Brand sponsorships have become a substantial advertising channel, especially when brands work with creators to reach specific audiences. U.S. creator-economy ad spend rose from $13.9 billion in 2021 to $29.5 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $37 billion in 2025, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. The figures below show how sponsorship budgets, objectives, measurement, creator partnerships, and audience expectations are changing.
Contents
- Market size and growth
- Budgets and investment shifts
- Brand goals and creator selection
- Performance and ROI measurement
- Content reuse and platform mix
- Partnership structures and deal conditions
- Audience trust, disclosure, and response
Market size and growth
The IAB projected U.S. creator-economy ad spend at $37 billion for 2025. That forecast represented 26% year-over-year growth compared with 2024. The IAB said the growth projection was about four times the broader media industry’s 5.7% growth projection, indicating that creator placements were expanding faster than the overall media market.
The same IAB figures place creator-economy ad spend at $13.9 billion in 2021 and $29.5 billion in 2024. The IAB expected spending to reach $44 billion in 2026. These are U.S. market estimates and forecasts, not a global total or a guaranteed outcome.
Creator buying is also becoming more established in media planning. In the IAB’s 2025 study, 48% of U.S. creator-ad buyers classified creators as a must-buy channel. For brands deciding whether sponsorships belong in a campaign plan, that measure suggests creators are increasingly treated as a core media option rather than an experimental add-on.
Budgets and investment shifts
CreatorIQ’s 2025 survey shows a wide range of annual influencer-program spending by organization type. Surveyed brands reported average annual spending of $2.9 million, while surveyed agencies reported $4.4 million. Enterprise organizations reported average annual creator investment ranging from $5.6 million to $8.1 million, and industry leaders reported average annual creator spending of $7.8 million.
The survey also found that 22% of respondents reported spending $5 million annually on influencer marketing. Average annual influencer-marketing investment rose 171% year over year in CreatorIQ’s harmonized comparison. These figures describe the survey’s spending measures and comparison method; they should not be read as a universal average for every sponsor or creator.
Investment increases were common. Seventy-one percent of organizations in the 2025 CreatorIQ survey increased influencer-marketing investment year over year. Among enterprise organizations, the share was 80%. Approximately 67% of increased investment came from digital and paid channels in the survey.
Earlier CreatorIQ reporting provides useful context for the direction of budgets. In its 2024 report survey, 55% of companies planned to increase influencer-marketing budgets, while 25% reported annual influencer-marketing budgets above $1 million. Forty-seven percent increased staff dedicated solely to influencer marketing. At the same time, 40% said traditional-ad costs had increased during the prior year. These 2024 survey results are historical measures and are not independently rechecked here.
Brand goals and creator selection
Sponsors use creator partnerships for both upper-funnel and direct-response goals. In the IAB’s 2025 study, 43% of creator-ad buyers cited building brand awareness as a campaign goal, and 41% cited reaching new audiences. Another 35% cited enhancing brand reputation or trust, while 32% cited driving online sales or conversions.
Overall ROI was the top campaign KPI for 40% of IAB-surveyed creator-ad buyers. That combination of awareness, audience growth, trust, and conversion goals helps explain why a sponsorship may be judged through several metrics rather than one engagement number.
Finding a suitable partner remains a major operational challenge. Thirty-three percent of brands in the IAB study identified finding the right creators as their biggest partnership hurdle. The selection criteria reported most often included creator reputation, listed by 58% of brands, and audience alignment, listed by 56%.
| Brand sponsorship consideration | Share reported |
|---|---|
| Building brand awareness as a goal | 43% |
| Reaching new audiences as a goal | 41% |
| Overall ROI as top KPI | 40% |
| Creator reputation as a selection criterion | 58% |
| Audience alignment as a selection criterion | 56% |
| Finding the right creators as biggest hurdle | 33% |
These percentages come from the IAB’s 2025 study and represent respondents’ selections. They are not mutually exclusive categories, so they should not be added together.
Performance and ROI measurement
CreatorIQ’s 2025–2026 State of Creator Marketing survey reported strong perceived performance. Ninety-four percent of surveyed organizations said creator content drives more ROI than traditional digital advertising. Approximately 70% of brand respondents said they more than doubled their ROI with creator marketing, and approximately 40% reported more than three times the ROI. Among enterprise brands, 74% said creator-marketing ROI increased year over year.
