The creator economy is earning a rising share of consumers’ attention, but its growth is making the terrain more complicated both for brands and for creators seeking sponsors.
While some major marketers say they’re moving spending from television and digital advertising to social-media creators, the money is lagging behind both consumer trends and the population boom among creators themselves. That’s spreading budgets thin, discouraging potentially more effective long-term partnerships and leaving many out in the cold, creators say.
“Every creator wants to work with the brands,” said Sam Beres, who goes by Sambucha to his millions of followers on YouTube and TikTok. “Creators will have their hands out like, ‘Hey, we’re ready, we’d love to work with you. Pay me something close to what I think I should get.’ There’s just not enough volume of brands coming in.”
Forty-eight percent of marketers call creators a “must buy” for their media plans, trailing only paid search and social-media ads, according to a survey last summer by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, an ad-industry trade group.
And U.S. advertisers are expected to spend as much as $43.9 billion this year on sponsored creator posts and related ads, up from $37.1 billion in 2025, according to the IAB.
This year’s predicted 18% year-over-year growth would, however, trail last year’s 26% growth rate and the previous year’s 34% rate, according to IAB.
Dove parent Unilever has led many other large companies in its embrace of creators. The company now has 300,000 people recommending its products, its CEO said last month, up from 10,000 two years earlier.
“You cannot talk about what engages people, where people find things, where people buy things without talking about the creator economy,” said Selina Sykes, global vice president for digital, social and AI transformation at Unilever’s beauty and well-being division.
The company’s strategy ranges from hiring big names to serve as the faces of its brands to paying lesser-known creators to participate in its campaigns, Sykes said.
Some other major marketers remain cautious.
YouTube creator sponsorships from household-name advertisers grew 189% in 2025, but smaller and direct-to-consumer brands still accounted for more than 94% of 150,00-plus sponsored creator videos from last year, according to Joshua Cohen, chief executive of data firm Gospel Stats. Names as big as General Mills, Salesforce and SiriusXM hadn’t sponsored any YouTube creator content before last year, Cohen said.
Activision was 2025’s biggest household-name YouTube sponsor with 579 sponsored creator videos but still trailed the top two brands, news aggregator Ground News and remote therapy platform BetterHelp, each of which showed up more than 3,000 times, Gospel Stats said.
Even when creators do get inbound interest, they often have to educate the agencies that negotiate these brand deals, according to an executive at a large YouTube creator network who requested anonymity to share proprietary data.
The network, which averages 140 million views a month, is on track to earn around $5 million from brand sponsorships this year after bringing in $4 million from 29 brands and 99 pieces of content last year, the executive said. Buyers still often treat these deals like traditional ad campaigns, however, asking for things that creators can’t provide, like clickable ads or a guaranteed number of views, he said.
Measurement is a key holdup for some big brands because returns on creator campaigns can’t be quantified as easily as for traditional TV commercials. This is especially true when the brands pay the creator but don’t invest heavily to promote the content or turn it into paid ads, said the executive.
Mars often starts its creator campaigns by hiring creators to promote the products but not paying to place or boost those posts, according to Gülen Bengi, lead chief marketing officer at the packaged goods giant and chief growth officer for its snacks division.
The company last year sought input from users of gaming company Razer’s products to develop Respawn, a sugar-free line of gums and mints aimed at gamers. It then distributed the product to certain key gaming creators before turning their content into ads, said Bengi.
Mars then analyzes web traffic and other data to connect individual points of engagement to sales. “Everybody creates and everybody is in the conversation,” Bengi said.
Creators and the talent firms that represent them argue that brands benefit most from long-term relationships that span more than one social platform, such as Unilever’s deal last year naming reality star and creator Paige DeSorbo as the first ambassador for its hair-care brand TRESemmé.
“We really do want to move from having these transactional relationships to having these long-term relationships,” said Sykes, the Unilever executive.
The vast majority of creator deals with brands are contracts for a few paid TikTok and Instagram posts, said Andrew Graham, head of business development at Creative Artists Agency’s creator division.
Budgetary and time pressures also make one-off deals appealing for marketers, according to Samir Chaudry, one half of creator duo Colin & Samir. Six-figure contracts involving three to six posts can be finished in a week, while Samir and his team have spent months negotiating a longer-term deal with an unnamed brand, he said.
Marketers’ biggest challenge as they try to embrace creator marketing might be finding the right partner or community for their brands.
Many brands limit their outreach to a small circle of the biggest names, especially if they’ve had negative experiences with others who failed to meet deadlines or to include a brand’s key talking points in their videos, according to Beres, the creator known as Sambucha.
Sambucha works with Agentio, a startup that automates the process of connecting brands with creators and their ad inventory. Google at a sales presentation last month highlighted the ways its AI platform Gemini can now pair creators and brands.
Semi-stars with millions of followers may be frustrated that more brands aren’t calling them, but ultimately it’s their own responsibility to persuade marketers that they can bring real value beyond quick impressions, according to Chaudry, who compared partnering with a brand to bringing a new person to a party.
“Is there a clear-cut reason why I brought this friend to this party?” he said. “If not, then your other friends are gonna start to not really trust you as much.”