There is a version of the creator economy conversation that still gets stuck in the wrong place. It talks about reach, CPMs, engagement rates, and how to measure influencer ROI against a campaign objective. That conversation is not wrong, exactly – it’s just increasingly insufficient. It describes what creators do for brands in the narrowest sense while missing almost entirely what creators have become in a broader one.
The best creators are no longer content channels. They are cultural infrastructure: the connective tissue between communities, the trust layer between audiences and ideas, and increasingly the spaces, events, and rituals through which culture is experienced. Understanding this isn’t a philosophical exercise. It has direct commercial consequences for every brand deciding how to work with creators, at what depth, and over what timeframe.
Key takeaways
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The most influential creators now operate as cultural infrastructure. They build communities, host events, launch products and hold cultural territory that exists independently of any brand relationship.
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Trust is the core commercial asset in creator marketing. 96% of creators formally assess a brand’s content standards before signing a partnership, and 61% turned down at least three deals in the past year over content quality or values misalignment.
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Consumers favour creator content. 77% prefer it to professionally scripted advertising, 80% have acted after seeing it, and among 18 to 34-year-olds it has overtaken search as the most trusted source for product discovery.
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Creator communities are increasingly finding physical expression. 41% of social media users attended an in-person creator event in the past year, and creators, podcasters and authors sold 500% more IRL event tickets in 2025 than the year before.
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Long-term partnerships deliver the strongest results when creators are selected for cultural fit and shared values with your target consumer.
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Value builds cumulatively, so long-term partnerships should be measured over months and years, with dedicated resource on the brand side to manage the relationship.
About the author
Simarin Tandon | Junior Digital Account Director
Having worked with brands across the Beauty & Wellness, FMCG, FinTech, and Home & Lifestyle sectors, Simarin focuses on driving acquisition and growth, whilst managing the Digital team at brandnation.
A curious marketer, Simarin’s finger is always on the pulse when it comes to performance and digital updates across both paid and organic platforms.
Culture has to be earned
One of the easiest mistakes is treating culture as something to bolt onto a marketing plan. A trend picks up speed, a TV show takes over the group chat or an aesthetic starts appearing everywhere, and brands rush to join in while it’s still hot.
Sometimes that works, especially when the link is natural and the brand has something to add. More often, the result references the same thing as everyone else and gives the audience no reason to care.
Cultural relevance comes from understanding why something matters to people, how they take part in it and whether the brand has a credible role in that behaviour. Speed helps on social. Speed without understanding looks like trend-chasing. The brands that build genuine relevance do it over time, by turning up consistently in spaces where they’ve earned permission to be.
How we got here
The creator economy’s growth over the past decade has been well documented, and the numbers are striking. What they don’t capture is the nature of the shift underneath them.
In the early years of influencer marketing, the model was straightforward. A creator had an audience, a brand wanted access to that audience, a transaction occurred. The creator was, in effect, a media placement. A more targeted, more trusted, cheaper-to-produce version of a magazine spread or a TV spot. The creative was decided by the brand. The creator’s job was to deliver it convincingly.
That model still exists. But it’s no longer the most commercially significant thing happening in creator marketing. A generation of creators, the ones building genuine longevity in the space, have moved from being audience intermediaries to being cultural producers in their own right. They are building communities, not just content. They are hosting events, launching products, and occupying cultural territory that exists independently of any brand relationship. The brand is no longer the story. The creator’s world is the story, and the brand is invited into it.
What cultural infrastructure means
Cultural infrastructure is a term worth taking seriously rather than letting it collapse into jargon. Infrastructure, in the conventional sense, is the underlying system that makes other things possible. Cultural infrastructure works the same way. The institutions, spaces, rituals, and voices that give communities a shared language and a place to exist.
A fitness creator with a run club, a weekly training programme, a podcast, and a touring event series is not a content channel, it’s an institution. Their community has built real relationships with the creator and with each other through participation in the world that creator has built. The content is almost incidental – it’s the surface expression of something much more load-bearing.
This is what creators as cultural pillars is actually pointing at. Not that creators are influential. But that the best creators are now the pillars around which communities are organised, through which ideas are filtered, and in which lived experiences happen. That is a fundamentally different brief for a brand than “post about our product three times.”
The trust economy and why it matters commercially
The commercial consequence of this shift flows from trust. Trust is, and has always been, the genuine asset in creator marketing. But its significance is growing precisely because trust is getting harder to manufacture everywhere else.
96% percent of creators now formally evaluate a brand’s content standards before signing any partnership agreement, and 61% turned down at least three brand deals in the past year due to poor content quality or brand value misalignment. That isn’t creators being precious. That’s creators protecting the trust they have spent years building, because they understand better than most brands, that once that trust erodes everything built on top of it erodes with it.
