The creator marketing market has experienced exponential growth.
From $1.7 billion in 2015, the sector reached $32.55 billion in 2025, with a projection exceeding $40 billion in 2026. Growth that attracted massive investment and, with it, a progressive simplification of the model.
The logic was linear: a creator has an audience, that audience trusts the creator, the brand buys that trust by paying for a sponsorship.
The problem is that this logic treats trust as an asset that can be bought once and consumed indefinitely.
But trust does not work like that.
In April 2026, several creators reported that they had been uninvited from Coachella brand trips, or had seen their trips cancelled at the last minute.
In the same month, Target announced the closure of its creator affiliate program, replacing it with a gamified system that rewards creators with gift cards and products instead of money.
Two different pieces of news, two different sectors. The same fracture.
The model that dominated creator marketing over the last ten years is crumbling.
The Target case
Affiliate programs are extremely difficult to scale because creators are a primary source of discovery and influence, but they do not always generate direct attribution. Creators either do not participate in affiliate programs, or they try, fail to monetize effectively, and abandon them. Target experienced exactly this dynamic.
ROI measurement and attribution complexity together account for 15.84% of the main challenges reported by brands in 2026. The channel scales in budgets before having the tools to demonstrate its value in a defensible way.
This fragility is not new. It was ignored as long as the market was growing fast enough to cover the inefficiencies.
The Coachella case
For years, Coachella was the symbol of the brand trip as a marketing tool. A festival with an aspirational aesthetic and enormous media coverage. Brands paid to bring creators there. Creators produced content. The content generated exposure.
Now, however, in 2026, the situation has reversed.
Creators with signed contracts found themselves receiving cancellation messages two days before departure, with reasons linked to delays in international payments between brand partners and agencies.
The damage was not only to the creators involved. It was to the brands. Creators such as Tiahra Nelson, with 4.7 million followers, and Yazmin Marziali, with 280,000 fans on TikTok, shared the experience publicly, generating negative coverage.
When the channel breaks down in public, the damage is proportional to the visibility of the tool being used. A brand trip cancelled at the last minute therefore becomes a public statement about how that brand treats its partners.
Transferring trust
The reason creator marketing works, when it works, lies in a precise neurological mechanism.
Trust is not built through the brand consumer relationship. It is transferred from the creator audience relationship to the brand. The consumer’s brain processes a creator’s recommendation through the same circuits it uses to process a friend’s recommendation: activation of the insula, reduction in perceived uncertainty, lower resistance to purchase.
69% of consumers say they trust influencer recommendations more than direct brand messages. Partnerships with authentic creators generate 11 times the ROI of traditional display advertising.
The transfer of trust therefore works, but only if the relationship between creator and audience is authentic. When a brand buys that relationship as if it were a media slot, paying for a post, a presence, a trip, it obtains the visible form of trust without the substance. The creator’s audience perceives it. Not always consciously. But they perceive it.
Credibility vs Channel
Even though the market has long treated them as synonyms, there is a structural difference between the two uses of creator marketing.
On one side, we have the creator as a channel. In this scenario, the creator is a means of distribution, and the brand buys access to their audience, measuring the response to this transaction through metrics. It is a scalable mechanism, but one that declines the moment investment stops: just like any paid media.
On the other side, we have the creator as a credibility system, which involves building a relationship between brand and creator. The creator incorporates the brand into their value system, brings it into their narrative organically, and represents it not because they genuinely believe in it.
This type of partnership generates 2.1 times the ROI of single sponsored posts. 71% of creators offer discounts for ongoing partnerships. It is not generosity: it is the awareness that long-term relationships produce better content.
It is a slower method, harder to measure, perhaps also more expensive to build. It requires careful selection, alignment of values, and the ability to give the creator the expressive freedom that makes their content credible. But it is also the only approach that builds something lasting.
Towards a new Influencer Marketing
The prediction is that other brands will soon follow Target’s direction: away from commission-based affiliation and towards more structured incentive programs, with access to events, professional support and connections between creators. The pure pay-per-post model will continue to exist, but as a tactical tool.
Lippincott identified a trend in 2026: the smartest brands are building creator loyalty infrastructure. The thinking has shifted from acquiring a post to managing and retaining the creator so that no competitor can do the same. The creator becomes an asset to be managed according to the same logic used for a high-value customer.
It is a paradigm shift. It requires different skills, new metrics. It requires stopping treating trust as something that can be bought, and starting to treat it as something that must be built.
Those who understand this first will have a real competitive advantage. Those who continue buying reach without building credibility will find themselves managing crises like the one at Coachella: visible, expensive, and completely avoidable.
New Connections (FAQ)
Does it still make sense to pay a real person to promote my brand?
It depends on how the creator is used. If they are viewed as a pure distribution channel, their efficiency will prove to be declining: today the audience is more sophisticated, attribution is difficult to demonstrate, and cost per reach has increased. As a credibility system built over time, with creators selected for value alignment rather than only audience size, it remains one of the most powerful tools available for building trust with a specific audience.
How do I know whether that money is bringing me real sales or whether I am just paying for likes that are worth nothing?
Vanity metrics (likes, reach, impressions) do not measure the transfer of trust. The relevant metrics are: changes in brand consideration among the audience exposed to the creator over time, quality of leads generated compared with other channels, and customer lifetime value of customers acquired through creators compared with the average. None of these can be measured in 30 days.
Beyond follower count, what should I look at when choosing an influencer?
The criteria that matter are not audience size or average engagement rate. They are the consistency between the creator’s values and the brand positioning, the quality of the relationship between creator and audience, which can be verified by reading the comments rather than looking at aggregated metrics, and the creator’s history of previous partnerships: have they integrated brands organically or accepted any sponsorship available?
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