Make creator marketing count

Why are we having this conversation now?

We have news for you: Creator marketing has officially graduated from experiment to essential. In less than a decade, it’s gone from a test-and-learn channel for a few companies to a core part of modern brand building and pipeline generation.

But this shift is happening against an increasingly complicated backdrop.

• Trust in business and institutions is near record lows, making it harder for brands to connect in a way that feels real.
• Social platforms have linked the world while, at the same time, pulling it apart.
• And whether you intend it or not, creators talk about your brand, both good and bad.

Marketers also face growing pressure to show the brand and business impact of creator programs. Not just because the level of investment demands it, but because, as with any channel, it’s essential to understand exactly what drives success (and where it drops off). Traditional media metrics rarely tell the full story, and influencer measurement is notoriously difficult. So while it’s true that when creator marketing works, it really works, separating signal from noise is what turns a good moment into a scalable channel.

This moment requires a new way of working with creators

And so as more industries begin testing creator and influencer marketing, Morning Brew Inc., Tracksuit, and Ekimetrics came together to share what we’ve learned about working with creators (and marketers). Winning here isn’t always just about budget. It is about a mindset shift that requires new muscle and new ways of approaching media strategy, measurement, creative collaboration, and more.

Together, we wanted to understand not just why creators work but how more brands can work with them. So we asked marketers themselves.

What you’ll see is the findings from our latest research, powered by the Breakroom, a survey of more than 250 marketing leaders across industries and conversations with creators, operators, and domain experts showing where there’s untapped opportunity and what slows brands down.

Let’s get into it.

Big brands have already proven what happens when creators aren’t just a nice-to-have but a real engine for growth. Ekimetrics’ full-funnel measurement found that influencer marketing consistently ranked among the top tactics driving sales for the Estée Lauder Companies in the early years of measuring its impact. Today, influencer marketing still earns its keep, consistently performing across the portfolio.

But big brands aren’t the whole story. We wanted to know how everyone else is navigating the creator economy. So we asked more than 250 marketers across industries how they’re approaching the creator economy.

Here’s the headline. Creator marketing is no longer a niche tactic for beauty and CPG. It’s gone mainstream. 66% of marketers already use creators, and another 10% plan to start in 2026. And budgets are rising fast. 50% expect creators to be a core or secondary channel next year, up 14% YoY. Creators aren’t the experiment anymore. They’re becoming the playbook.

But scale brings pressure. Marketers aren’t just asked to tap into the creator economy; they’re asked to prove the business impact behind it. And that’s where the story gets interesting.

Translation? Creators do all the heavy lifting at the top of the funnel, but hardly anyone’s asking them to drive the outcome that keeps business leaders up at night.

It’s not because creators can’t influence purchase. They can. They do. It’s that teams hesitate to set sales goals when they can’t measure them confidently. 42% of respondents cite measurement as their biggest barrier, outranking concerns about cost and low engagement. Until brands build clearer tracking, sales will stay the goal marketers care about but hesitate to use creators for.

So what makes a good creator campaign?

Across nearly every category, the same performance levers show up. “Trust” and “relatability” are powerful drivers of conversion, according to Tracksuit’s dataset of over 13,000 brands. Ekimetrics sees the same pattern globally. These aren’t nice-to-haves. They’re the things that move people from “I know you” to “I’m choosing you.” And creators are one of the most effective ways brands can move the needle on those metrics.

Survey respondents also understand the importance of creator-brand fit. 68% say it’s their top vetting requirement. And an IPA benchmark study across 144 brands and £133m in influencer spend shows why. When a creator’s content aligns with a brand’s values and audience interests, conversion doesn’t just rise. It jumps roughly 3x. So you want to pick creators who authentically align with what you (and your customers) believe in. 

But there’s a gap between believing in authenticity and actually enabling it. 93% of marketers say creator campaigns work best when creators use their own voice. Yet many teams still struggle to let creators lead. 36% say giving creators control feels risky. And the current workflow reflects that. A mix of partial co-creation, detailed briefs, and restricted creative freedom dominates. Only 7% of marketers offer full creative control.

If you want a peek at what happens when it works, look at categories that have invested consistently. Beauty, fashion, and health brands have integrated creators into their core content engines, and the returns stack up. The IPA benchmark data shows that while short-term ROI for influencer marketing is similar to other channels, long-term ROI is 51% higher in the UK. That puts creators on par with print and TV and well ahead of paid social. But here’s the curveball. Only 12% of marketers in our survey say strong ROI is a benefit of creators. That tells us the belief in creators is high, but the way their impact is being measured undervalues their contributions.

And that’s the real inflection point. The challenge isn’t whether creators work. It’s whether brands can quantify how they work. Until teams know what to measure and how to track it, creators will stay stuck in the awareness bucket even as the channel proves it can influence the full funnel.

To understand what that evolution looks like, we first need to unpack the foundational shifts shaping smarter, more sustainable creator programs. Then we’ll break down how brands can put them to work. But first, a quick review.

Trends come and go. Campaign formats evolve, algorithms change, and a new “best practice” emerges every few months.

But two forces consistently shape how brands and creators work together. Understanding them is key for any brand stepping into the creator economy.

