Creators Are the New Media Channel of Choice

Creator partnerships are no longer just content opportunities or one component of a brand’s social strategy – they’re core components of paid media strategy.

According to 12 media experts who spoke with LBB, including Lizzy Ryan, head of media and communications at Cutwater, the shift has been seismic. As she puts it, “They're becoming the media strategy.”

She adds, “The brands winning right now are the ones treating creator content less like a one-off post and more like a scalable engine that can drive relevance, paid performance, and real business impact across the funnel.”

The most successful collaborations align the creator and their audience with brand objectives, and play a meaningful role within the brand’s broader content ecosystem. Jessi Minneci, senior content strategist at DAC, thinks this is when creator work stops feeling like one-off posts with influencers, and more like partnerships with “strategic brand translators”.

“A strong creator doesn’t just extend reach for a brand, they bring credibility, platform instinct, and a format or perspective that humanises brand messaging and makes it feel more natural in-market,” says Jessi. “That’s why creator roles and partnerships now extend well beyond organic social and into paid media, campaign development, digital storytelling, multi-format content series, and broader cross-channel execution.”

For Vanessa Watts, EVP, head of media at Laughlin Constable, “the space has become too complex” for brands to simply use creator content as an add-on. Encompassing brand safety, contracts, usage rights, creative development, paid amplification, performance measurement, and more, it now requires a dedicated team and integration from the beginning.

"The opportunity is not just to ‘use influencers’ -- it is to treat creators as strategic media partners..."

Done well, this results in more “authentic” creator activations too. “[Strategists] need to collaboratively build the creator ‘brief’,” adds Vanessa. “And media [teams] need to identify how creator content will be funded, distributed, amplified and measured - and also plan for paid amplification from the outset… The opportunity is not just to ‘use influencers’; it is to treat creators as strategic media partners – capable of building relevance, driving action, and extending the impact of a campaign across the full consumer journey.”

It’s clear that creators are no longer just ‘influencer marketing’. Kate O’Brien, founder and CEO at Powers of Reasoning, says they are instead operating as a media channel in their own right, thanks to deeper agency integration, and a measurement and buying infrastructure that “barely existed two years ago”.

She says that new frameworks, like YouTube Creator Partnerships’ formal buying tools, Comscore and Spotter’s measurement capabilities, and Amazon and Twitch’s tightening connections between content and commerce, means the creator economy requires more than a “side budget” from marketers and media teams.

“The question now is whether agencies will evolve accordingly, treating creators as a disciplined media channel with rights management, amplification, measurement, and conversion attribution built in, or continue siloing creator spend into separate influencer teams with smaller experimental budgets,” she adds.

Highlighting how YouTube has paid creators more than $100 billion since 2021, with premium creator-led content now reaching more than 238 million US adults, according to Nielsen, Kate warns that agencies which don’t view creators as core media infrastructure “risk missing one of the fastest-growing and most strategically important channels in advertising”.

​“It’s the paid social Wild West all over again, and again, and again!”

​Chris Tracy, VP, social innovation at MissionOne Media (part of BarkleyOKRP), sees these creators as “networks in and of themselves”, becoming key for media targeting. “Creators are brands, and as consumers continue to align their identity and ideology with the brands they choose, the semiotics of the client-creator relationship are how consumers make meaning in the selection space,” Chris says. “Knowing a campaign’s target consumer inside and out is the best way to vet and select creators and content types at various engagement tiers, as spaces like TikTok One and Meta Partnership Ads Hub continue to streamline the creator marketplace process.”

As the platforms deploy these collaborative models, Chris believes media’s role will shift towards mapping audience ecosystems rooted in consumer insights across platforms. “It’s the paid social Wild West all over again, and again, and again!”

This reframing of creators is well underway among the media experts we spoke to. Chaucer Barnes, CMO at Translation, calls the ‘creator economy’ a “misnamed merchant class of creatives… leveraging their content as ‘seed investment’ for cultural relevance and financial liquidity”. He believes creators are “moving more like founders, and less like talent”, and thus agency relationships should evolve towards a business strategy approach.

“Invite these founders to sit with various teams, including product, finance and creative development, moving beyond marketing,” he suggests. “The most effective collaborations won’t come from asking, ‘What can they post?’ but will come from asking, ‘What can they build with our assets?’. This is how collaborations will bring long-term business value.”

