Alexandra Manderstam, brand consultant and co-founder of CULTISH, wrote a line on LinkedIn that sums up the shift in how creators are judged. “Reach is a vanity metric. Engagement is now also a vanity metric.”
According to her post, brands are looking at the depth of conversation instead of reach and engagement, that is, whether the content actually changes something in a person.
Kantar measured how often engagement and brand-building go together
The British research firm Kantar reviewed the content that creators produce for brands on TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram.
In its report The Creator Game Plan, it found that of 15,000 analysed pieces, only 6% achieve both strong audience engagement and a strong brand effect at once. Medium to high levels in both dimensions were reached by 27% of content. The rest manage one or the other. “Our research is a wake-up call that high engagement and genuine brand effectiveness more often than not do not align,” said Vera Sidlova, Global Creative Director at Kantar, on 23 June.
The figure bears on budgets that are growing. According to the Influencer Marketing Benchmark Report 2026 from Influencer Marketing Hub, 87.49% of brands expect their influencer marketing budgets to grow, and 72.22% of them expect growth of more than half.
What brands track in creator content
The inconsistency lies in what is actually tracked. According to the Precision Gap Report from Influencer Strategists, 91% of brands track engagement, but only 9% track real effectiveness. 81% check whether creator content matches the brief, and only 29% assess whether the content resonates with the consumer.
CreatorIQ describes the same shift over time, from followers (2015) through views (2025) to “depth of engagement” in 2026, meaning watch time, saves, comments with content and follow-up actions. CreatorIQ also notes that creators generate 11 times more impressions and 14 times more interactions than brands’ own content, and that organisations activate creators on an average of five platforms per campaign.
The agency Ogilvy says it without disguise in its 2026 Influence Trends analysis. “Influencer marketing can no longer survive on reach and engagement vanity metrics. Impact is everything, ROI is mandatory.” It adds where the advantage lies: “the winners will be those who find opportunities to build and protect trust, not just chase attention.”
Fake followers and the shift of budgets to smaller creators
Trust remains a rare signal. According to Influencer Marketing Hub, fake or bot followers account for 56.5% of all reported quality problems and fraud in influencer marketing in 2026. Reach that can be bought cheaply is losing its evidential value.
This is also where budgets are moving towards smaller creators. The same report shows that 52.83% of brands intend to expand with micro-creators and 51.43% with nano-creators. At Cannes Lions 2026, creator David Dobrik named this logic, according to a report by Later. “Brands get more out of integrating and supporting smaller creators than they realize.”
The context of market size remains large. According to a 2023 analysis by Goldman Sachs, the creator economy was then worth around $250 billion and could reach roughly $480 billion by 2027, with 50 million creators and annual growth of 10 to 20%.
Article 50 and mandatory labelling of AI content
European regulation is heading to the same place. From 2 August 2026, the transparency obligations under Article 50 of the EU AI Act apply. Providers must ensure that synthetic image, audio, video and text is marked in a machine-readable way and detectable as artificially generated. Deployers must disclose the origin of deepfakes and of AI-generated text published to the public, unless it has been through human editorial review. The scope of the obligations will be clarified by interpretation and enforcement.
Reach and engagement can be bought or manufactured. Trust, which makes someone write something genuine in a comment, cannot be manufactured. And that is precisely what brands are beginning to measure.
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