Communities, not creatives, control the conversation

As American Eagle found out with the Sydney Sweeney jeans campaign, a campaign’s intent can (and will) be reshaped by an audience once it launches. Content rarely follows a linear path. People discover, remix, and respond in ways that no media plan can fully, well, plan for.

And so, the best marketers build flexibility into their plans, with creators serving as both amplifiers and interpreters. Their closeness to their communities gives them a unique read on what will land and what won’t. For brands, it’s an opportunity and a test of comfort. Success means ceding a little control and embracing a little more co-creation.

That means new briefing processes, clearer expectations, and relationships built on honesty rather than oversight. When done well, the results speak for themselves. The marketers we surveyed who reported success with creator campaigns are 1.7x more likely to let those creators ideate and create content than those who didn’t see success. Even in highly regulated spaces (think banking), global brands like Monzo are proving co-creation pays off.

By working with creators like Kait Park, who openly shares her financial ups and downs, Monzo found a new way to connect with younger audiences. What could have felt risky (a bank partnering with a creator who jokes about impulse shopping) instead delivered authentic storytelling and fresh creative insights that now inform the brand’s other campaigns.

Creator communities can serve as a safe space to iterate, have fun, and push boundaries. Off the company’s owned channels, they create space to test and learn and bring that back to the business.

The smartest marketers will use creators as a real-time read on what audiences actually care about.

Scale ≠ success

For years, brands treated scale like the only metric that mattered. The bigger the audience, the bigger the impact. But that thinking has aged out. Influence today isn’t about casting the widest net; it’s about connecting with the communities that actually care. The real power sits inside smaller, high-trust pockets where creators show up consistently, build routines with their followers, and shape how people think day-to-day.

Creator and brand strategist Eugene Healey, one of Tracksuit’s early partners, refers to this as “niche at scale,” where the path to mass relevance runs directly through clusters of hyperspecific communities. “Your brand is being built in the aggregate—when you buy my perspective, you’re likely buying the perspective of a bunch of other creators alongside mine. You’re creating a mosaic of different associations—a content universe.”

That content universe is made up of many interconnected voices that, together, shape how your brand is understood. That mosaic is worth more than any one megaphone.

This shift shows up clearly in categories like celebrity beauty. Tracksuit data shows that while brands like Kylie Cosmetics and Fenty Beauty lead in their category for being “trendy,” they score toward the bottom of the pack on trust and relatability. Attention is easy. Affinity is the hard part. And that’s where smaller creators win.

That’s the model behind brands like Olipop, which built trust and cultural credibility by showing up across a wide range of creators and communities. Their strategy didn’t hinge on one creator. It hinged on many smaller ones, which ultimately drove stronger awareness, consideration, and long-term growth than any single spike in impressions ever could. You can see echoes of that same approach in modern media ecosystems, too. It’s the same engine that shaped Morning Brew’s own growth: Serve highly engaged communities, not the masses, and influence follows.

An unlock most marketers overlook: The next high-impact creator might already be inside the company. Employees at every level are building their own followings, sharing their expertise, and becoming trusted voices in their corners of the internet. When brands tap into this internal creator class, they get an immediate testing ground, richer employee engagement, and early signals before scaling an idea externally. It also helps the business get comfortable with a creator-led model by using voices they already know and trust.

All of this represents a mindset shift. It asks marketers to value depth over breadth, relationships over transactions, and ongoing dialogue over one-off hits. Long-term creator partnerships make more sense because creators aren’t just distribution channels. They are consumers who’ve built a community of other consumers who trust them. Treating those relationships as partnerships, not campaigns, is ultimately how brands strengthen credibility and influence over time.

The takeaway: Brands don’t need bigger creators. They need the right creators. The ones who sit inside the culture pockets their audience actually cares about today. Influence is getting more distributed, more personal, and more powerful. The brands that win will be the ones building with creators, not just buying from them.

How can brands new to creator marketing learn both from those that have had success and from the very creators that are out in front of that opportunity? We’ve developed an iterative framework that will help marketers go from start to scale, fast.

Regardless of where you are on your creator journey, you know full-funnel measurement isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the grown-up move. It shows the real value creators bring and gives you confidence to make calls that actually ladder up to your goals.

Think of it as a multi-stage framework plugged straight into your MMM. Because it’s way too easy to fixate on metrics with zero real-world impact, especially the so-called vanity metrics that look shiny but don’t move business outcomes. With full-funnel, integrated measurement, you see how influencer efforts echo across the entire funnel. That way you can stop reacting to noise and start making decisions that build long-term, compounding marketing momentum.

Every brand wants to move faster. Every team wants to make work that lands harder. But speed and impact don’t come from more processes. They come from more trust.

Creators have proven they can deliver reach, relevance, and results. What’s next is trusted partnership.

The brands that will win are the ones that move beyond managing creators to building with them, integrating their perspective into everything from storytelling to strategy. So as you rethink how your brand shows up in this next era of creator marketing, keep these principles front and center:

Creator marketing isn’t a new tactic. It’s a new operating system for how brands connect, communicate, and create. The most effective teams will be the ones that rewire their internal habits to match the speed and authenticity of the people they work with. And the brands that build for collaboration (not just campaigns) will move faster, create smarter, and stay relevant longer.