel, but as a production resource for other channels.
Ankur Goyal of Ultra Pouches argued at the event that creator content can be thought of as part of creative production for paid media. This also shifts the budget logic. A creator fee then pays not only for organic reach, but possibly also for assets for ads, social, retail media or other campaign placements at the same time.
You can already see this development in practice. Molson Coors has significantly accelerated its creator workflow, while Meta, with the Creator Marketing Hub, is bringing search, rights management and partnership ads more closely together.
Price comparison remains difficult
Standards also become more important because creator prices have so far been hard to compare. Reach, production effort, usage rights, exclusivity, platform, duration and paid amplification can all change the price of a deal considerably.
This makes blanket benchmarks quickly misleading. As Srocket has already described on the topic of price pressure in creator marketing, brands are increasingly questioning whether large reach premiums are backed by real business results.
A more sensible system would therefore have to separate at least three levels: media value, production value and usage rights. Only then can one assess whether a creator deal is expensive or efficient.
What marketing teams can standardise now
Brands do not have to wait for binding industry standards. Internally, a few rules can already be set today:
- Document view definitions: do not compare platform metrics uncritically with one another.
- Separate paid and organic: measure creator reach and paid amplification separately.
- Disclose rights: do not hide usage rights and exclusivity inside the creator fee.
- Set goals in advance: awareness, content production and conversion require different KPIs.
- Check incrementality: with larger budgets, test what the creator adds on top of the existing media mix.
The creator market therefore does not need less creativity, but better infrastructure around it. The bigger the budgets become, the less it is enough to justify campaigns with screenshots from platform dashboards. Measurement, pricing logic and rights must become just as professional as the content itself.