The creator economy isn’t a side hustle anymore — it’s where real marketing dollars live. Brands that treat influencers like glorified ad placements are already losing. The gap between brands who get it and brands who don’t is widening every single quarter.
A sharp new breakdown from Ad Age lays out exactly what’s moving the needle for brands like Chili’s, Marshalls, Lenovo, and Book of the Month — and if you’re a brand marketer still treating creator partnerships like a line item, this is your wake-up call.
The Shift Nobody Wants to Admit
Creators aren’t influencers in the old sense. The word “influencer” still makes half of Madison Avenue cringe, and honestly? That’s a them problem. The people building audiences on TikTok, YouTube, and Substack right now are media companies. Full stop.
Chili’s leaned into this hard. Their creator strategy wasn’t about finding someone with a big follower count and slapping a logo on it. They found people who genuinely talk about food culture, eating out, and value — and let those creators speak in their own voice. The result was content that didn’t feel like an ad. Which is exactly why it worked.
Marshalls did something similar. They tapped creators in the fashion and home décor space who already had the trust of deal-hunters. Not celebrities. Not mega-influencers with vague demographics. Real people with real communities who care about finding a bargain without looking broke.
Micro Is the New Macro
Stop chasing follower counts. Seriously. A creator with 80,000 highly engaged followers in a specific niche will outperform a celebrity with 8 million passive scrollers every single time. The data backs this up. The instincts back this up. And yet brands keep writing big checks for big names and then wondering why the conversion numbers look like a bad dream.
Lenovo understood this. Their approach to creator marketing leaned on tech-adjacent creators — people who actually use laptops for creative work, not just the “unboxing and reaction” crowd. That specificity matters. The audience already trusts the creator’s tech opinions. The recommendation lands differently.
Authenticity Isn’t a Buzzword Here
It sounds like something a brand strategist says right before they make a deeply inauthentic ad. But in this context, it means something specific: creators who have an actual relationship with your product category will always outperform creators who are just doing a paid placement favor. Book of the Month cracked this years ago. Their creator partnerships work because book people are already talking about books. They’re not asking a fitness influencer to fake-read a novel for the ‘gram.
What Brand Marketers Are Getting Wrong Right Now
Here’s the list. It’s not long but it’s damning.
One: Over-scripting. Giving a creator a 300-word approved script with mandated talking points is how you get content that performs like a TV commercial from 2009. Let the creator talk. Give them the brief, not the script.
Two: Chasing virality. Viral moments can’t be engineered on demand. What you can do is build consistent creator relationships that produce consistent content. Consistency compounds. One viral post doesn’t build a brand.
Three: Short-termism. One sponsored post is an ad. Six months of working with the same creator is a relationship — and audiences notice the difference. The same way tech policy decisions can have compounding long-term consequences, a creator partnership that gets cut off too early leaves real value on the table.
Four: Ignoring comments. The comment section on a creator’s sponsored post is a live focus group. Brands almost never look at it. Which is insane. You’ll find out in real time whether the partnership is landing or whether the audience smells a cash grab.
The Hot Take
Most influencer marketing agencies are selling brands a false sense of control. They promise measurement, brand safety, and “alignment” — and what they actually deliver is a sanitized, committee-approved version of creator content that strips out everything that made the creator worth hiring in the first place. The brands doing this well are the ones working directly with creators and actually trusting them. The agency layer, in many cases, is the problem. Not the solution.
Where This Is All Heading
The creator economy is eating traditional media from the bottom up. And just like how certain scientific fields are being forced to rethink foundational methodologies, brand marketing is being forced to rethink what reach actually means in 2025. Reach without trust is just noise.
The brands winning right now — Chili’s, Marshalls, Lenovo, Book of the Month — aren’t winning because they spent more. They’re winning because they stopped treating creators like human billboards and started treating them like the editors, producers, and taste-makers they actually are. Every brand marketer reading this needs to look at their current creator roster and ask one honest question: do these people actually care about what we sell? If the answer is no, the content will show it. And so will the numbers. The era of faking it through the creator economy is over. The audience is too smart, and the algorithm is too honest.
And yes, just as communities built on generational trust tend to outperform flash-in-the-pan recognition, creator partnerships built on genuine alignment will always outlast the ones built on a quick check and a due date.