47% of brands now prefer ongoing creator partnerships over one-off deals (Influencer Ma...
By Maria Celeste on
47% of brands now prefer ongoing creator partnerships over one-off deals (Influencer Marketing Hub 2026 Benchmark Report: https://lnkd.in/dBrZKibS)
Which means the other half are still running the playbook that's been quietly failing everyone for years
The content isn't the problem it's the system creators are being asked to work. Brands say they want authenticity but they hand over a brief the length of a small novel, push it through several rounds of approvals, and what comes out reads like it was written by a legal team. The creator's voice gets sanded down
And in most setups, the relationship resets every quarter. No continuity, nothing compounds. A campaign, a late payment, radio silence until the next launch. The good creators pick up on this fast and quietly stop replying
What actually works looks different. Ongoing partnerships where the creator learns the product and the audience starts trusting their voice over time
Deloitte found creators are nearly 4x more likely to continue working with a brand when they feel the brand invests in their long-term growth, not just the next campaign (Creator Economy in 3D: https://lnkd.in/dHaGHEvM)
The brands doing this well aren't treating creators like a line item. They're treating creator content as infrastructure, something repeatable where trust builds and performance follows