Since the early days of marketing, brands have been in pursuit of connection with consumers — meaningful, authentic connection that resonates, is relevant, and drives revenue.
Ten years ago, social media was all about the newsfeed, and content from people you followed. Social media marketing has evolved throughout several key phases since then, most notably, the rise of content creators and a new peer-to-peer cultural connection where authenticity reigns.
Consumers have responded overwhelmingly—they prefer contextual, community-based conversations about the brands and products over hearing directly from brands.
Today, marketing industry leaders allocate 57% of their budgets to creator marketing, according to our State of Creator Marketing report. We’ve seen a 143% increase in creator marketing investment over the last four years alone.
We’ve hit an inflection point where creator-led marketing is outpacing social media marketing as the foundation for brand growth. We've seen the shift from social platforms, too. Creator audiences are no longer a clear-cut indicator of success. It's the quality of the content. Take a look at your social feeds—what the algorithm predicts you will engage with determines more of your For You Page or Explore Feed than who you follow. Algorithmic feeds suggest new content to users and make new creators' posts go viral all the time.
For brands, that means a creator’s audience data or demographic targeting are no longer reliable inputs for predicting success. What matters most is the content itself. And more importantly, the insights we can derive from that content. Content performance metrics like engagement and impressions are the new signals that help us understand what truly resonates with audiences, rather than the follow button.
Audience following no longer predicts performance
This shift can be summarized by four phenomena:
- Demand for content is exploding
- Creator content helps close that demand gap
- Creator content works better
- Audiences and followers are no longer a clear predictor of success
Content demand has increased dramatically over the past few years. 88% of brands say their content demand has doubled in the last 12 months and will increase by 5x in the coming two years. In CreatorIQ's 2024-2025 State of Creator Marketing Report, 98% of industry leaders reported that creator content drove more ROI than traditional advertising in 2024.
Creator content works better because authenticity is a non-negotiable for consumers, it’s faster to produce, and there’s a lot of it. It's not possible without creators, but a content-first world fundamentally changes the way we discover, manage, and measure programs.
The future of marketing is clear. It's content-first and creator-led.
What holds brands back from maximizing the full potential of creator content?
This content-first approach fundamentally changes the way we discover, manage, and measure creator marketing programs. And handing over the keys of content creation to creators brings inherent risk, complexity, and infrastructure needs for brands looking to build mature, safe, effective creator programs.
CreatorIQ’s role in all of this is to empower our customers to face these challenges so they can take on a content-first future successfully, and realize this massive opportunity to drive authentic connection and revenue. That’s why we’re building an all-new, next generation CreatorIQ platform.
CreatorIQ is building a next-generation platform to support the needs of a content-first future—ensuring this content-first future is safe, seamless, smart, and scalable.
Safe creator marketing is:
✓ AI-Driven
✓ Content-First
✓ Traceable
With a content-first entry point to Discovery, marketers can evaluate content and creators surfaced to them and spend less time crafting searches, scan content based on their brand’s custom brand safety rules, and flag anything their team needs to review. And every time a creator is approved and added to their communities, they can trace back all decisions made.
Ultimately, this saves time, increases the quality of the creators they work with, and mitigates brand risk.
Seamless creator marketing:
In the all-new platform, always-on, automated content and data collection will better inform campaign plans and syndicate and repurpose content for maximum impact.
It will all be available via a flexible API that gives brands unlimited opportunities to work with creator and content data, so teams can integrate creator marketing workflows and data across markets, multiple brands, teams, tools, and partners.
Smart creator marketing:
With intelligent AI models, CreatorIQ will provide recommendations based on past campaigns, and it can be trained to serve better results by telling it which content is a good fit or not. So that over time, teams can refine approaches and begin to turn complex, human processes into a more exacting science.
Scalable creator marketing:
Creator marketing needs to be done at scale. What does scale mean?
As programs grow, and different divisions and markets of a brand get on board, teams can track thousands of creators and hundreds of thousands of posts—or more.
If you want 12 brands, five global markets, and over 500 users operating within the same platform, under the same processes, CreatorIQ will support that.
That means standardized measurement, traceable workflows, and centralized information; but also a clear delineation between teams, so users can do localized, specific work without extra noise or confusion.
CreatorIQ is built for this kind of scale.
We are building the all-new, next generation CreatorIQ platform now, and rolling it out to select customers by early 2025. Until then, see how we’re building CreatorIQ for a content-first, creator-led future at creatoriq.com/vision.