As creator marketing scales, the need for credibility becomes structural

As spend grows and creator marketing becomes a permanent part of media plans, trust, transparency, and shared standards are moving from best practice to basic infrastructure.

Creator marketing has reached a level of scale where its biggest challenge is no longer adoption, performance, or even creative effectiveness. It is trust. Not in an abstract sense, but in a way that is now shaping how brands assess risk, how audiences interpret intent, and how the industry defines professionalism.

Influencer marketing is firmly embedded in modern media plans. US creator ad spend is projected to reach $37 billion in 2025, representing year on year growth of approximately twenty six percent. That pace makes creator marketing one of the fastest growing areas in media, expanding at roughly four times the rate of the overall digital media market. This growth is not coming off a small base. Spend has more than doubled since 2021, increasing from $13.9 billion to $29.5 billion in 2024, with forecasts suggesting it could reach $43.9 billion by 2026.

This trajectory makes it clear that creator marketing is no longer being treated as a short term tactic or experimental budget line. It is now a permanent part of how brands allocate media investment, which in turn raises expectations around governance, accountability, and credibility.

“Like every medium before it, as creator marketing has scaled, expectations around consistency and accountability have become clearer,” says Lucy Ronald, Head of Talent and Strategy at Fabulate. “When creators are part of core media plans, brands need the same confidence in how those partnerships operate as they would expect from any other channel.”

Trust has always been one of creator marketing’s strengths, but the world around creator content has changed. As brand partnerships become more common and more layered, audiences naturally want a clearer sense of what sits behind the content they are seeing.

This reflects how creator marketing now sits closer to paid media, long term commercial relationships, and always on brand activity than it did in its earlier phases. In that environment, clarity around intent becomes increasingly important.

Across major markets, that expectation of transparency is not simply cultural. It is reinforced through consumer protection law designed to ensure audiences can clearly recognise when content is commercial in nature.

We have written previously about why disclosure is not optional and why it is effectively the price of credibility in influencer marketing, but the growing scale of the channel means this is no longer just a creative or legal consideration. It is a structural one.

“Disclosure should not be treated as an afterthought or a risk mitigation exercise,” Lucy Ronald adds. “It is foundational to how trust is built with audiences, and increasingly, how brands assess whether a creator relationship is sustainable over time.”

As creator marketing has matured, the industry response has taken multiple forms. Regulation and enforcement set the baseline. Disclosure standards protect consumers. Industry bodies provide education and guidance. Alongside these, newer initiatives are emerging to help operationalise consistency and accountability at scale.

From disclosure to shared standards

Disclosure has always been a core requirement of influencer marketing, and clear labelling remains essential to meeting legal and regulatory expectations. When applied properly, disclosure helps audiences understand when content is commercial and protects the integrity of creator recommendations.

As creator marketing has scaled, however, disclosure alone has not always delivered consistency across a fast growing and highly varied ecosystem. The challenge is not the presence of labels or hashtags, but the uneven understanding of when they are required, how they should be applied across formats, and how responsibility is shared between creators, agencies, and brands.

This is where broader education and shared standards begin to matter. Certification and industry frameworks are not about replacing disclosure or redefining the rules. They represent one way the industry is attempting to reduce ambiguity, support clearer interpretation, and encourage more consistent practice as creator marketing becomes embedded in long term brand strategy.

Certification does not replace legal obligations or regulatory enforcement. It cannot override consumer protection law or remove liability. What it can do is act as a signal of education and intent, sitting alongside regulation, self regulation, and enforcement as part of a wider response to scale.

The recent launch of the Institute for Responsible Influence reflects this direction of travel. Established by the Center for Industry Self Regulation, the non profit foundation of BBB National Programs, the Institute has introduced a US based creator certification program focused on disclosure, accountability, and responsible influence.

Whether initiatives like this scale broadly remains to be seen. What matters more is what they represent. As creator marketing becomes infrastructure rather than experiment, the industry is actively exploring ways to bring clarity, consistency, and shared understanding into how it operates.

