UK advertiser investment in creators is expected to pass £1bn for the first time this year, growing 26% to reach £1.217bn. The headline number is impressive. But one comment in The Drum‘s coverage of the IAB UK ’s Creator Fronts particularly jumped out at me.
Creator media needs to become easier to compare, easier to prove, easier to buy and easier to defend when someone asks why it deserves the next dollar.
James Douglas, the IAB’s vice-president of its Experience Centre, argued that the next phase of the creator economy won’t be unlocked by proving, yet again, that creators matter. Instead, creator media needs to become ‘easier to compare, easier to prove, easier to buy and easier to defend when someone asks why it deserves the next dollar’. I think he’s right.
The argument about whether creators belong on serious media plans no longer exists. Audiences have already made their choice and advertiser investment is following them. The more interesting question is what happens next.
Passing £1bn is clearly something to celebrate, but it also showcases some of the growing pains of creator media. Investment is scaling rapidly, but the infrastructure around it hasn’t always kept pace. The example highlighted by the IAB is almost wonderfully simple: what counts as a view?
That might sound like a technical detail, but it matters enormously. If the same basic metric means different things across different platforms, comparison becomes harder. Planning becomes harder, measurement becomes harder and ultimately moving significant budgets into creator media becomes harder.
So, I completely agree that creator media needs greater standardisation, but I also think we should be careful about what we standardise.
There are plenty of things within creator media that we should be making more consistent: measurement, definitions, reporting, transparency, brand safety, campaign delivery and accountability. Getting these things right gives agencies and advertisers greater confidence to invest, and creators themselves greater credibility when competing for budgets.
But creators aren’t and shouldn’t be considered as simply media units. Trying to standardise the product itself risks removing precisely what makes creator media so interesting. So how do we make creators easier to compare, prove, buy and defend without making them all look the same?
A creator might host a podcast, make YouTube videos, build a following on TikTok and appear at live events. Their relationship with their audience can move across all of those environments, but the content and the commercial opportunity within it changes with each one.
That’s important. Audiences don’t experience creators as a collection of separate media channels. They follow people, personalities and communities across platforms.
Yet the advertising industry often still buys them that way. A podcast budget sits in one place. Influencer marketing somewhere else. YouTube may be bought by another team. Social has its own budget. Live may come from somewhere different again.
If audiences are platform-agnostic, shouldn’t our approach to buying creators increasingly be platform-agnostic too?
I don’t believe the answer is to force creator media into the structures we built for the media that came before it. We should build the commercial infrastructure around creators that makes their individuality easier for advertisers to access.
If billions more are going to move into this market, and the evidence suggests they are already on their way, agencies need efficient ways to plan and buy. But scale doesn’t have to mean making everything the same. I think the real opportunity is to make the process scalable while allowing the idea to remain bespoke.
Give advertisers consistency around how campaigns are planned, bought, delivered and measured. Give them transparency over where their investment is going. Give them the standards and accountability they reasonably expect from any serious media partner. But at the same time, allow creators to do what made their audiences choose them in the first place.
Because the objective shouldn’t be to turn creator media into traditional media. It should be to make buying creators feel every bit as straightforward, accountable and credible as buying established media, without standardising away the very thing advertisers are buying into.
We don’t want creators to fit the media system. We want to build a media system that fits the creators.