It has been a month since Cannes Lions, the festival where brands, creativity, and the future of marketing converge. The creator economy’s next challenge is asking both brands and creators to pay attention before it devours all the budgets and creativity on both sides.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) projected U.S. creator ad spend would reach $44 billion in 2026 and found that 48% of creator ad buyers now consider creators a “must buy,” ranking the channel just behind paid search and social media. On the one hand, creators are investing like small businesses in infrastructure, ideas, and performance before they have any guaranteed return. They are betting on proximity to brands, agencies, potential clients and other creator communities so that the trust within their communities is something they can count on.

On the other hand, brands are recognizing the impact creators can have on the acceptance and use of their products and services, but they are being forced to rethink whether one-off influencer campaigns are enough for the next phase of growth. If creators are behaving like small-business owners, driving attention, trust, and purchase behavior, should brands move beyond one-off posts and build systems that make creator partnerships financially sustainable to win in this expansion of the creator economy? To understand how that shift is taking shape, I spoke with different agents in the creator economy to understand how the companies-creator approach is changing.

Creators Are Building Brand Capital Without Financial Capital

For years, influencer marketing has often been treated as a transaction where a brand hires a creator, the creator produces content, the post goes live, the campaign ends, and the brand moves on to find another campaign, and probably another creator. However, as content creation moves closer to the center of business strategy and creators begin shaping their work from opportunity into structured businesses, the old mold may be breaking.

I have previously reported on how building personal brands and creating content are becoming new paths to financial stability, especially for women of color. But after a year of observing, reporting, and researching the creator economy, the shift feels bigger than content itself. Creators are building businesses without the traditional access to capital many entrepreneurs rely on, using their creativity, voice, and visibility to build community and trust as their first form of leverage, something many are not willing to compromise for a single paid campaign.

Curtis Midkiff, director of social media marketing at Sprout Social , said Cannes has long been a place where brands express creativity and build relationships with prospects. But creators have changed the room. “The creator economy is on the minds of senior marketers,” he said, and added that creator activation is “not going away” and is “not a fad.”

A creator can help a brand understand a market, translate culture, build trust with a specific audience and open doors to communities traditional advertising may not reach. But as the industry matures, creators are no longer asking only for visibility. They are asking for support on the financial stability path they have already bet on. If a brand sees creators only as media placements, it may get content. But if it sees creators as partners, it may get distribution, trust, audience intelligence and sales pathways.

Midkiff said Sprout had already seen where creator relationships were moving. “Creators are asking for more tangible long-term relationships,” he said. “They’re not asking for more transactions. They’re asking for more trust.” He added that creators still want revenue, but they want “revenue and relationships.”

Sprout’s Cannes strategy reflected that understanding of support. Midkiff said the company was already planning to build a creator network, but Cannes accelerated the timeline after Sprout received about 300 submissions from creators attending the festival. Many were seeking guidance, events, content ideas, and opportunities to monetize a trip they had already invested in themselves.

Financial Stability Requires Infrastructure

If creators are now investing like small-business owners, brands need to meet that investment with more than campaign briefs. The next phase of the creator economy will not be sustained by one-off posts, delayed payments and short-term activations. It will require infrastructure that helps creators turn visibility into repeatable revenue, while helping brands build relationships that can scale.

That infrastructure has nothing to do with marketing but with the financial services, payments, banking, taxes, capital, and wealth-building. Amanda Estiverne, financial inclusion advocate and board member of the National Alliance for Financial Inclusion, said the creator economy is building demand for a new generation of financial products. “The creator economy is maturing faster than many of us imagined, and it’s fascinating to watch financial services begin to show up in meaningful ways to support this rapidly growing industry"

Creators need to be discovered by the right brands, access the right rooms, understand where their audience and expertise fit, find paid opportunities, and get paid on time. But they also need tools built for how creator businesses actually operate. “Today’s creators aren’t simply influencers—they’re entrepreneurs,” Estiverne said. adding that “They’re managing multiple revenue streams, invoicing brands, selling products, receiving cross-border payments, hiring teams, and building businesses with income that rarely follows a predictable paycheck.”

This is where Sprout’s Cannes strategy offers a different model. Midkiff said the company did not wait until creators arrived at Cannes to engage them but they monitored the conversations creators were already having online, where many were asking whether they should go, why they should go and whether the investment was worth the financial risk. Many creators, he said, were deciding to “bet on me.”

But, as any small business or entrepreneurs operating with tight margins, payments is another worrying point and part of the infrastructure question and part of a larger financial shift. “We’re starting to see fintech recognize that creators represent an entirely new customer segment,” she said. She pointed to Stripe as part of the infrastructure powering creator payments, embedded finance and platform payouts; Mercury as a banking option for digital-first businesses; Karat as a company challenging traditional underwriting by looking beyond FICO scores; and emerging startups like CloutScore as early examples of platforms being built for creator-led businesses.

How Brands Tap Into The Financial Expansion

As the creator economy matures, creators are no longer asking only for visibility, access, or paid campaigns, but for brands to support them through more effective budgets that allow them to continue operating as small-business owners, community builders and product-development partners who happen to create content as part of a much larger business ecosystem in exchange for the trust and deep knowledge of their communities.

Financially, if brands continue allocating creator budgets only to posts and short-term campaigns, while dismissing the relationships, ideas and community value that creators are already building, the financial return on investment will likely remain capped. For this next creator economy phase, the opportunity lies in the relationship and in those who pour into it before the transaction is needed.

The initial problem is no longer whether creators matter to brands, but whether brands are building the right financial and operational systems around the creator economy’s expansion as creators invest their own money, time and trust to partner with them and architect ways to land in the communities they have already worked on. The old model of one-off influencer campaigns risks becoming too expensive, too transactional, and too limited for where the industry is heading. Relationships, faster payments, business tools, financial products and long-term infrastructure are needed to continue growing with the industry. The next phase of the creator economy will belong to companies that understand creators not as media placements, but as business partners whose communities, ideas, and cultural intelligence can turn creator spending into shared financial growth.

Alejandra Rojas is the founder of Brown Way To Money , a financial education platform, and the host of the Brown Way To Money podcast . Alejandra blends financial strategy with economic opportunity for financial stability.

The information in this article are not intended to replace professional financial, tax, or accounting advice.