This work mirrors broader efforts across the industry. In Australia, the Australian Influencer Marketing Council launched in 2019 around trust and transparency, it plays a central role as the industry’s self regulating body, bringing together more than one hundred members across talent agencies, creators, media agencies, social agencies, creator technology vendors, and creator platforms. By establishing shared principles and guidance, AiMCO helps reduce fragmented interpretation of disclosure and compliance across the local market.

“Creator marketing works best if everyone is operating from the same rulebook,” says Patrick Whitnall, Managing Director of the Australian Influencer Marketing Council. “AiMCO exists to create that shared understanding across the Australian market, so creators, agencies, platforms, and brands are aligned on how to mitigate risk, ensure governance, educate their team and know what good work looks like, rather than interpreting the rules and best practice in isolation.”

Similar efforts are underway in the UK, where the Influencer Marketing Trade Body operates as the recognised industry body for influencer marketing within the advertising ecosystem. Launched in 2021, IMTB is represented within the Committee of Advertising Practice framework, co owns the influencer marketing code of conduct alongside ISBA, and participates in the influencer workstream of the UK government’s online advertising taskforce.

In 2024, IMTB extended this work at a European level by co-founding the European Influencer Marketing Alliance. The alliance now represents three hundred agencies and eight thousand creators across seven European countries, reflecting a growing push to harmonise standards, education, and advocacy as creator marketing becomes increasingly interconnected across markets.

Together, these efforts point to a broader shift. Rather than relying on any single mechanism, the industry is building layers of infrastructure that support credibility as creator marketing continues to grow.

Trust as a commercial input, not a soft metric

What makes this moment significant is not the emergence of any one initiative, but the way trust is being treated as a practical input into how creator marketing operates. When audiences understand the commercial context behind content, trust is supported rather than undermined. Clarity removes ambiguity and allows creator content to do what it does best.

For brands, this has implications well beyond compliance. A more consistent ecosystem creates a stronger baseline for measurement, risk evaluation, and partnership design. It allows marketers to move away from reactive checks and toward proactive creator strategy, where credibility, audience alignment, and ethical standards are built into decision making from the outset.

“As budgets grow, brands are becoming less tolerant of ambiguity,” says Lucy Ronald. “Shared standards give teams confidence that they are investing in partnerships built on clear expectations, not assumptions.”

It also opens the door to more nuanced creative execution. When disclosure expectations and responsibilities are well understood, brands are less likely to overcorrect in ways that undermine performance or authenticity. Shared frameworks help creators and brands strike a better balance between transparency and storytelling.

What this means for creators

For creators, this shift represents both opportunity and responsibility. Clearer standards provide greater certainty about what is expected across markets, formats, and commercial arrangements, while also creating new ways to demonstrate professionalism and credibility.

At the same time, accessibility matters. Any move toward greater structure must avoid narrowing opportunity or favouring only the largest creators. That is why education, guidance, and proportional approaches to certification are as important as enforcement.

“Professionalisation should widen opportunity, not narrow it,” Lucy Ronald notes. “The goal should be to help creators understand the rules of the system they are operating in, so they can build careers that are credible, sustainable, and trusted.”

A structural shift, not a single solution

It is important to be realistic about what any one initiative can achieve. No single program will transform an ecosystem as large and fragmented as creator marketing. What is changing is not one tool, but the mindset of the industry.

As creator marketing becomes a core media channel, credibility is being treated less as a byproduct of authenticity and more as infrastructure that needs to be designed, governed, and maintained.

For brands, agencies, platforms, and creators alike, the direction is clear. Trust remains central, but it increasingly relies on systems that support transparency, consistency, and accountability at scale.

If creator marketing is to continue maturing, credibility will need to sit at the centre of how the channel operates. Not as a reaction to risk, but as part of its foundation.

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