Influencer Spend Becomes Media Line Item as Procurement Steps In

Creator budgets are now planned like media buys

For most of the past decade, influencer marketing sat in an odd spot on the budget. It was too big to ignore and too loosely measured to plan with any precision. Trade coverage this week says that is changing. Brands are reportedly moving creator spend out of brand and PR budgets and booking it as media, which puts procurement and finance in charge of how the money is forecast, negotiated and reported.1

The main account, from the trade outlet Influencers Time, describes three changes. Planning is moving from one campaign at a time to quarterly flights booked in advance. Creators are being judged on CPM, CPA and incrementality testing instead of follower counts and engagement. And procurement teams are negotiating rate cards, usage rights and contract terms the way they would for a TV or programmatic buy.1 The same outlet says the change has reached the smallest line items too. Finance teams are reportedly treating nano-creator fees as paid distribution,4 and a growing share of brands are counting gifted product and seeding costs as media spend instead of cost of goods or overhead.6

My view is that the trend is real and supported by independent data. The most sweeping claims, though, come from one outlet that keeps citing its own earlier articles. The evidence that holds up best is in how creator money is actually being spent, not in surveys about how brands label it.

Independent data shows creator money buying ad placements

The strongest support comes from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), the US ad industry's trade body. It estimates that US creator ad spend more than doubled from $13.9 billion in 2021 to $29.5 billion in 2024. It says brands increasingly treat creators as a full advertising channel, not just social media partners, and it projects about $44 billion for 2026.13 Its estimate for 2025 is $37 billion, up 26% on the year before.12

The breakdown of the 2026 forecast matters more than the total. One summary of the IAB data says spend on paid promotion of creator partnership posts on social platforms will rise 48% to $13.2 billion. Paid promotion of creator content beyond social platforms is forecast to rise 56% to $11.1 billion. Direct partnerships, where brands pay creators to make and post content, are forecast at $11.6 billion.11 In other words, the fastest growth is in ad dollars that use creator content as the ad itself. That is media spending, whatever the accounting label says.

Influencers Time reports a similar shift on the creative side. It says brands increasingly pay for creator content as a production asset that has to beat studio-made ads on cost per acquisition. It also says flat retainers are under strain, because a successful asset can be scaled into large paid campaigns while a failed one is dropped within days.5 A related piece argues that this pressure is moving deals away from CPM pricing toward pay-per-conversion terms.3

Where the numbers disagree

The figures need care, because the headline numbers do not always mean what they seem to.

Take the claim that creators now get about a quarter of total marketing budgets. Influencers Time attributes it only to recent industry surveys.1 An Aspire budget survey cited elsewhere puts the average share at 23%, which is close. The same survey also found that 61% of programs still spend under $250,000 a year and only 16% run multi-million-dollar programs.20 That pattern suggests the large-budget, procurement-led programs are concentrated among a minority of big advertisers. The average share is high, but most programs are still small.

Timing is also a problem. Influencers Time presents US creator ad spend "crossing $37 billion" as new and attributes the 26% growth partly to procurement reclassification.2 But the IAB put that figure on 2025, in a report from November of that year, and confirmed it in its April 2026 revenue report.1418 The correct current figure is the roughly $44 billion forecast for 2026. That works out to about 18% growth, slower than the year before but still well ahead of the wider market.11

Definitions also produce very different totals. eMarketer, which counts only payments for influencer marketing, puts US spend at about $12.17 billion in 2026, up 15.7%.16 The IAB's roughly $44 billion figure is much larger because it also counts paid promotion and ad placements next to creator content.11 Influencers Time notes that estimates of the wider creator economy differ by about $100 billion, and argues that reclassification creates pressure for cleaner numbers.9 The gap between eMarketer and the IAB shows the same thing: much of what now counts as "creator spend" was always going to be measured as media.

Some other figures should be read cautiously. The trade coverage cites budgets growing 171% and 70% of brands measuring creators like paid media,14 but those numbers are mostly attributed to the outlet's own earlier reporting. The claim that reclassification has happened "inside most enterprise marketing orgs" is also stated more than shown.3

How this fits the wider ad market

The shift is happening while social advertising is growing very fast. IAB/PwC data shows US social ad revenue rose 32.6% to $117.7 billion in 2025, passing search for the first time in that series.26 The IAB later raised its 2026 forecast for overall US ad spend growth to 12.3%, led by social media at 16.5%.25 It also reported that creator and influencer partnerships were the area buyers most often said they were increasing, cited by 54%.11

Agency forecasts point the same way. WPP Media's midyear forecast expects US social and other digital ad revenue to reach $161.4 billion in 2026, up 16.3%. It credits AI-driven ad delivery, short-form video and creator-led distribution.21 Globally, WPP Media raised its 2026 growth forecast to 8.9% from 7.1%, for a market of about $1.3 trillion.22 WARC's Q3 forecast is more bullish. It puts global 2026 ad spend at about $1.34 trillion, up 11.9%, with social media the fastest-growing channel, up 21.3% to $394.6 billion.29

WPP Media's caveat may be the most useful context for the procurement shift. It expects growth in social advertising to slow to single digits from 2027. Its reasons are that time spent on social platforms is leveling off, age-based access limits are spreading, and AI chatbots are drawing consumer attention.22 If that happens, competition for social ad budgets will get tougher, and finance teams will want proof of return from every channel. Formal procurement of creator spend looks like preparation for that. When growth slows, the channels with clear measurement are the ones that keep their budgets.

Retail media and big platforms also compete for creator budgets

The new rules do not only affect brands and creators. Influencers Time reports that retail media networks are taking some budget that used to fund standalone creator campaigns. Creator content still runs, but the money flows through a retailer's ad auction instead of a direct brand deal.10 The outlet says the appeal for finance teams is closed-loop reporting tied to sales, which is easier to approve than awareness metrics.10 eMarketer data puts US retail media ad spend at about $69.3 billion in 2026, up 17.9%.26

Scale matters here too. WPP Media forecasts that Alphabet, Meta and Amazon will take 57.6% of advertising outside China in 2026.23 Influencers Time adds that Meta's and TikTok's ad tools now connect creator marketplaces directly to paid-media dashboards. It also says agency holding companies have bought creator marketplaces and user-generated content shops, which could reduce brands' leverage on rates.1 Once creator spend is treated as media, the familiar media-buying questions follow: price transparency, agency markups, and who owns the relationship with the creator.

What changes for creators and compliance

For creators, the effects are uneven. The trade coverage suggests that nano and micro creators with engaged niche audiences tend to do well under acquisition-based pricing.3 eMarketer forecasts that micro and nano influencers will get 45.5% of influencer marketing spend in 2026.12 At the same time, product gifting is losing standing because it is hard to show a return,4 and pay is concentrated at the top: one dataset finds the top 10% of creators took 62% of payments.12

On compliance, the coverage agrees on one point. How a brand books creator spend does not change its disclosure obligations under FTC endorsement rules, including for gifted products.6 The practical difference is that media budgets come with contracts and audit trails. These make it easier to check disclosure, and also make gaps easier to spot.16

Overall, creator spend is being treated as a mature ad channel, and procurement taking control reflects that. The less certain question is whether formal measurement will confirm the strong returns brands have reported, or show that some creator spend does not hold up under the scrutiny applied to search and social buys.