Working in this collaborative way “tends to outperform standard brand assets, delivering stronger impressions, higher engagement and deeper audience connection”, according to Gaby Parker, VP, director of digital comms and amplification strategy at Momentum. This, she affirms, is because the content “seamlessly integrates” with relevant conversations and cultural moments, thanks to the creators’ existing credibility.

“The strongest programmes don’t force creators into rigid brand scripts...”

This posture shift “from client to co-producer”, as Saylor’s head of production Harris Sherman puts it, is what separates culture-moving collaborations from collaborations that “just spend efficiently”.

He notes that authenticity and effectiveness truly compound when brands embed creators as programming and production partners, and then build media plans around that across organic and paid channels. For this, he points to Influencer Marketing Hub’s 2025 research which revealed long-term creator partnerships “generate 70% higher engagement than one-off activations”, and Aspire’s 2025 findings that showed ambassador programmes delivering “the highest ROI of any influencer tactic”.

“The strongest programmes don’t force creators into rigid brand scripts,” says Cherie Johnson, SVP, media at Allen & Gerritsen (A&G). “They provide guardrails while allowing creators to speak in their own voice and connect authentically with their communities.

“They’ve become core components of modern paid media strategy because creator-led content consistently drives stronger engagement, trust and conversion than traditional brand advertising,” she adds. “In many cases, ‘lo-fi’ creator content outperforms highly produced campaigns because audiences respond to people they trust, not just brands speaking at them… In a world increasingly filled with AI-generated noise, human connection has become one of the most valuable forms of media.”

With this connection and community being the starting point, paid media then acts as an “amplifier”. Cherie explains, “We often let creator content build organic traction first, using engagement signals to identify what resonates before adding paid support behind top-performing posts to expand reach and performance.”

"In a world increasingly filled with AI-generated noise, human connection has become one of the most valuable forms of media."

​Austin Price, social media director at H/L, describes these collaborations as treating content “like a hypothesis”. He elaborates, “You back the creative risk with data, amplify what earns it, and cut what doesn't. No vanity reach numbers. No 30-day ‘see how it lands’ cycles. Just creative with a reason behind it, measured against the audience that can actually buy.”

The creators’ social channels are then “the real-time nervous system of the market” – a two-way testing ground offering rich sources of context for every creative and media decision. “A creator's comment section tells you why something landed, not just what happened,” Austin explains. “That's intelligence you can't buy from a media plan alone.”

“Platforms reward iteration,” agrees Nick Rogers, VP, media strategy at The Variable. “The job now is to form hypotheses, test creative variables quickly, and continuously optimise based on audience response.” He says this is causing media and creative teams to converge, as the old model of “letting the same creative run for months” disappears. “Media teams need a stronger creative POV, and creative teams need to understand performance mechanics,” he adds.

​Jim Babb, CEO of Part and Sum (part of Residence), also finds test-and-learn methodologies useful, but believes that if a brand’s goal is to grow in culture by engaging creators, then agencies need to start upstream, rather than with the media.

“While moving budgets is important, paid amplification only compounds the quality of the creator content,” he says. “Many media teams still focus first on reach and CPM, which treats creator content like publishing inventory – which it is and isn’t; it’s more of a cultural unit. The creators worth putting paid behind are the ones already moving your brand's Share of Culture – your share of category conversation, engagement, comments, sentiment, and creator advocacy, relative to competitors.”

“Start with cultural insight upstream, use paid to compound and drive effectiveness. This is the collision we’re designing for.”

He argues that any brand that’s experimented with creator content in its paid efforts knows “it’s quickly becoming the most effective type of content”. He points to the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s projections that US brands will spend over $24 billion on amplifying creator content through paid channels in 2026. “The shift is real, and investment is following.”

For media planners and buyers, this means using creator content in conjunction with paid media, to do “what paid does best”. “It compounds,” Jim says. “Start with cultural insight upstream, use paid to compound and drive effectiveness. This is the collision we’re designing for.”

The implications reach beyond media planning. Creator content is no longer being treated as an extension of a campaign – it is increasingly the engine that powers it.