40% of brands now rank ROI as top KPI for creator marketing, IAB finds
The Interactive Advertising Bureau finds that about 40% of brands now rank overall ROI as their top KPI for creator marketing, marketer Cory Treffiletti reports in MediaPost's Research Intelligencer on August 26, 2026. Creator pay is moving away from flat fees priced on reach and frequency and toward pay tied to sales lift, conversion and attribution back to the store or site, the same standard brands apply to paid search campaigns and retail media placements. Treffiletti describes panelists who said creators now run their own paid amplification behind organic posts and test different hooks and calls to action the way a media buyer tests creative variants. For a meaningful chunk of retail brands, the creator relationship sets the strategy first, and the rest of the media plan gets built around it.
Social media agencies now compete with the creators they used to manage, since those creators handle distribution, paid amplification and conversion optimization on their own. Treffiletti says that shift should worry any agency built around briefing and measuring a single sponsored post, because the creator's role has expanded into buying and testing work an agency once owned. Retail attribution is already difficult to track cleanly, and pay tied purely to the fastest sales lift can pressure creators toward performance tricks over the storytelling that built their audience. Outcome-based pay brings real discipline to creator budgets. Treating creators as the centerpiece of a plan means giving them the budget and strategic weight that role requires, a step Treffiletti says the industry has yet to take.