Why Brands Are Choosing to Invest in Homemade Individual Content Over Traditional Advertising, Insights from Jordi Berenguer, Managing Partner, IMSA Search Global Partners Spain and General Manager, AdQualis Executive Search
The way brands budget their marketing capital reveals how they plan to reach their audiences. While companies once exclusively placed their trust in prestige advertising executives and agencies, today they’re increasing spending on partnerships with individual digital creators. These homegrown content-makers connect directly with audiences on algorithmic platforms like TikTok and Instagram via self-produced content that blends seamlessly into consumers’ daily digital environments. Spending on individual creators doubled from $13.9B in 2021 to $29.5B in 2024, and was projected to grow to $37B by 2025, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. As brand messaging consolidates around these creator led-platforms, business leaders across industries must reassess how they communicate, accounting for ways information is discovered and decisions made in today’s algorithm-driven environments.
Content Creation and Algorithms
On digital platforms, individual digital creators are able to display products and services integrated into their everyday worlds with short-form videos and affiliate links. Unlike traditional display or broadcast ads, content is included within platform-native algorithms which users discover as part of their existing content stream. Digital creators’ production value can range from informal to highly polished, but the defining features are speed and scale. Wide swaths of people can produce content quickly and independently, rather than one professional production team producing one campaign. The result is a model for consumer influence that is both decentralized and heavily based in algorithmic performance.
The Effect of the Creator Economy
In 2024, 94% of organizations from CreatorIQ’s survey of brands said they believe content made by independent creators yields higher return on investment (ROI) for their business than traditional advertising. The same survey’s assessment of 39 varied Fortune 500 companies found that creator content produced 17x the amount of engagement with consumers as owned content. Content of this style isn’t just taking over because it’s convenient—it works.
Among the industries spending most heavily on creator partnerships, consumer-facing giants Retail and CPG expectedly lead. Notably, however, Finance ranks third in industries investing in digital creators with an investment of $2.2B (Interactive Advertising Bureau). With a focus on educational content, major financial institutions like Fidelity and Intuit are partnering with independent financial educators on platforms like TikTok, LinkedIn, and Youtube to explain financial processes and provide bonus material for customers in accessible formats. These partnerships both empower customers to use a brand’s financial tools, and reinforce overall trust for the institution. For a conservative industry historically reliant on formal channels and institutional credibility, the financial industry’s willingness to invest in decentralized creator networks underscores a broader shift.
Trust Patterns and Information Exchange
With 84% of customers are more likely to trust a brand if they’re promoting user-generated content, the longer-lasting business impact may be the shift in where consumers place their trust (Entribe). “What smart businesses are figuring out is that this doesn’t just affect direct-to-consumer,” says Jordi Berenguer, Managing Partner, IMSA Search Global Partners Spain and General Manager, AdQualis Executive Search. “Audiences of all types are shifting the ways they process the constant flow of online information, and even who they trust to interpret it. This marks a change beyond marketing that impacts how businesses approach hiring, product strategy, investor relations, and more.”
In a world of decentralized credibility, organizations need to build brand trust through organic channels. With research consistently showing that individual voices and subject matter experts generate higher engagement and perceived credibility than corporate messaging on its own, it’s clear that influence can no longer be centralized within elite channels. Companies that fail to account for the ways these distributed networks will continue to shape customer perception risk making strategic decisions based on outdated assumptions about a consumer’s ways of discovering and evaluating information.
Traditional Advertising Still Plays a Role
The creator economy’s rapid ascent doesn’t render traditional advertising obsolete; it just reframes its role. Professional full-scale production remains crucial for moments of tight narrative control, when a brand needs to tell one story or share a key piece of information. Moments like brand launches or crisis response may call for a centralized campaign with tight channel distribution, as opposed to a wide-ranging collection of voices presenting multiple points. Certain specialty jobs are too niche or professionalized for the mass creator market. Traditional advertising still runs a robust business, with brands paying up to $10M for a 30-second ad in the 2026 Super Bowl (Forbes). And these more formal, legacy advertising structures still excel at defining a brand’s mission, making an institutional change, or signaling longevity and strength.
What has changed is not whether traditional ads work, but where in the funnel consumers should experience them for the most positive effect. Where owned media once had to both drive awareness and build trust, now it can operate as the foundational layer that sets the tone for the brand’s position, while independently created media drives engagement, reception, and reach. For business leaders seeking to understand the consumer experience, integration of the two types of media is essential. Traditional, centralized advertising still builds brands; networks of partnerships with independent creators increasingly builds consumer trust and action.
Breaking Down the Metrics
The most significant and durable impact of the shift towards the creator economy is and will be financial, not merely stylistic. As institutions increasingly invest their budgets in creator partnerships, more measurable, near-term metrics for success are in reach. Organic content produced by individuals can easily be structured around trackable links and real-time performance metrics. This new accessibility to immediate ROI information is reshaping how the industry views marketing effectiveness.
For CEOs and leaders, the mass availability of more rapid metrics on brand content introduces both opportunity and risk. Engagement- and performance-driven content offers clearer insight into conversion, which enables more agile allocation of funds and faster feedback loops. At the same time, an overemphasis on short-term metrics can erode long-term brand consistency if awareness and turnover take priority. If a brand tries to be all things to all people, it has no clear position. Organizations must learn to balance a strong internal brand foundation with fast-moving content networks that can spread the word and translate that foundation into consumer-facing stories.
The rise of individual creator-led marketing is not a temporary trend but a sign of broad structural change in how trust and influence operate between brands and people. “Business leaders who recalibrate capital allocation, institutionalize new capabilities, and coordinate between traditional and decentralized channels for getting a message out will be best positioned to communicate their brand message with a world ready to hear it,” states Jordi Berenguer, Managing Partner, IMSA Search Global Partners Spain and General Manager, AdQualis Executive Search.
About IMSA Search Global Partners
With 30 offices in 18 countries on 5 continents, our 200 Executive Search experts span the globe to identify the right candidates to successfully lead teams and organizations locally, regionally, and globally. https://www.imsa-globalsearch.com/
