Influencer marketing is having its digital-media-2015 moment

Brands now put an average of 23% of their total marketing budget into creator partnerships, according to Aspire’s 2026 State of Influencer Marketing report. Digital marketing held close to that same share of total marketing budget back in 2014 and 2015. Digital used that moment to build real measurement, and a few years later, real brand safety standards too. Creator marketing hasn’t done either yet, and I think brand safety is the more urgent gap of the two.

The number that stopped me

That’s not a niche experiment anymore. 23% of a total marketing budget is a real line item, sitting next to paid search and paid social, sometimes bigger than either.

I think that number should stop more people than it does, because of what happened the last time a channel crossed this exact threshold. Per Gartner’s CMO Spend Survey, digital marketing reached about a quarter of total marketing budget in 2014 and 2015, right around when real frameworks started showing up on the market. The Media Rating Council finalized its viewability standard in 2014. Nielsen rolled out Digital Ad Ratings across major markets through 2014 and 2015, so brands could measure digital the same way they measured TV. The infrastructure didn’t show up because someone decided it would be nice to have. It showed up because the money got too big to keep guessing.

I don’t think influencer marketing has hit that same point yet.

Digital solved this once already

Here’s the part I keep coming back to. Digital didn’t solve measurement and brand safety at the same time. Measurement came first, in 2015. Brand safety came later, once measurement was already in place.

I remember how proud I was early in my career landing a $1 CPM. Looking back, yikes. Imagine how bad brand safety actually was before any of this existed, before anyone had a real way to check where an ad even ran, let alone what was next to it.

That order matters. It means the industry has already run this exact playbook once. Get the budget to a real share of spend. Build measurement so the money can be tracked. Then, once enough incidents happen, build the standards that keep the money safe.

Creator marketing is stuck on step one.

Creator marketing hasn’t even solved measurement

Per Zoe Soon, writing in Forbes, 98% of buyers surveyed said the industry needs a universal performance measurement standard for creator marketing. Not a nice-to-have. Nearly everyone.

So the will is there. It already has an IAB report behind it, and buyers are publicly pushing for a standard. I think that’s a good sign, honestly.

But it also means creator marketing hasn’t even cleared step one yet, the step digital cleared back in 2015. And if brand safety only showed up for digital after measurement was solved, that puts creator marketing’s brand safety timeline even further out than most people are planning for.

Brand safety is more sensitive here, not less

This is the part I think people underestimate. It’s not just that creator marketing is behind on brand safety the way it’s behind on measurement. Brand safety is a fundamentally more sensitive problem here than it ever was in digital advertising.

In digital advertising, brand safety was mostly a context problem. Your ad showed up next to the wrong video. You fix it by blocking that placement. The brand and the content were never really the same thing, they just happened to share a page.

Influencer brand safety doesn’t work that way. The brand isn’t adjacent to the message. The creator is the message. When a brand pays an influencer, it’s not renting space next to their content, it’s tying its name directly to a person, their history, and everything they do next. There’s no equivalent of “just block that placement” when the placement is a human being.

That’s why I think this deserves more urgency than digital brand safety ever did, not less. And right now, it’s getting less. Most brands I’ve talked to don’t have a dedicated brand safety solution for their influencer program at all, and some didn’t know this was a category they were supposed to have solved.

Just look at how often brands end up terminating a creator partnership. Not because the creator did something wrong during the campaign, but because something in their past surfaced after the deal was already signed. This happens often enough now that it has its own pattern, a partnership announced, old content resurfaces within days, the deal quietly ends. That’s not really a brand safety failure in the traditional sense. It’s a vetting failure, exactly the kind a real content history check is supposed to catch before the contract gets signed, not after.

Why this matters now, not later

This isn’t a small gap to leave open. A few things make it urgent:

The money is already real. Influencer budgets have, in some categories, already caught up to or passed digital media budgets. This isn’t a channel brands are testing anymore. It’s a channel they’re funding at scale, often without the same governance they’d apply to a media buy of equivalent size.

The risk is already real too. Content doesn’t disappear. An old post, an old video, an old comment can resurface years after it was made and become a brand’s problem overnight, regardless of whether the brand ever reviewed it. That’s not a case of a partner going rogue overnight. It’s a case of risk that existed the whole time and simply wasn’t caught, and because the creator is the message, that risk transfers to the brand directly.

Nobody’s really doing the checking. From conversations with other global brands, the discovery side of these platforms gets used constantly. The brand safety side barely gets touched. It’s not that brands don’t care. It’s that the category is still too new for most teams to have built a real process around it.

What I think happens next

Performance measurement will likely get fixed first. It’s the more established conversation, it already has an IAB report behind it, and buyers are publicly pushing for a standard. That’s the natural next thing the industry solves, the same way it played out for digital.
I don’t think brand safety waits as long this time, though. Digital could afford to solve brand safety second, because the risk was mostly contextual. Creator marketing can’t really afford that same order, because the risk is personal, not contextual. Budgets keep growing, and incidents keep happening. I think brand safety takes up more and more of this conversation over the next few years, probably faster than people expect, and faster than it did for digital.

The real question is whether brands build that infrastructure now, before the pressure hits, or scramble to catch up once it does. I know which side of that I’d rather be on.

I spent the last few months evaluating brand safety solutions for a client’s influencer program, walking through roughly 30 vendors, narrowing to a shortlist, and sitting in demos to see what actually held up against what was promised. I’ll be sharing what that process looked like, and what it taught me about the state of this market, in the next piece.

Sources: Aspire, 2026 State of Influencer Marketing report. Gartner CMO Spend Survey, 2014–2015. IAB / PwC digital advertising spend data. Zoe Soon, IAB Experience Center, via Forbes, July 2026.

Written by

Marylyna Larrivée-Petrucci, Digital Senior Director at Manoeuvre and co-founder of Magellan Labs.