"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," said our analyst Max Willens during EMARKETER’s virtual summit last week.

US social media creator revenue will reach $21.04 billion this year, more than doubling since 2022, according to a January 2026 EMARKETER forecast. But the size of the market only tells part of the story.

What’s more revealing is what that growth represents. Brands that once defaulted to traditional digital media buys are now placing creators on their short list, with 48% of marketers saying creators are a must-have investment, found Q4 2025 data from the IAB.

The reason is straightforward: Creators don’t just live on social anymore.

• “Creators have … long since transcended and escaped from social as a place to activate,” said Willens, noting that retailers, media networks, and entertainment giants are all leveraging creators.
• “Even the major social platforms are redesigning their systems to make them more hospitable to creators,” he said.

For marketers, creator content offers a unique advantage: It’s easily transposable across multiple channels and platforms.

• 58% of enterprise brands reuse creator content across their website, while 55% repurpose it for paid social or digital advertising, and 53% use it for organic social, according to CreatorIQ.
• Brands are also using creator content across email, events, TV, and even print, found the data.

Alignment over reach

At the same time, the definition of “influencer” is evolving.

“The industry has moved away from the legacy digital thinking of hunting for cheap reach,” said Willens, instead marketers are focusing on “deeper alignment,” selecting creators who match a certain aesthetic, have an authentic affinity or history with a brand, or reach a specific target audience.

That could explain why spending is concentrating among smaller creators.

• “Effectively, half of the money in 2026 is going to go to nano- and micro-influencers,” Willens said. “These are people that you know might only have a couple thousand followers to their name.”
• A few years ago, that cohort accounted for less than a fifth of spending. Today, they represent nearly half (49.9%) of US creator spend.

AI meets operational complexity

As budgets grow and creator rosters expand, so do the operational demands. Brands are managing more creators, repurposing content across more channels, and trying to drive full-funnel outcomes. Add measurement challenges on top of that, and the pressure intensifies.

That’s why marketers are turning to AI to navigate that scale.

• Nearly three quarters of marketers (74%) are using AI for influencer marketing in some capacity, found July 2025 data from Linquia.
• Creative ideation is the top use case, with 78.4% of marketers using it for influencer marketing, followed by writing influencer briefs (68.9%), streamlining workflows (63.5%), and finding creators (45.9%).

Many (69%) marketers are even in favor of automating influencer marketing, per CreatorIQ, but Willens warns caution.

“It’s going to be really essential that marketers tread really lightly as they figure out the relationship between [AI and creators],” he said.

Building the infrastructure for scale

If creators are now a core growth engine, the foundation underneath has to be stronger.

• In a channel stretching from awareness to foot traffic, and from organic posts to paid amplification, measurement can’t be improvised. Without that analytic backbone, scale quickly turns into noise.
• “It’s really essential that brands build infrastructure that can support the measurement, optimization and scaling of whatever it is that they’re doing,” said Willens.

At the same time, the shift toward nano- and micro-influencers changes the operational equation. The brands that win won’t just identify the right creators; they’ll build systems that allow those relationships to function smoothly at scale.

"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," he said.

But even as creator marketing matures into something that looks more like a scaled channel, marketers should be careful not to reduce it to pure transaction.

“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 multi-faceted,” said Willens.

As budgets grow and automation tools improve, there will be pressure to make the process more turnkey, programmatic, and interchangeable.

• But resonance, the quality that made creator marketing powerful in the first place, still depends on depth.
• That depth also opens the door to thinking beyond the feed.
• “Breaking out of feeds as much as possible is going to be really important,” said Willens, noting the major opportunities that lie in activations that blur the lines between media, retail, and entertainment, like in-person experiences, collaborative product development, or storytelling formats that live off-platform.

Watch the full session

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