From the consumer side, the data is equally pointed. 77% of consumers favour creator content over professionally scripted advertising. 80% took some form of action after seeing creator content, resulting in consumers visiting a website, following a brand, or making a purchase. Among 18–34-year-olds, creator content has now overtaken search results as the single most trusted source for product discovery.
Where IRL and URL converge
The clearest evidence that creators have become cultural infrastructure is what is happening offline. The Influencer Marketing Factory’s 2025 Creators IRL survey found that 41% of social media users attended at least one in-person creator event in the previous year. Further, creators, podcasters, and authors sold 500% more tickets to IRL events in 2025 compared to the year before. These are indicators of a fundamental shift in how communities organise themselves.
Online, creators have built the shared language, the sense of belonging to something, and this is now finding physical expression. The run club isn’t a content opportunity – it’s community infrastructure that the content helps sustain.
The brands getting results from this have stopped treating the IRL/URL relationship as a funnel and started treating it as a cycle. We know that unscripted and unrehearsed content performs better than anything produced in a controlled environment – and the brands that made the experience possible earn something a product placement never could: genuine cultural association.
How to get it right
Long-term creator partnerships are the unit of strategy that makes all of this possible, and the distance between a long-term partnership and a series of one-off activations is not just time. It’s intent, structure, and what both parties are actually building toward.
Getting this right starts with creator selection based on cultural fit rather than audience size. The creator whose community overlaps with your target consumer in values, not just demographics, is worth more than a creator with double the following and no meaningful connection to the territory your brand operates in.
It requires patience about metrics. The brand that measures a long-term creator partnership on a per-post basis is making the same mistake as measuring a media brand partnership on a single ad slot. The value is in the cumulative relationship between the creator’s community and your brand over time, the association that builds, the trust that transfers, and the advocacy that becomes self-sustaining.
The limitations worth naming
Long-term creator partnerships carry real risk. The closer your brand sits to a creator’s identity, the more exposed you are to what happens to that identity over time. Proper partnership agreements, clear content guidelines, and an ongoing relationship rather than a set-and-forget contract are essential.
Creator marketing strategy at this level also requires genuine resource on the brand side, someone whose job it is to understand the creator landscape, maintain relationships between activations, and bring creative intelligence to the briefing process. Brands that treat this as a procurement function will get procurement outcomes.
And the model does not work for every creator or every brand. A creator with a highly engaged niche audience and genuine authority in a specific territory is worth more to the right brand than a macro-creator with a diffused audience and no particular cultural gravity. Scale is not the point. Depth is.
The brief is changing
The creator economy is the newest configuration of how culture moves, how communities form, and how trust is built and spent. The brands that understand this will stop briefing creators like media placements and start building with them like long-term partners, investing in the depth of fewer relationships rather than the breadth of a larger roster, and measuring what those relationships build over years rather than what individual posts generate in their first 72 hours.
Ready to stop renting audiences and start building community?
Sphere™, Brandnation’s global influencer marketing studio, helps brands move from one-off activations to long-term creator partnerships that earn trust, drive advocacy and deliver results you can actually measure. Get in touch to find out more.
FAQs
It describes creators whose influence extends well beyond content. Through run clubs, podcasts, events, training programmes and products, they create the spaces and rituals that give a community its shared language and a place to belong. Their content is the visible surface of a much deeper community they have built.
Renting an audience means paying for short-term access to a creator’s followers, usually through one-off posts with brand-led creative. Building an audience means investing in a long-term partnership, where the brand earns a lasting place within the creator’s community and benefits from the trust and advocacy that grow over time.
Trust transfers gradually. A sustained relationship gives a creator’s community time to associate the brand with the creator’s world, which produces deeper credibility, stronger advocacy and content that feels authentic. One-off activations rarely have the time or structure to achieve that.
Start with cultural fit. Look for creators whose community shares the values of your target consumer and who have genuine authority in the territory your brand operates in. A niche creator with a highly engaged audience will often deliver more for the right brand than a macro-creator with a broad, diffuse following.
Look at cumulative impact across the life of the partnership: brand association, sentiment, community growth, advocacy and commercial outcomes over time. Judging individual posts on their first 72 hours of performance will undervalue what the relationship is building.
IRL events are where online communities deepen their connection. The most effective brands treat online and offline as a continuous cycle, where events generate unscripted content that performs strongly online, and online engagement feeds participation in the next event.
The closer a brand sits to a creator’s identity, the more exposed it is to changes in that identity. Robust partnership agreements, clear content guidelines and an active, ongoing relationship help manage that risk. Brands also need dedicated internal resource to maintain relationships and brief creatively between activations.
Sphere™, Brandnation’s global influencer marketing studio, helps brands move from one-off activations to long-term creator partnerships, from creator selection and partnership structure through to measurement that captures long-term value.
