Your Weekly Creator Marketing Update🚀

05.05.2025

May 05, 2025

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🔄Creators pivot as brands’ spending goes into ‘freeze mode’

📌TL;DR

According to this article, brand budgets are tightening, and as a result, content creators are feeling the pinch. With economic uncertainty and tariffs (especially in the US) leading to spending freezes. Influencers are adapting by renegotiating contracts, shifting timelines, and exploring alternative revenue streams.

🟢 THE YAY

📈More emphasis on measurement

Brands and agencies increasingly prioritize tangible results,” Acevedo added, “like conversions and website traffic, over softer metrics” — like brand sentiment, share of voice and social shares, for example.

🔍 Exploration in terms of revenue diversification

Some creators see diversifying their revenue streams as the path forward, and are emphasizing authenticity and community and demonstrating their expertise beyond traditional influencer metrics to manage the uncertainty of the moment.

🔴 THE NAY

The current situation seems to be having a direct effect on how creators are experiencing the negotiation process with brands:

🤏More emphasis on shorter-term deals

some brands are trying shorter-term partnerships. For example, she said some of those brands proposed doing one-off deals with her as opposed to working on something longer-term. In other cases, brands are simply pressing pause on deals with creators until they feel they can have more confidence in the market.

⛔Unwillingness from the brand side to negotiate rates & terms

“They’re not coming to the table negotiating,” — “I’m probably not going to change any of the way that I’ve been moving through this business, but I’m noticing I’m saying no a lot more.”

🚀Reduced fees & expectation to over-deliver

While brands are less likely to budge on compensation, she said they also expect a bigger “scope or work,” and for less pay than previous contracts. For instance, brands want more volume while paying less for a Reel or series of posts. Overall, she is also seeing fewer deals come through in recent months.

🖋️ MY THOUGHTS

Let’s make sure we get the elephant out of the room first before the response pieces come to argue that influencer marketing is about to die. That’s not happening.

What is clearly happening is a re-focus. Influencer marketing is now, for most companies, a recurring budget line fuelled by either internal departments or external agencies. The increase in budget in combination with a market that’s trending down is speeding up the process around accountability and performance.

Personally, I think that content creators have for too long “enjoyed” a position in which brands were quite happy to sign deals based on rates that were dictated by influencers and their representatives, often backed up by (if any) limited data to support those deals from a performance angle.

If you’re working with content creators, there needs to be a clear framework around goal setting and expected results - and how rates fit into that framework. More and more brands are building out their own internal calculators to determine whether the fees match up with what they expect in terms of views, engagement, and harder conversion metrics. For me, this is 100% a step into the right direction, and hopefully it will push the talent side to re-shift their focus around performance versus vanity level metrics in tandem.

🏭Industry Headlines

💼Why B2B brands are going all in on creator marketing—and inside LinkedIn’s new video tool

Business-to-business brands are ramping up their creator marketing efforts and getting more creative with their campaigns. In response, LinkedIn, the most popular B2B social platform, has announced a video ad tool to support the newfound appetite for creator marketing.

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