The reported ROI-driving tactics included both paid distribution and creator-produced assets. Boosted creator posts were identified as a top ROI-driving strategy by 39% of CreatorIQ respondents. Branded sponsored posts featuring creators were identified by 38%, affiliate marketing by 33%, and user-generated content by 31%.
Measurement practices vary by organization. Engagements were the most-used metric for justifying creator marketing among 23% of enterprise brands in the CreatorIQ survey. That result is a reminder that reported ROI and the metric used to support investment are related but not identical: a campaign can be evaluated through engagement, sales, paid amplification, or a combination of measures.
Content reuse and platform mix
Sponsored content is often treated as a reusable asset rather than a single post. Ninety-eight percent of CreatorIQ’s brand respondents said they repurpose creator content on other channels. Sixty-four percent said they increased their use of creator content over the previous year.
CreatorIQ platform data showed that 53% of campaign posts were published on Meta during the first half of 2025. In the organization survey, Instagram was used by 72% of brands for creator marketing. TikTok and Facebook were each used by 65%, while YouTube was used by 62%. Organizations used an average of five social platforms for influencer campaigns.
| Platform or distribution measure | Share or average |
|---|---|
| Campaign posts on Meta, H1 2025 | 53% |
| Brands using Instagram | 72% |
| Brands using TikTok | 65% |
| Brands using Facebook | 65% |
| Brands using YouTube | 62% |
| Average platforms used per organization | 5 |
The Meta figure measures campaign-post publication in the first half of 2025, while the platform-use figures come from CreatorIQ’s 2025 survey. They describe different measures and periods. The average of five platforms also means a typical organization may distribute a partnership across several networks instead of choosing only one.
Partnership structures and deal conditions
Creator relationships can be short-term or ongoing, and the available survey evidence shows that one-off work remains common. In Traackr’s 2024 survey, 36% of marketers said the typical brand-creator contract lasted for one one-time post. Only 16% tracked the number of creators who churned from their brand community.
Traackr’s 2024 report ranked product seeding first for creator acquisition and retention. This points to a partnership structure built around getting products into creators’ hands, although the statistic does not establish that product seeding produces a particular sales or ROI result.
CreatorIQ’s 2024 report found that only 13% of brands used creator content in a majority of their digital ads. Compared with the 98% of 2025 CreatorIQ brand respondents who said they repurpose creator content on other channels, the two figures suggest a shift in how reuse may be defined or deployed. They come from different reports and periods, so they should not be treated as a direct before-and-after series.
For content creators negotiating sponsorships, the data also describes a market where repeat relationships and one-time posts coexist. The 36% one-time-post figure measures what marketers called typical, not the share of all contracts. Likewise, the 16% churn-tracking figure measures measurement adoption, not the actual churn rate.
Audience trust, disclosure, and response
Audience receptiveness depends on credibility and transparency. In a Snap/MAGNA study conducted in September and October 2023 and published in 2024, 87% of participants said they were open to seeing brand-sponsored creator content. Snapchat users were 16% more receptive than non-Snapchat users in that study.
Fifty-five percent of users said they somewhat trust creators. The study also found that 60% wanted creators to share mistakes and lessons learned, 58% wanted evidence and facts, and 57% wanted creators to portray a realistic life. Disclosure was especially clear: 89% said creators should disclose when content is sponsored by a brand.
Among Snapchatters viewing creator content in the Snap/MAGNA exercise, 51% were interested in researching the featured product and 49% were interested in purchasing it. These are study responses from the exercise, not guaranteed conversion rates for sponsorship campaigns.
TikTok’s cited studies provide additional platform-specific measures. TikTok reported a 9% increase in ad recall for creator-led branded content compared with the benchmark analysis cited in its material. In a 2021 study published in 2023, 75% of viewers said messages in TikTok creator videos were believable. A 2022 commerce study, also published in 2023, reported that 64% of users bought a product after watching creator advertising.
Entertainment was associated with stronger results in TikTok’s cited 2022 study. Ads with high entertainment value produced 25% higher brand love and 15% higher purchase intent than ads with low entertainment value. Viewers spent 26% longer watching the entertaining ads than the comparison ads.
The study periods and reporting dates matter when comparing these results: the Snap/MAGNA research was conducted in late 2023, while the TikTok measures cite studies from 2021 and 2022 and were published in 2023. Together, the statistics show why brand sponsorships need both clear disclosure and content that feels credible, useful, evidence-based, and engaging.