Fernando Fernandez had run Unilever for barely a month when, in March 2025, he sat down with Warren Ackerman of Barclays and tore up the marketing script. Consumers, he said, had grown suspicious of anything a company told them directly. So the maker of Dove and Hellmann’s would push half its media budget through social channels, up from about 30 per cent, and work with 20 times more influencers. By December Fernandez reckoned Unilever was already tied to close to 300,000 creators. Rivals moved fast behind him; within months General Mills, Gap and Victoria’s Secret were flagging fatter creator budgets on their earnings calls.
Ed East, who founded the London agency Billion Dollar Boy in 2014, told The Drum in December that the “wild west days” were over now that chief marketing officers had turned up with real budgets. The Business Research Company put the creator economy at 160 billion US dollars in 2025, up 28 per cent in a year and on course for 436 billion by 2029. East’s own firm tracked creator ad spending climbing from 37 billion US dollars towards 44 billion between 2025 and 2026. Aspire, which polled nearly 900 marketers and creators, found roughly three-quarters planning to spend more this year.
In July 2025 Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania jointly paid 90,000 euros to steer Darren Watkins, an American streamer known as IShowSpeed, through the region for a few hours of livestreaming to his following of some 40 million. Watkins then let slip that he might also call on Russia, apparently for free, and on July 22 Latvia’s economy minister, Viktors Valainis, said his country would withhold its 30,000 euros were he to do so. By then, brands were moving their money towards smaller names anyway. Micro-influencers accounted for nearly two-fifths of the market in 2025, some 12 billion US dollars on Mordor Intelligence’s count, while the mega-influencer tier’s share slipped by 3.2 per cent and long-term deals grew by 28 per cent over one-off posts.
Creators match TV
On June 22 Circana, an American data firm, published The Value of Influence, and its measurement chief Yeimy Garcia-Smith said brands had poured money into the sector without knowing what it bought. Running creator activity through marketing-mix models and retail data, the study found influencer marketing returned as much in the short term as major media and beat traditional advertising over the longer run. However, it found that creators with 50,000 to 250,000 followers proved the most efficient, ahead of the big names above them, and fewer than one in ten brands came anywhere near saturating the channel. Circana also reckoned Gen Z shoppers were 92 per cent more likely to buy after an influencer’s nudge. Britain’s IPA, sifting 133 million pounds of creator spend across 144 brands, came to much the same conclusion, that creators matched television for short-term return and topped every channel over time.
Billion Dollar Boy’s Creator Instinct study, published in May, found that leading with the product rather than earning attention first cut the share of viewers who reached a quarter of the way through by 44 per cent on Instagram and TikTok. Viewers now often see the same hooks and discount codes wherever they scroll. Trust has thinned as feeds fill with machine-made filler: Sprout Social’s first-quarter survey found 88 per cent reporting weaker faith in what they saw, 56 per cent seeing ‘AI slop’ often, and two-thirds more selective than a year before. The same agency’s work on AI put the share of British and American consumers who reckon generative tools are bad for the creator economy at 32 per cent, up from 18 per cent in 2023, as enthusiasm for AI-made content fell from 60 per cent to 26.
Fernandez, for his part, had said he wanted one creator in each of India’s 19,000 postcodes and Brazil’s 5,764 municipalities. Collabstr has since counted the supply rising by 93 per cent in a single year, with the average fee per collaboration slipping to 202 US dollars from 214. Smaller audiences and smaller fees, but the trend is clear. For brands that get influencer marketing right, it can pay handsomely.
Photo: Dreamstime.
