Creator marketing has become one of the most significant structural shifts in modern marketing.
What began as an experimental channel built around a relatively small number of influencers has evolved into a highly complex commercial ecosystem involving agencies, platforms, production partners, media amplification, affiliate infrastructure, analytics tools, and increasingly vast creator networks.
Global influencer marketing spend is now estimated at more than $30 billion annually, and some of the world’s largest advertisers are aggressively increasing investment. Unilever, for example, has publicly committed to putting more than half of its marketing budget into creator-led activity, working with hundreds of thousands of creators globally.
As creator marketing has scaled, however, the commercial side of the industry has become materially more complicated.
For procurement teams, the challenge is no longer simply understanding whether creator marketing works.
The harder question is whether it is being bought, structured, and measured in the right way.
That distinction matters because many organizations are now discovering that creator marketing is not just difficult to evaluate. It is difficult to define.
Two programs may look commercially similar on paper while being designed to achieve completely different things.
One may be built to drive cultural relevance and brand visibility. Another may be expected to generate measurable commerce outcomes. Yet both may use the same compensation structure, similar KPIs, and near-identical reporting frameworks.
At that point, the issue is no longer pricing.
It is alignment.
That is the underlying tension now emerging across the creator economy. The industry has become very focused on improving cost transparency, measurement, and operating models, but those elements are still too often managed independently rather than as part of a coherent commercial system.
The result is that organizations can make progress in individual areas while still struggling to understand whether their creator programs are economically well-designed.
Take cost transparency.
Much of the discussion in the market has centered on the split between creator compensation and agency fees. That conversation is important, but it only captures one layer of the economics.
In reality, creator programs can involve a much broader cost structure that includes production, paid amplification, technology, analytics, payment infrastructure, and operational support.
A program with lower agency fees may require substantially more media support. Another may appear more expensive on creator compensation while reducing downstream production or paid media needs.
Both programs may technically be “transparent,” but they are not necessarily comparable.
Visibility into isolated line items is not the same thing as understanding total program economics.
The same dynamic applies to compensation structures.
Different commercial models incentivize fundamentally different behaviors.
A commission-based arrangement naturally rewards spend growth. Output-based structures reward scale and content volume. Performance-linked models prioritize measurable efficiency and conversion.
None of those models is inherently wrong.
The problem emerges when the incentive structure is disconnected from the underlying business objective.
That is why one of the most useful questions procurement teams can ask in creator marketing is surprisingly simple:
“What behavior are we actually incentivizing?”
That question tends to expose misalignment very quickly.
The challenge becomes even clearer when you look at how value is defined.
Most creator programs operate across three overlapping layers:
- Input: what the organization pays
- Output: what the organization receives
- Outcome: what the program ultimately drives
Different commercial approaches optimize different parts of that stack.
Some prioritize cost efficiency. Others prioritize creator participation, content generation, or measurable performance.
Problems arise when organizations expect one layer to behave like another.
For example, it is increasingly common to see awareness-led creator programs evaluated using short-term ROI expectations, despite never being structured or measured to deliver direct-response outcomes.
Conversely, some programs optimize heavily for output – more creators, more assets, more activity – without establishing a clear connection to business performance.
Both situations create economic ambiguity because the commercial model, KPIs, and operating structure are no longer aligned around the same definition of value.
Even relatively simple agency fee structures can illustrate the problem.
Two agencies may both charge 15%.
But 15% of what?
Creator spend?
Total campaign spend?
Paid media?
Attributed sales?
Those are entirely different economic models, despite appearing superficially similar.
That is why sophisticated procurement organizations increasingly normalize fee bases, scope definitions, and KPI frameworks before attempting to compare partners or programs.
In practice, the strongest creator marketing organizations tend to follow a clearer sequence of decision-making.
They begin with the objective.
Only then do they define the type of value that matters most, the scope of responsibility across partners, the KPIs that will define success, and the commercial structure most appropriate for the work.
Importantly, that also includes determining the right operating model.
Some creator programs benefit from in-house control and direct creator relationships. Others benefit from specialist agency capabilities, broader creator ecosystems, or performance-oriented platform infrastructure.
The right operating model depends entirely on the objective.
That may sound obvious, but much of the market still defaults to standardized commercial structures across fundamentally different creator programs.
As creator marketing continues to mature, that approach will become increasingly difficult to sustain.
The organizations that succeed in the next phase of the creator economy are unlikely to be the ones with simply more data, more creators, or more visibility.
They will be the organizations that develop a more disciplined understanding of what they are actually buying, why they are buying it, and how their commercial structures reinforce the outcomes they want to create.
In other words, they will be the organizations that buy better.
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This article is adapted from Flock Associates’ presentation at the ANA Financial Management Conference and reflects our work advising organizations on agency compensation, marketing procurement, and commercial operating models.
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