In his first weeks as chief executive of Unilever, Fernando Fernández told the industry in March 2025 exactly what it had long asked for. Half of the digital budget would go to social, creators would increase twentyfold, and there would be one influencer in every Indian postcode and every Brazilian municipality. “There are 19,000 Zip codes in India. There are 5,764 municipalities in Brazil. I want one influencer in each of them,” Fernández said, according to The Drum. He had shortly before replaced Hein Schumacher. Until then, about 30% of advertising budgets had gone to social.
The industry took this as proof that creator marketing had moved from experiment to the centre of media plans. A year on, however, Unilever has published no accounts of its progress towards that target, as a Digiday report points out. Companies that treated the declaration as a starting gun are finding that the infrastructure needed to back the commitment is missing.
What happened after the announcement
Demand moved immediately. Billion Dollar Boy, the agency working with Unilever on creator plans, grew by a third in the six months after Fernández’s speech, according to Digiday. Brands from traditional FMCG, finance and automotive began sending out RFPs, and some, according to Arthur Leopold, CEO of Agentia, admitted that only Unilever had shown them how little they were investing in the channel. According to Adweek, which named Billion Dollar Boy social agency of the year for 2025, the scope of its work with Unilever grew by 1,048% over the year.
All of this happened, and was already under way, before Fernández said anything. RFPs at Linqia had been rising, but for five years already. Reign Maker launched in October 2025, but its co-founder Jonathan Chanti had been building it long before. Blue Apron brought creator marketing in-house, but Coca-Cola, HelloFresh, Red Bull and Pernod Ricard did so years earlier. Unilever caused none of this. After March 2025, though, it was hard to pretend that nothing was changing.
“As they are heading into their first full year of this model, and with various other brands having followed a similar strategy, I think we’ll see a reckoning over the coming months,” said Alex Tait, founder of Entropy Consulting and former media director at Unilever, according to Digiday.
What was not built behind the announcement
Jamie Gutfreund, founder of Creator Vision, named the gap between declaration and delivery directly. “Unilever’s announcement was a directional signal, not an operational plan,” she said, according to Digiday. “The more interesting question now is not ‘did they do it’. It is ‘did they build the systems required to do it well’. That is not a Unilever question. That is an industry question.”
The industry is still searching for the answer. For such a commitment to work, a brand must know how much it paid each creator, how each piece of content performed and what business result it delivered. That data has to be captured, standardised and actually fed into decisions. Organic and paid should run as one whole. Creator results should be tied directly to business performance, and the view should reach across markets, brands and partners.
Most brands cannot do any of this. The main obstacle is the missing pipeline, because no platform in the creator economy can handle the whole chain on its own. Creator IQ and Traackr serve as a foundation, and Traackr additionally measures the path from click to conversion, but the rest has to be stitched together. Affiliate tools here, paid media integration there, attribution somewhere else. A brand that means it does not buy a system. It assembles one from partial solutions that were never meant to talk to each other, run by teams that often do not talk to each other either.
Where the data gets lost
The organic team pulls in one direction, the paid team in the other. A media agency owns the YouTube budget, and a creator agency handles integrations. And somewhere in the gaps between them the data gets lost, the very data that would tell a marketing director whether the whole thing works.
The consequences showed up quickly. “One brand came to us asking to activate dozens of creators across multiple markets with near real-time optimisation, basically treating creators like a paid media channel,” said Jonathan Chanti, CEO and co-founder of Reign Maker Group, according to Digiday. “When we dug in, they didn’t have the internal workflows, measurement model, or even approval processes to support that. That disconnect, ambition versus operational reality, has been a recurring theme since Unilever made its move.”
Ambition was the easy part.
Fifty percent is heard as volume
Arthur Leopold sees the same pattern from the position of a technology platform. “What we found in a lot of cases is that people hear fifty percent and they think they need to increase volume,” he told Digiday. “That’s led to a lot of spray and pray with micro and nano influencers rather than understanding why creators are effective in the first place and then finding ways to actually partner with them at scale.”
The demand also showed up in prices. Micro-creator rates rose by roughly 30% by July 2025 compared with the year before, according to The Drum, as Hayley Stevens-Shaw of the agency Hello Franses said. Today, 71% of American marketers and 52% of British marketers put more than $1 million a year into creator marketing. Budgets are growing faster than the tools to evaluate them, and the gap between what brands spend and what they can prove is getting harder to overlook a year after Fernández’s declaration.
Budgets shifting away from television
Steve Lammertink, CEO of The Cirqle platform, described what is actually happening under the surface. “Large advertisers like Unilever aren’t necessarily increasing total spend, they’re reallocating from traditional paid media, TV and agency-driven production into creator-led content that can be deployed across paid channels,” he told Digiday. Money is therefore moving out of television and classic production into creator-led content, while the total volume stays much the same.
That also changes what a brand is buying. “The biggest misconception is still treating creator as a line item,” said Matt Barash, commercial director of the Nova platform, according to Digiday. “It’s not a channel, it’s a production model. The output isn’t just influencer posts. It’s a continuous stream of creative that can power social, CTV, retail media and programmatic.” The result is a constant flow of creative that feeds social, CTV, retail media and programmatic.
What remains a year after the declaration
The gap between how much brands want to spend and how much the ecosystem can absorb remains large. Alex Tait, who spent years helping brands calculate the incremental return from influencers, is watching investment outpace the tools to evaluate it. That is the reckoning he talks about.
“There are only a handful of moments that truly shift the trajectory of this industry,” said Thomas Walters, CEO of Billion Dollar Boy, according to Digiday. “The onset of Covid was one. This is another. It has firmly established creator marketing as a primary channel for growth, not an add-on or a test bed, but a strategic driver of performance and cultural authority.” Creator marketing has moved from a test line in the budget to its core. A year after the declaration, the ability to measure what it delivers is what is most missing.
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