By Charles Lee Mathews. Creators have moved from the edge of many media plans to their centre. The fight now is over who controls that budget and who answers for whether it works.
Brands are spending real money on creators, and spending more of it every year. The problem is that media, PR and content each believe the budget belongs to them. This is creating a turf war in the industry.
“Creators are not just a ‘nice to have’ social layer, or a PR bolt-on, or a cheaper way to produce content. They are now seen as a serious brand-building touchpoint,” says Scott Reinders, chief operating officer at Connect.
Reinders argues that paid creator work should be treated as advertising rather than as an extension of PR or content. He points to The Creator Effectiveness Playbook, launched at Cannes Lions by WPP Media, System1 and TikTok, which examines paid creator advertising measured through brand lift. “It also shows that creators have moved from the edge of the media plan into the centre of how brands show up,” he says.
Creators are now brand builders
“For years, influencer, now creator, marketing has been judged by the easiest numbers to collect. Views. Likes. Comments. Engagement rates. Follower counts. It’s useful information, but often known as ‘vanity metrics’ because they don’t answer the one question every marketer should be asking,” according to Gillian Rightford, founder of AdTherapy and The School of Thought and executive director at the ACA.
The Creator Effectiveness research is an important contribution to marketing thinking because it answers that question definitively.
“The research is substantial. Drawing on 1,217 paid creator ads, 23.6 billion impressions, over 182,000 TikTok users and hundreds of brand lift studies across eight markets, the authors set out to answer a deceptively simple question,” Rightford writes.
The big question Rightford’s alluding to is this: “Did this make the brand more memorable?”
The authors of the Creator Effectiveness Playbook reveal evidence that shows creators are “paying back commercially, especially over the long term”. “Creators sit among the strongest touchpoints for building future demand. Our own data shows creator ads build more Brand Memory than brand ads. So, the problem is not a lack of potential but what we measure creator success with,” the researchers point out.
Creator metrics need to mature
“Creator ads are still judged too often on impressions, views, likes, comments, engagement rate and follower count. Those metrics can show what happened around a post, but they cannot show whether the brand was remembered,” the playbook researchers write.
“One of the biggest shifts in the playbook is moving the conversation away from engagement and towards brand memory,” argues Rightford.
“The argument is that creator campaigns should be judged by exactly the same standard as every other form of advertising: did exposure to the campaign increase awareness and recall of the brand? If not, all the likes and comments in the world may simply be evidence that people enjoyed the content rather than remembered who paid for it,” she says.
Who holds the purse strings?
“The debate should not be whether creators are media, PR or content. The real question is: who is accountable for making the investment work?” asks Reinders.
“My view is that creator budgets should sit with media, but creator strategy cannot live in a media silo. Media should own the investment logic, measurement, paid amplification and performance accountability. PR should protect credibility and relationships. Content and creative teams should protect the idea, craft and platform-native execution,” he says.
But is it a media investment?
“If we are talking about paid creator campaigns, especially where the content is being boosted, whitelisted, sparked, optimised or measured through brand lift or conversion objectives, then it is a media investment. It is money being used to reach an audience, create attention, build memory and shift behaviour. That is media territory,” Reinders explains.
He argues that creators cannot be reduced to a standard media buy because brands are investing in a person’s credibility, audience and ability to create content people choose to watch.
“The media team should not turn it into a sterile CPM exercise. But equally, PR and content teams should not treat it as a loose relationship or an asset production job with vague metrics. The playbook makes the point that creator ads can build brands, but only when they are planned and measured properly, not just judged on likes, views or engagement,” Reinders says.
When asked whether creator budgets should sit with PR, media, or content agencies, Reinders responds: “They should sit with media, but with clear shared ownership across PR, content and creative.”
“Creators work because they feel native, trusted and entertaining. PR teams often understand relationships and reputation best. Content and creative teams often understand storytelling and craft best. But the budget holder should be the team accountable for the outcome,” Reinders says.
Fighting for a slice of the pie
Mike Sharman, chief creative officer of Retroviral, has a completely different perspective. “I believe it should be a PR relationship, but the average PR agency in South Africa isn’t creative enough to manage both creative output and messaging, so it should be an ad agency with creator knowledge.” He adds that Retroviral frequently owns and manages this kind of ad output.
“The network agencies are under more pressure than ever. They need to extract margin from as many buckets as possible. This is absolutely a turf war and the last bastion of opportunity to convince procurement to part with a budget that still offers grey areas for network agency value, whether or not they truly understand creators,” Sharman says.
Lost in translation
Joanne Hope, co-CEO of 2Stories, agrees, but says this raises issues. “It is genuinely all three at once, and that is the problem. Trying to file it under a single one breaks the other two. But there is a practical trap in the instinct to hand it off to a specialist: the more agencies you bolt onto a single creator campaign, the more the original concept gets diluted in translation.”
“Expecting the agency that developed the creative to then brief a third party to source and manage the talent rarely works. You lose the thread. Creators deliver best when the people who own the idea also own the relationships,” Hope advises. She says media can hold the budget where creative and media teams work closely together.
If you do the brief, you own the budget
“But ideally, the people who brief the creator, which should be the creative or content agency that built the concept, are the ones paying them, so that there is one clear line of accountability for both the creator and the client. You cannot dream up the idea and then hand a stranger the job of casting it,” says Hope.
“They are part of the story, not a bolt-on. So take the holistic view: a creator is not a media buy; it is a creative solve, part of a brand’s narrative. Splitting the concept from the people who deliver it is where things fall apart,” she explains.
Richmond Sajini, PR account director at Melenial, says that creator budgets should sit firmly with PR. “You are buying the credibility, cultural relevance and relationship a creator has built with a community. The creator is both a stakeholder and a channel, which makes creator management much closer to modern public relations and influence than traditional media planning,” he says.
“Content and ad agencies absolutely have a role… [But that] should not automatically determine ownership of the creator relationship or budget,” says Sajini.
Relationship management rules
Chris Botha, group managing director at Park Advertising, says the lack of agreement is a sure indicator of what’s happening in the sector.
“The debate around creators is, in many ways, a microcosm of where the advertising industry is headed. As more investment flows into this highly effective channel, agencies are naturally competing to determine who should own and manage it. But I think that’s the wrong question,” he says.
“The issue isn’t whether creator marketing belongs to media, PR, creative, content or activation agencies. The answer is all of the above… Success isn’t determined by the agency label; it’s determined by the quality of the strategy, the execution, and the ability to deliver against the client’s objectives,” says Botha.
Welcome to the turf war
“The real challenge is that agencies can no longer afford to operate within rigid, traditional lanes. The future of advertising will present more and more opportunities that blur the boundaries between media, creativity, content, technology, commerce and earned influence. The agencies that thrive will be those that are agile enough to move beyond historical definitions and build the capabilities needed to solve business problems, regardless of where those capabilities have traditionally sat,” Botha says.
The honest threads that run through this article are the ones Sharman and Botha say out loud: this is a turf war, fought over one of the few budget lines still vague enough to claim.
Creator marketing has exposed the cracks in an industry still organised around media, creative and PR, even as clients increasingly expect integrated solutions. Nobody can quite agree where one agency discipline ends and another begins because creators sit at the intersection of all three. In that sense, the debate is less about who owns the budget than whether traditional agency structures still reflect how modern marketing actually works.
Charles Lee Mathews is a senior editor to MarkLives MEDIA and a senior writer to MarkLives.com, as well as co-founder of The Writers, a writing consultancy.
