Creator marketing has a scalability problem

TikTok Shop reaches four more European markets this week. Social commerce is no longer a side experiment. And yet the marketing channel with the strongest long-term returns is also one of the smallest — for reasons that have nothing to do with whether it works.

In October the IPA published the first cross-industry data on influencer effectiveness: 220 campaigns, 144 brands, 28 markets. Over the long term, creators returned an ROI index of 151 against 77 for paid social. Creator marketing is worth around $33bn globally. Paid social is north of $250bn.

"The channel that wins on long-term ROI is a fraction of the size of the one it beats," says Lewis Crosbie, founder and CEO of creator-marketing platform KOMI. "That gap isn't a performance problem. It's an infrastructure one."

Proven, yet stunted

The intent to spend is there. CFOs are scrutinising every line, paid social keeps getting more expensive, and in research KOMI ran with CMO Circle across more than 50 CMOs, 93% plan to increase creator budgets next year.

What's missing, Crosbie argues, is the operating layer. "Creator marketing still runs like talent management, not media buying," he says. "Discovery is manual,
contracting is fragmented, payment is slow. A campaign takes six to eight weeks to get live — by which point the cultural moment that justified it has gone. A Meta campaign launches in an afternoon. Budget flows to whatever's easiest to run at scale, not whatever performs best."

ROI lives in creator-brand fit, not spend

The IPA data points in the same direction: ROI variability across creator campaigns has almost no correlation with spend, CPM or flight length. What moves performance is brand–creator fit and content quality. KOMI’s own data shows conversion can roughly triple when the two line up.

But that fit is getting harder to engineer at scale. Value is shifting down the follower curve, with creators under 100k followers routinely outperforming larger names on trust and engagement.

“Effective media buying now means running distributed networks of micro and nano creators, not just booking a few big placements,” says Crosbie. “That means more relationships, more coordination, and more places for a manual process to break. The thing that drives ROI is the thing that doesn’t scale by hand.”

The winning formula

The brands seeing the strongest returns are responding by treating influencer less like a series of isolated campaigns, and more like an always-on, compounding channel.

Unlike other media channels, influencer partnerships combine creative and distribution within a single investment. The best-performing brands are using that to build longer-term relationships with emerging talent — increasing audience trust, improving conversion efficiency, and creating more consistent messaging over time.

As those relationships deepen, creators also become more valuable beyond
distribution. They inform positioning, shape campaign narratives, and provide
real-world insight into how products are perceived and used by their communities.

For brands, this marks a shift from transactional influencer marketing toward a more integrated model — one where creators act not only as media channels, but as sources of ongoing creative and commercial intelligence.