Two brands can hire the same creators, spend the same money, and use the same technology. One will still outperform the other.

The difference is how quickly each company learns what works and acts on it.

According to CreatorIQ’s State of Creator Marketing 2026-2027 report, based on 2,000 brand and agency respondents, average annual creator marketing investment reached $4.8 million, up 33% year over year. The previous year’s study reported a 171% increase. While the survey samples changed, the direction is clear: brands are investing heavily in creators.

At CreatorIQ Connect in Los Angeles, more than 1,000 people from across the creator economy gathered as the company unveiled Q, a new AI agent system designed to help marketers make decisions and act faster. Its first deployment is live through MeasureIQ, a new business intelligence product. Broader Q capabilities will arrive in early 2027. CreatorIQ also introduced enhancements to SafeIQ, its brand suitability technology.

On a panel about making creator measurement useful to business leaders, Stephen Peteritas, Vice President of Social Media at SharkNinja, showed what faster learning looks like. The company puts roughly 80% of its media spending behind creator content that has already performed well organically. Those results guide where SharkNinja spends money and what it creates next.

When SharkNinja runs a four-week creator campaign, “the expectation is that week one learnings are already in week three content,” Peteritas said.

How SharkNinja And Amazon Turn Creator Data Into Better Creative

SharkNinja tracks how individual creator posts perform against expectations, then studies those signals to decide what to change. The company uses what it learns to improve creative, increase media investment and even anticipate product demand.

“We’re basically feeding back into content the signals we’re seeing,” Peteritas explained. Those insights shape the next wave of creator content and influence decisions well beyond marketing. “We actually place inventory bets based on that,” he said.

Amazon also watches for signals that help marketers act sooner. Julie Haleluk, Global Head of Growth for Amazon Shopping Video, pointed to a simple measure: how many people move from creator content to the actual product page. If that traffic isn’t growing, marketers have an early indication that something needs to change. When those visits are low, “something’s not cutting through, and then you’re not filling your funnel,” she said.

Haleluk also emphasized branded search. Are more people searching for a brand after encountering its content? Both measures help marketers understand whether their creative generates interest while they still have time to adjust.

Every piece of creator content gives brands clues about what people notice, what interests them and what motivates them to take the next step. Yet too often, those signals end up in agency recap reports rather than influencing the work.

The real value of creator data is what it teaches brands to create next. Brands can use audience response to sharpen creative and make each campaign more effective than the last.

Why Leading Brands Are Bringing Creator Intelligence In-House

Learning quickly matters. The opportunity grows when companies connect what they learn across the business.

CreatorIQ’s research revealed a disconnect. Of the brands surveyed, 77% of brands feel confident in measuring the business impact of creator marketing. Yet their biggest obstacle is integrating creator data and workflows across marketing systems.

Many companies have become very good at measuring their piece of the business. They have much less visibility into how the pieces work together. The industry is confusing measurement confidence with measurement competence.

Some of CreatorIQ’s most sophisticated customers are addressing that problem by bringing creator intelligence inside their own technology environments.

Bhavin Desai, CreatorIQ’s Chief Product Officer, described brands with technology teams working directly within social marketing. These teams connect creator intelligence with internal sales data, paid media and social listening. The direction of that connection matters. “They don’t want to put their sales data into a third-party solution,” Desai explained.

Instead, brands use CreatorIQ’s APIs to bring creator information into their own systems. They analyze it alongside proprietary sales and customer data without sharing that sensitive information with an outside vendor.

Desai calls the people creating these capabilities “builders.” “I don’t mean engineers and technologists,” he said. “I mean people who are actually building things with these tools.”

As AI lowers the technical barriers, more marketers can connect creator intelligence with their own business data and build tools that meet their specific needs.

Two companies can use identical software. But the company that combines creator intelligence with its own sales, customer and media data can learn things its competitors cannot see.

Over time, those insights can influence which creators a brand hires or what content it produces. Each decision creates another opportunity to learn.

Why AI Marketing Technology Still Needs Human Expertise

As creator technology becomes more powerful, brands face a growing challenge: connecting what their teams know with the decisions their leaders need to make.

Jennifer Cho, CreatorIQ’s Chief Customer Officer and a former influencer agency CEO, is building the company’s customer success and services teams around experienced practitioners who have managed creator programs themselves. These experts help brands understand the data and put the technology to work. “Our industry is living at the speed of light,” Cho said. “Even the experts are no longer experts.”

Brands have access to more information and capabilities than ever. But as Cho explained, the challenge is understanding how to use them. “How do we actually apply that to our business?”

Part of the problem is the gap between practitioners and senior leadership. The people working directly with creators understand the relationships, the creative and the day-to-day performance. Senior executives understand business priorities and control larger investment decisions. Neither group has the complete picture on its own.

Different teams make that gap even wider. Creator marketing, paid media, social and ecommerce often use separate tools, budgets and measures of success. Each can report its own results, but few can see how the investments work together or agree on what to change.

Companies need a consistent source of information that connects creator performance to broader business outcomes. Practitioners and senior leaders need access to that same evidence, even if they use it to answer different questions.

Companies have spent more time adding ways to invest in creator marketing than building the systems to manage those investments.

That is the organizational problem technology companies such as CreatorIQ are trying to help solve. MeasureIQ can give teams a more consistent view of performance, while Q aims to help them act on that information within their company’s rules and approvals.

But brands still need people who can interpret the evidence, make decisions and take responsibility for the results.

The Future Of Creator Marketing: An Advantage That Compounds

Creator marketing has grown faster than many organizations can keep up with. Companies have invested in more creators, content and technology, often without connecting the people and decisions behind those investments.

Leading brands are changing that. They use performance signals to improve creative, connect creator intelligence with their own business data and give people the tools and authority to act.

As technology becomes more accessible, companies will have more opportunities to build these capabilities. But competitors cannot simply purchase the knowledge another brand has accumulated.

The biggest return in creator marketing comes from using what a brand has already paid to learn.