The business case for creator marketing: the numbers worth trusting

Creator marketing has stopped being the experimental line in the budget. The reliable numbers say so, and this post collects the ones worth trusting, with their sources and their caveats attached. That last part matters: this field is full of circulated figures that trace back to nothing, so every number here names who measured it, when, and what they counted.

The spend is real and still growing

The IAB's 2025 Creator Economy Ad Spend and Strategy Report projected US creator advertising spend of $37 billion for 2025, up 26% year on year, roughly four times the growth rate of the overall media market. It found that 48% of creator ad buyers considered creators a must-buy channel, behind paid search and social media.

Definitions matter here. eMarketer's March 2025 forecast counts a narrower slice, payments to creators for sponsored content, and puts that at $10.52 billion in the US for 2025. The two figures measure different things; the direction of both is the point. eMarketer also notes the spend is spreading beyond social posts into paid ads, TV and podcasts, which is what a channel maturing looks like.

Consumers act on it

Sprout Social's State of Influencer Marketing report, published January 2025 from a survey of over 2,000 consumers and 650 marketers across the US, UK and Australia, found 86% of consumers make a purchase inspired by a creator at least once a year. In the same survey, 59% of marketers planned to work with more creators in 2025 than the year before. Survey answers are intent, not spend, but the direction agrees with the spend data above.

It holds up against other channels

The IPA's October 2025 Influencer Databank, the first cross-industry econometric analysis of creator campaign returns, indexed creator marketing at 99 on short term return against 86 for paid social and 97 for linear television, and at 151 on long term effects against paid social's 77. The base is small, 59 UK campaigns for the short term figures and 18 for the long term, so read it as an early comparison rather than a verdict. What creator marketing returns goes through it in detail.

How to read numbers in this field

Three habits keep you on solid ground.

• Check the source, the sample and the date. A figure without all three is a slogan.
• Prefer ranges to single values. Rates and benchmarks vary by market, tier, vertical and season, so a single global average is close to meaningless.
• Distinguish attributed from incremental. Decide what success means and how you will measure it before launch. Attribution assigns credit but does not by itself establish causation, and suitable incrementality testing is what estimates the additional outcomes caused by the campaign.

Most published benchmarks come from parties selling the thing being measured. The sources above are a trade body, a research firm, a software company's survey with a stated base, and an industry professional body, which is why they made the cut.

Decide what success means and how you will measure it before launch.

What this means for your first campaign

The channel works and the budgets are following it, which means the constraint has moved: the hard part is no longer deciding whether to use creators, it is finding the ones who actually want your work. That is the part CreatorCall does. You describe the campaign once in a Creator Call, we contact creators and read every reply, and in 3 to 7 business days, depending on list size, you get a shortlist of creators who have said yes, verified against what you asked for. The numbers above are the case for the channel; the shortlist is the case for a specific campaign.