The £1bn creator economy doesn’t need better rate cards. It needs better programming
Opinion | Future of Brands: Creator Economy Week in Focus
The CEO of HYDP argues that brands must move beyond transactional campaigns and follower-based pricing, focusing instead on ongoing creator programmes that connect content, performance and distribution.
UK creator partnership revenue is forecast to surpass £1bn in 2026. It is an important milestone for an industry that, not that long ago, was still fighting for its place on the media plan.
But the number itself isn’t the most interesting part.
The more pertinent question is whether the way brands buy, price and measure creators has matured at the same pace as the market around them.
I’m not convinced it has.
Creator marketing has become a significant part of the media ecosystem, yet much of the industry still operates on a surprisingly transactional model. A brand briefs a campaign. A list of creators is assembled. Fees are negotiated based on followers, engagement, platform, deliverables and usage. Content goes live. Results are reported. Then, often, everyone starts again.
As creator investment continues to grow, that model becomes increasingly difficult to justify.
The next phase of creator marketing needs to be less about buying posts and more about building programmes.
The price of a creator isn’t the same as their value
Pricing has always been one of the most difficult parts of influencer marketing.
There are good reasons for that. A creator isn’t simply selling media inventory. Brands are buying some combination of audience access, creative capability, credibility, production, intellectual property and, increasingly, the right to distribute that content elsewhere.
That makes comparing a £2,000 creator with a £20,000 creator considerably more complicated than comparing CPMs on a media plan. Reach and efficiency matter, but so do the quality of attention, the relevance of the audience, the strength and reusability of the content, and ultimately what that creator drives against the brand’s objective.
The wrong questions are being asked.
Instead of asking, “How much should this creator cost?”, brands should increasingly be asking, “What does this creator and this content produce?”
Did it generate attention? Did people watch? Did they act? Did the creative outperform our benchmark? Can we amplify it? Did it work better with a particular audience? Did we learn something that can improve the next piece of content?
A creator’s fee is an input. It shouldn’t define their value.
From campaigns to programming
This is where I believe the industry needs to shift its thinking. The real opportunity isn’t influencer campaigns. It’s creator programming.
Programming means building a system where brands can continuously source creators, test content, measure performance, learn, optimise, retain what works and scale it. The distinction matters.
In a campaign model, ten creators might produce ten pieces of content and the campaign is judged collectively.
In a programming model, those ten creators create ten opportunities to learn.
Perhaps three creative hooks outperform everything else. Perhaps a smaller creator generates disproportionately strong watch time. Perhaps one piece of content performs modestly organically but becomes exceptional when amplified through paid media. Perhaps a creator who looks expensive on a cost-per-post basis becomes extremely efficient once you test their content across multiple channels.
Those signals should determine what happens next.
You invest again. You adjust the brief. You test another creator against the same audience. You put paid distribution behind the strongest content. You build deeper relationships with the creators who repeatedly perform.
Over time, you’re not simply commissioning content. You’re building a performance engine. Content performance and creator performance aren’t the same thing. This distinction is becoming particularly important.
For years, influencer marketing largely valued creators according to the audience they could distribute content to. But increasingly, the content itself has independent value.
A creator with a relatively small following might produce an extraordinary piece of creative. Put that asset into paid social, retail media, a product page or another distribution environment and its impact can extend far beyond the creator’s organic audience.
Conversely, a creator with enormous reach might generate distribution without producing content that performs particularly well against the brand’s objective.
Neither outcome makes one creator “good” and another “bad.” It simply shows why follower count, engagement rate, and individual post pricing can’t tell the whole story.
Brands need to understand both sides of the equation: who creates the content and how the content performs.
Scale should make creator marketing smarter
Crossing £1bn should be a moment of confidence for the creator economy. But maturity can’t simply mean bigger budgets. It should mean better systems.
More consistent measurement. Better data across campaigns. Clearer distinctions between creator performance and content performance. More experimentation. More intelligent use of paid amplification. Stronger long-term creator relationships. And importantly, institutional knowledge that doesn’t disappear every time a campaign ends.
There will always be a place for a brilliant one-off creator partnership. Culture doesn’t fit neatly into a spreadsheet, and we shouldn’t try to engineer the humanity out of an industry built on people, creativity and relationships.
Programming isn’t about turning creators into ad units. It’s about creating enough structure around creativity to understand what works, while still leaving enough freedom for creators to make something people actually want to watch. That’s the balance the next era of this industry needs to find.
If UK creator investment is moving beyond £1bn, brands should no longer wonder how much of their budget belongs in influencer marketing.
The more valuable question is what kind of creator infrastructure they are building with that investment. Because the next stage of creator marketing won’t be defined by how much brands are willing to pay for a post. It will be defined by how intelligently they programme creators, content and distribution to perform.
Stefani Stamatiou is the North American CEO of global creator agency HYDP.