Marketers are shifting serious budget to creators, more so than to almost any other channel. According to Kantar Media Reactions 2025, a net 61% of marketers globally plan to increase investment in creators in 2026. Estimates suggest the global creator economy will be worth more than $350 billion by 2030.
What’s driving this gold rush? Creators do something that brands often struggle with at scale: make content that people genuinely want to watch.
But with this surge in investment comes a real challenge. To put it mildly, creator marketing ROI varies wildly. To put it more bluntly: some brands have been throwing good money after bad.
Creator marketing may be booming, but it’s still a young, fast-shifting space. And without the right approach, brands risk missing the full value of the investment. So how can marketers use creators in ways that help their brands be more Meaningfully Different? Let’s take a look at three key ways.
1) Use creators as cultural translators, not trend chasers
In a landscape where trends rise and vanish in the span of a morning scroll, jumping on every new trend isn’t a cultural strategy. As Rachel Lowenstein, a cultural decoder and creative strategist, put it in her interview with Kantar: ‘Very few brands understand their role in culture. So many of them are chasing fleeting trends, and a trend does not equal culture’.
We know that brands that are culturally vibrant grow six times more simply by being more Meaningfully Different. However, merely tapping into moments in culture won’t help you achieve that. The role your brand plays in culture must be authentic to who you are, and to what your audience wants, and this is where creators can be great partners for brands.
Creators operate directly inside culture. Because of this, they can help brands show up in the right spaces at the right moments, and in ways that feel authentic.
A good example of this is ‘You Already Vote, So Vote’. This Effie Europe gold-winning campaign came from My Life My Say, a youth-led non-partisan charity in the UK. It showcases the power of marrying creators with strong cultural and strategic insights - namely, that young people already vote often (for Love Island finalists, for Celebrity Big Brother houseguests, in TikTok polls). Therefore, they should carry that habit over into participating in political elections. My Life My Say started by recruiting reality-TV personalities that young audiences had already voted for in other contexts. From there, they turned these creators into authentic translators for the cause of boosting voter turnout - turning a dry civic ask into something culturally relevant for the younger audience.
2) Keep the brand in the room in the quest for authenticity
Just as with any piece of advertising, effective creator content must ultimately build positive mental connections for a brand; it must be remembered in association with the brand in question. This is precisely where creator content often falters. Kantar’s cross market analysis shows that only 27% of creator content links to brand.
When branding is strong, however, the impact on brand equity increases by almost two-thirds.
The struggle, then, lies in honoring what makes creator content work - authenticity, entertainment, credibility - while ensuring that brand isn’t an afterthought tucked in between hashtags. Success here tends to be won based on how well brands brief and collaborate with creators up front.
Ultimately, creators are not marketers, so guidance on effectiveness and key messages is important. But brands must also leave their partners enough creative space to express things in their own unique style.
A strong example is CeraVe’s GRWM with TikTok creator Grandma Droniak. True to her blunt, no-filter ‘internet grandma’ persona, she gets ready for a date while naturally weaving CeraVe into her routine. Even as the content stays authentic to her style, the product remains central to the story. This ensures that the video’s humorousness drives memorability for CeraVe, rather than distracting from it.
3) Coherently plug creator content into the bigger picture
For creator content to contribute meaningfully to a campaign, it cannot live on an island. It needs to connect to the same creative direction driving the rest of the brand’s activity. Synergy matters.
Kantar data shows that since 2021, brand-building impact driven by synergy effects has climbed to 45% in campaigns - a proportion that is 2.5 times higher than the 18% observed in campaigns before 2014. You have to make sure that your campaign’s big idea flows coherently across channels.
Desperados’ ‘The Beer with Latin Vibe’ campaign shows what coherent creator integration looks like in practice. The brand worked with 75 creators across music, choreography, nail art, fashion, and storytelling. It used each creator’s craft to express the same cultural energy in different, channel-native ways, while always pointing back to the Desperados creative platform.
Putting it together
To win with creators, brands can’t afford to place their creator strategy in a silo or treat it simply as a media buy. Instead, they need to integrate creators into the heart of their marketing strategy. That means showing up intentionally in culture; preserving strong brand identity within creator-led work; and plugging creator content into a unified campaign ecosystem.
Discover how the most valuable brands win in Kantar BrandZ’s 2026 Most Valuable Global Brands report now available at www.kantar.com/campaigns/brandz/global
