Leveraging The Creator Economy as a Platform
- Matt Lang
- Apr 16
- 5 min read
How brands can shift from thinking of creators and influencer marketing as a tactic to an evergreen platform for brand building
“Today, the creator system is the most important marketing platform on earth. Creators are now companies, and companies are now creators. Everything important in our culture — including mainstream media like Wicked, Barbie, Sinners — starts and ends on creator platforms.” – Evan Shapiro, Media Cartographer, The Hollywood Reporter
The creator economy is no longer just one of a multitude of opportunities for brands to utilize to reach consumers, it’s a platform, arguably the platform, that needs to be prioritized in go to market plans. Partnering with a small set of highly followed influencers for reach is an outdated playbook. Brands need to be reconsidering the breadth and depth of talent that surrounds us everyday and how they deploy it. We are talking about a market that’s been projected to reach half a trillion dollars by 2027.
Many marketers are still thinking about influencer marketing and creators simply as post or ad-level tactics to better break through in an increasingly challenging social media environment. They’re not wrong, but they are also still underestimating the upside of this market. Leading companies are not just upping the volume of posts dedicated to influencers, they’re fundamentally shifting their investment. Take a look at reports of Unilever spending up to 50% of some brand marketing budgets on ‘influencer-first’ social strategy – this is how strong the value and belief in this talent is.
Brands ready to embrace the real opportunity of influencers and creators should keep the following in mind.
Changing the influencer selection equation
In recent years, brands have spread their influencer strategy and talent agreements across buckets based on follower size and reach potential. Typically, this falls along a spectrum of Nano, Micro and Macro which broadly speaking equates to influencers with <100K following, between 100K and 1 Million followers, and 1 Million+ followers respectively. Scale, Reach, and Cost are always going to be top of mind. However, there are other important factors that need to be considered when selecting partners.
Depending on a brand's objective online, the talent with the largest audiences aren’t always the right fit. Credibility, authority, authenticity, production style, audience engagement and sentiment all need to be considered. When companies start thinking about talent vetting this way, a new world of combinations and pairing criteria for marketers activating these programs starts to appear.
This may sound obvious to some, but too often we come across misguided pairings or ineffective posts to no fault of the talent. Ideally, what you want to get to is a strategic coalition of content creators that helps deliver your message or campaign to audiences across all levels of attention and engagement.
“The Glossy Gang wasn’t just a one-off activation—it was a layered rollout designed to mimic how real cultural trends spread online. Macro creators kicked off the conversation, mid-tier influencers gave it scale and micro creators brought authenticity and niche relevance. This strategy ensured that content didn’t feel top-down, but rather surfaced organically in the places where beauty fans discover new products and trends—TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts.” – How Tresemmé’s influencer-first strategy turned a legacy brand into a Gen Z favorite - Ad Age
Given all this evolution in thinking, it’s not surprising to see budgets drifting meaningfully toward “smaller” influencers to drive brand programs, with eMarketer noting that nearly half of influencer marketing budgets are going toward micro and nano sized influencer audiences.
Giving license to let creators create
Picking the right talent partners is only part of the process, ensuring they’re empowered to create quality content is a separate and critical component. Controlling the brief is one thing, but brands that too tightly direct and constrain a creator’s content defeat the purpose of partnership.
“There’s sort of been a reckoning in the marketing world around brand-led content and creator and influencer content. Brands need to maintain their voice, but make sure [their social content] still resonates. So, it’s a little bit of bringing the creators into our world … and tapping into the strengths of creators who have both an audience and a talent for being comedians and working together in an ensemble.” – Jeremy Lowenstein, Milani CMO, Why brands are rethinking TikTok’s casual style for more polished social strategy - AdAge
I would encourage brands to shift from thinking of influencers as purely reach vehicles to considering them as participatory creative talent for their marketing team. This often means moving from one-off post agreements to deeper engagements with creators and influencer partners to create content series or become more of an evergreen spokesperson representing the brand online. A lengthier partnership can also build trust and help the partners audience feel they really back a brand or product and didn’t just take a quick check for one ad.
Content series and original micro-shows are continuing to grow in popularity for exactly this reason. They help brands and creators keep content fresh and create more compelling, native content. Giving them some license to come up with ideas and humorous premises for content helps paid content go from thinly veiled RTB-stuffed reviews to something that entertains while educating audiences.
Mind the evolving media environment and adapt accordingly
Aside from influencer talent selection and activation strategy, brands need to keep the ever evolving media environment front and center. Three specific areas to be aware of today:
First, the importance of authenticity amid AI slop. Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram recently said “Over time we are going to move from assuming what we see is real by default, to starting with skepticism when we see media, and paying much more attention to who is sharing something and why they might be sharing it.” This is a difficult, but golden opportunity for creators and influencers to embrace their style, imperfections and all. Soon enough people will be craving real and candid content more than ever.
Next is the reality of attention on modern social media. CreativeX research recently found that “45% of creator spend on meta is wasted due to poor execution [and] only 14% of creator ads were watched beyond the first three seconds.” (additional source: WARC podcast)
The final piece is to not lose sight of bigger brand building efforts to build breadth and salience of reach through consistent and cohesive messaging. This is summed up well by Mark Ritson who in a recent column for The Drum who says
“Engagement rates are seductive: immediate, abundant, free and impressively large. But engagement is not sales, brand equity or mental availability. The IPA’s effectiveness data is consistent: short-term engagement metrics correlate poorly with long-term brand growth. Marketers who have shifted budgets into micro-influencer programs based on cost-per-engagement figures are typically measuring activation output, not brand-building input. The numbers look extraordinary right up until you ask what they are driving downstream.” – Mark Ritson
Treating creators as a platform requires brands as highly engaged partners
Although it has been slowly building for at least 15 years, the creator economy is now exploding. Brands that haven’t jumped all the way in and committed meaningful dollars are now seeing the power and catching up. In the race to build out a strong and performant creator and influencer strategy, many will be tempted to quickly stand-up a diverse roster of talent and get the posts flowing. It’s easy to check the box on reallocating funding to creators as a channel, but those that want to unlock the power of it as a brand-reinforcing platform need to think deeply about selection, creative strategy and brand messaging cohesion.
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