LTK, the pioneer of Creator Commerce™, today released findings from the fourth annual Creator Marketing Study in partnership with Northwestern University. The study reveals creator marketing has moved beyond one-off campaigns to become always-on marketing infrastructure, reshaping how brands organize, measure and scale creator programs. As creator marketing expands across the customer journey and the organization, the challenge now is operating it more intelligently at scale.
Always-On Creator Marketing Is the New Baseline
Creator marketing has outgrown the one-off campaign model. Today, 91% of brands operate programs with an always-on component, while the average number of creators brands work with has increased 275% year over year.
Creator programs are also reaching more teams across the organization, spanning marketing (74%), social (65%), media (61%) and brand (60%). Affiliate and PR are also increasing their involvement – PR increased 15 points to 30% while affiliate rose to 36%, up 7 points year over year. As programs grow larger and more cross-functional, brands are rethinking the organizational structures, budgets and measurement models originally built for one-off campaigns.
The types of creators that brands value are also broadening. Lifestyle creators still lead in importance at 55%, but category-niche specialists (50%) and certified experts such as chefs, dietitians and trainers (49%), are close behind. Certified experts posted the largest gain in the study, up 18 percentage points from last year and category-niche specialists rose 6 points.
“Brands have stopped asking whether creator marketing works and started asking how to run it well,” said Frank Dudley, a Professor at Northwestern University and Associate Director of its Retail Analytics Council. “Creators build the confidence that moves people to buy, and commerce media puts that trust where the purchase happens. Seven in ten brands now use or plan to use creator content on marketplaces, and two-thirds on retail media networks.”
Creators are the Commerce Engine
Creator influence now extends beyond awareness, spanning the entire customer journey. Marketers report creators’ strongest influence at conversion and loyalty, with 55% rating their impact as high at each stage, followed by consideration (52%), discovery (50%) and repeat purchase (48%). Trusted creator recommendations are helping consumers decide what to buy while also strengthening relationships with brands after the sale.
As creator influence grows, brands are shifting how they measure success, focusing more on the actions creator content drives. The three most important creator-campaign reporting metrics are now awareness and campaign sales, tied at 51%, followed closely by conversion rates at 50%. Compared with last year’s study, campaign sales rose from 37% to 51% (+14 points) and conversion rates from 39% to 50% (+11 points), while awareness eased from 58%.
Human Trust Makes the Entire System Valuable
Technology can help brands scale creator marketing, but trust is what makes it work. For the second year in a row, marketers rank creators as the most trusted source of product recommendations, with 44% selecting creators, ahead of social media ads (34%) and celebrities (22%). That trust advantage is increasing, with creators widening the gap over social ads and celebrities year over year.
That trust matters throughout the customer journey. Marketers report that creators help consumers feel confident in their decisions (65%), demonstrate how products work in real life (61%) and simplify complex choices (57%). Clear, useful product information (62%), transparency about paid relationships (60%), genuine category expertise (54%), and honest comparisons (51%) are the leading factors that make creator recommendations feel trusted.
The Creator Post Is Just the Start
Creator content is becoming a core asset across the marketing ecosystem, extending beyond social into paid media, owned channels, commerce and, now, AI-driven search.
While 92% of brands use creator content in social advertising, brands are also expanding their use of creators across other marketing channels, including content and email (52%), display (50%), affiliate marketing (39%), and connected TV (36%).
For the first time in the study, 41% of marketers say they use creator content for AI-driven search visibility, a new use case that did not appear in previous studies. Brands are using creator content to influence how their products show up in AI-powered search experiences, extending its value beyond traditional channels.
Turning Creator Intelligence into Action
As creator marketing continues to scale, brands are looking to AI not just as a feature, but as a way to simplify the work, improve decisions and provide better business outcomes.
AI is now an expected part of how brands run creator marketing, with 95% of marketers rating it as a must-have or important when evaluating creator marketing platforms. Marketers are looking to AI for better personalization, performance forecasting, strategic planning and content reuse across channels. Yet operational complexity remains high: 90% of brands want a less complex creator marketing technology stack, while 45% still rely on manual processes such as spreadsheets and email.
“Creator marketing is no longer campaign marketing. It has become core marketing infrastructure,” said Amber Venz Box, Co-Founder and President of LTK. “But the industry has scaled faster than the systems built to support it. Brands are managing more creators, more content and more complexity than ever before, and the work surrounding the work has never been greater. The next chapter is about simplification. AI alone isn’t the advantage. It’s the intelligence behind it that will enable brands to make better decisions, remove friction and turn trusted creator relationships into measurable business growth.”
As creator marketing expands, LTK is building the infrastructure brands need to operate it at scale. More than 4,000 brands use the LTK Brand Platform, which connects creator discovery, activation, management and measurement in one experience. The platform is powered by LTK’s proprietary Commerce Intelligence Graph, built on more than 100 billion data points across 15 years of creator, consumer, product and transaction behavior. In the past 12 months, brands have invested $450 million in LTK Creators.
Building on that foundation, LTK introduced the next evolution of its Brand Platform: a new agentic experience. The experience is designed to help marketers turn business objectives into launch-ready creator campaigns through conversation, recommending campaign structure, creators and next-best actions while proactively surfacing trends and optimization opportunities and keeping marketers in control of every decision.
The reported data summarizes key findings from research conducted by LTK in collaboration with Northwestern University in June 2026. The study surveyed 209 C-suite marketers and senior decision-makers at brands that invest in creator marketing, the majority at organizations with more than $100 million in revenue. Because the 2026 survey updated its sample and questionnaire, comparisons with prior years should be considered directional.
To learn more about the LTK and Northwestern University Creator Marketing Study, visit https://company.shopltk.com/en/brands/northwestern-university-study .
