The creator economy has become a core part of modern advertising, not a side project. Ad revenue invested behind creator-generated content is expected to reach around $180 billion this year, representing roughly 20% growth in 2024, with forecasts suggesting that figure could more than double by 2030, according to WPP Media.
Much of this increased investment is coming from large CPG advertisers who are committing serious budgets to creator partnerships across platforms like Meta and TikTok.
However, behind the impressive growth sits a more uncomfortable reality. A significant proportion of this money is not working as hard as it could. Creative analytics platform CreativeX has identified a large gap between the industry’s enthusiasm for creators and the actual effectiveness of the content being produced.
That gap has led the company to launch a new creator content benchmarking tool designed to bring rigour, comparability and accountability to a space that has often been driven more by instinct and hype than by data.
When “Authentic” Content Fails to Deliver Brand Impact
CreativeX’s analysis reveals that a substantial volume of creator ad spend is failing to deliver meaningful brand impact.
On Meta, around 45% of creator ad spend generated no measurable brand effect because logos or branding simply did not appear within the crucial first three seconds of the ad. On TikTok, the challenge looks different but is no less serious, with only 7% of creator content being watched for more than 25% of its duration.
According to CreativeX’s founder and CEO, this disconnect is particularly striking when contrasted with how brands typically treat their own advertising. Over the last decade, marketers have spent significant time and money codifying best practices, testing creative elements and refining their understanding of what makes content effective.
Yet when working with creators, many of those learnings are abandoned. Creator ads, once they are turned into paid media, often ignore basic principles that are known to drive recall, engagement and purchase intent.
It is this specific discrepancy between high investment and low efficiency that prompted CreativeX, known for providing a “credit score” for creative effectiveness, to formalise a new approach to measuring and comparing creator work.
Bringing Creator Content Under the Same Rules as Advertising
The new creator content benchmarking tool is designed to help advertisers answer a fundamental question: is our creator spend actually effective, or is it just fashionable?
CreativeX’s platform allows brands to compare the performance of creator content against industry norms and against their own branded assets, providing a clear view of where media budgets are truly driving impact and where they are being wasted.
Rather than treating creator content as an unstructured, separate category, the tool evaluates it through the same lens as traditional advertising. It helps uncover whether key creative fundamentals are present and working, or whether “authenticity” has been allowed to displace basic brand-building requirements such as clear branding, strong messaging and compelling calls to action.
The founder and CEO of CreativeX argues that there is no defensible reason why creator ads, once they are used as advertising, should not play by the same rules of the game that have been established for brand content. The aim is not to dilute the creator’s voice, but to remove the artificial trade-off between authenticity and effectiveness.
Danone’s Shift from “Creators Know Best” to Co-Creation
One of the early adopters of CreativeX’s tool is CPG giant Danone. The company’s global culture, PR and influence director has highlighted that creators are now playing a far more central role in how Danone creates and distributes content.
As investment in creator partnerships scales, ensuring that the right solutions are in place to maximise brand impact has become essential.
The director also acknowledged that the industry’s prevailing mindset has often been that “creators know best”, and that brands should largely leave them alone to do what they do. For many organisations, that remains the default. Danone, however, is deliberately moving towards a co-creation model, where creators and brand teams collaborate more closely.
In this new model, Danone works to ensure that brand guidelines and established effectiveness principles are accurately reflected in the final content, without suffocating the creator’s style.
CreativeX’s benchmarking data helps Danone understand where creator work aligns with its standards and where it diverges, giving the company the confidence to adjust briefs, refine processes and better align creator output with brand objectives.
Testing the Ingredients of Effective Creator Ads
To build its benchmarks, CreativeX set out to test whether creator ads designed with specific platforms in mind perform differently to those that are not tailored. The company examined creator executions for major advertisers including Bayer, Mars, Heineken and Unilever, focusing on the presence or absence of certain best practices.
CreativeX analysed elements such as whether audio and visual branding appears within the first few seconds, whether the creative respects platform safe zones, whether there is a clear call to action, how video length affects performance, and how additional elements like sound, music and subtitles influence engagement.
The company then worked to isolate these variables to understand how they affected outcomes like view-through rates and click-through rates.
The result was clear: creator ads that followed proven creative principles performed better. The data showed that there is no credible justification for holding creator content to a lower standard than brand advertising once it is being used as a paid asset.
For CreativeX, the task now is to help marketers abandon the false dichotomy that pits authenticity against effectiveness and instead design creator campaigns that succeed on both fronts.
AI-Powered Guidance for Influencer and Creator Spend
Underpinning the new benchmarking tool is a foundation of artificial intelligence and machine learning, which enables CreativeX to assess creator content at scale and deliver practical guidance to advertisers.
The system can automatically review large volumes of assets, score them against effectiveness benchmarks and highlight where improvements are needed.
For Danone, this sits comfortably within its broader push to embed AI across the business. The company already uses AI to shorten the creative development process, speeding up testing and iteration. It also has a partnership with Microsoft to bring AI capabilities into its supply chain, further demonstrating its commitment to data-driven decision making.
Danone’s leadership has described the insights from CreativeX’s AI-powered tool as “vital”. By providing a clear, evidence-based view of which creator executions work and which do not, the platform allows teams to make targeted changes that maximise effectiveness.
It also directly informs decisions on how to optimise influencer and creator spend, helping ensure that growing budgets in this area are justified by measurable impact rather than driven solely by trend or intuition.
Conclusion: Towards Creator Content That Is Both Authentic and Effective
As creator spending races towards the hundreds of billions, the pressure on brands to prove that this investment is delivering real value will only intensify. CreativeX’s new creator content benchmarking tool arrives at a moment when the industry urgently needs more structure, more standards and more accountability in how it evaluates creator work.
By demonstrating that creator ads can still feel real and human while adhering to the same effectiveness principles as traditional advertising, CreativeX is challenging marketers to move beyond the assumption that authenticity and performance are mutually exclusive. Early adopters like Danone showcase a new way of working, one built around co-creation, rigorous measurement and a willingness to revise old habits in light of new data.
If brands are to close the gap between what they spend on creators and what they get back in return, tools like this will be essential. They offer a path to a future in which creator content is not only culturally relevant and “on trend”, but also consistently, demonstrably effective.
In that world, authenticity and impact are no longer opposing forces, but partners in building smarter, stronger advertising.
