Forty percent. That’s the median cut some CMOs are making to creator and CTV budgets heading into next quarter, according to multiple agency buyers Influencers Time spoke with. Meanwhile, their direct competitors are scaling the exact same channels by similar margins. Same economy, same platforms, opposite bets. What’s actually driving the creator and CTV spend pullback, and why are the smartest operators treating it as an opportunity rather than a warning sign?
This isn’t a story about a shrinking market. Total creator economy spend is still projected to grow, per eMarketer’s ad spend forecasts. It’s a story about bifurcation. The brands cutting budgets and the brands doubling down are both responding rationally to the same set of signals. They’re just reading different parts of the data.
The Pullback Is Real, But It’s Not Universal
Agency finance leads describe a familiar pattern this cycle. Mid-market CPG brands, some regional retailers, and a handful of legacy beauty companies have trimmed creator and CTV allocations by 30 to 45 percent since the start of the fiscal year. The reasons vary, but three keep surfacing in budget review meetings.
- Attribution fatigue. Finance teams are tired of paying for reach they can’t tie to revenue. If a brand can’t answer “what did this creator deal actually sell,” the line item gets cut first in any budget squeeze.
- CTV inventory confusion. Connected TV buying got complicated fast. Programmatic CTV now competes with linear holdovers, retail media networks, and creator-distributed video, and buyers aren’t always sure which bucket is working.
- Platform ROI skepticism. After years of inflated engagement dashboards, a lot of procurement teams simply stopped trusting the numbers influencer platforms handed them. That skepticism is well documented in platform ROI scrutiny happening at the CFO level right now.
Here’s the thing though. None of those three reasons are an indictment of creator or CTV as channels. They’re an indictment of measurement discipline. And that distinction is exactly what separates the brands cutting spend from the ones increasing it.
Brands that cut creator and CTV budgets this cycle weren’t rejecting the channel. They were rejecting their own inability to prove it worked.
Why the Other Half Is Scaling Up
Walk into a budget meeting at a brand that’s increasing creator and CTV spend, and you’ll hear a completely different conversation. These teams aren’t debating whether the channel works. They’re debating which creator tier delivers the best margin per dollar, and whether CTV inventory should sit closer to upper-funnel awareness or mid-funnel retargeting.
What do these scaling brands have in common? A few patterns stand out consistently.
First, they moved away from reach as the primary scorecard metric years ago. Reach stopped predicting sales reliably once feed algorithms fragmented audiences, a shift covered in depth in reach versus sales scorecards. Brands still anchored to reach as a north star are the same ones panicking when a campaign “performs” on impressions but shows nothing in revenue. Teams that already rebuilt their scorecards around GMV, conversion lift, or incremental sales aren’t having that argument anymore, a shift also detailed in coverage of GMV replacing reach as the dominant creator KPI.
Second, scaling brands treat CTV and creator spend as connected, not competing. CTV builds the top of funnel with trust-building narrative content, often repurposed creator footage, and short-form creator placements drive the click or the add to cart. Treating these as one integrated system, rather than two separate line items fighting for the same budget, changes how finance evaluates the spend entirely.
Third, and this is the part most budget-cutting brands miss: the scaling cohort is paying closer attention to regional rate variance and tier mix instead of just cutting volume. European advertisers, for instance, have pushed median influencer budgets up sharply even as other markets pull back, a trend detailed in the European budget jump to a 175K median. That’s not reckless spending. That’s brands recognizing where the ROI curve still has room to climb.
CTV’s Role in the Split Decision
CTV deserves its own callout here because it’s getting caught in the crossfire of a bigger media shift. Linear TV budgets have been shrinking for years as agencies pivot spend toward streaming, a migration tracked closely in linear to streaming budget shifts. That migration isn’t slowing down. But where the migrated dollars land depends heavily on whether a brand’s internal teams can actually operationalize CTV buying.
Brands cutting CTV spend usually have a fragmented buying process. Multiple vendors, inconsistent frequency capping, no unified view of who saw what ad on which device. Under those conditions, CTV looks expensive and unaccountable, so it gets cut alongside creator spend in the same budget review.
Brands scaling CTV spend have usually consolidated buying through fewer, better-integrated partners and paired it directly with creator content for cross-channel retargeting. The difference isn’t the channel. It’s the operational maturity behind the buying.
What the Cutters Get Wrong
There’s a tempting narrative that budget cuts reflect smart belt-tightening in a cautious economy. Sometimes that’s true. But in several of the accounts Influencers Time reviewed, the cuts were really a failure to adapt measurement and vetting infrastructure fast enough.
Consider the side hustle UGC flood that’s hit most brand inboxes over the past year. Thousands of new creators are pitching UGC content, many with inflated or fabricated metrics, forcing brands to rebuild vetting playbooks almost from scratch, as detailed in coverage of the UGC vetting overhaul many teams are now running. Brands without updated vetting processes got burned on low-quality content, assumed the whole channel was the problem, and cut budget. Brands with updated vetting kept finding good creators and kept scaling.
Compliance is the other quiet killer. Creator commerce has been outpacing brand compliance capacity for a while now, and the gap is forcing scrambles across legal and marketing teams simultaneously, a dynamic explored in compliance gaps in creator commerce. When a brand gets burned by an undisclosed partnership or an FTC inquiry, the instinct is to pull back spend across the board rather than fix the underlying disclosure workflow. That’s an overcorrection, and it usually costs more in lost momentum than the original compliance gap ever would have. The FTC’s endorsement guidelines haven’t gotten more lenient, so this is a solvable operational problem, not a reason to abandon the channel.
What the Scalers Get Right
Scaling brands tend to run leaner creator rosters with tighter performance thresholds. Instead of spreading budget across dozens of mid-tier creators hoping something hits, they’re consolidating around creators who’ve proven repeatable conversion, then layering CTV around that proven content.
They’re also paying closer attention to content fatigue cycles. Creator ad content now shows measurable fatigue by around day 36 in many verticals, pushing brands toward faster refresh cadences rather than letting a single high-performing asset run until it dies, a pattern quantified in research on creator ad fatigue cycles. Scaling brands build refresh costs into the budget from day one. Cutting brands treat fatigue as a surprise failure and blame the creator.
And scalers increasingly use creator-led ad creative specifically because it reduces CPC compared to brand-produced ads, a gap documented in analysis showing creator content cutting CPC relative to traditional brand creative. If a channel is measurably cheaper to convert through, cutting it in a cost-conscious budget cycle is backwards. Yet it happens constantly, usually because the savings aren’t being tracked granularly enough for finance to see them.
The brands scaling creator and CTV spend aren’t spending more because they’re braver. They’re spending more because they can actually prove where the dollars land.
So Which Camp Should You Be In?
Ask three questions before deciding whether to cut or scale.
Can your team currently trace a creator post or CTV impression to a specific sales outcome within 30 days? If not, fix measurement before touching budget. Cutting spend without fixing attribution just delays the same problem to next quarter.
Is your vetting process keeping pace with the volume of creator pitches hitting your inbox? If vetting is manual and inconsistent, quality problems will keep masquerading as channel problems.
Are you treating creator and CTV as one connected system or two competing budgets? Brands that integrate the two consistently outperform brands that silo them, according to multiple agency media planners interviewed for this piece. Tools like Meta Business Suite and TikTok Ads Manager already support cross-channel attribution modeling that most teams simply aren’t configuring correctly.
The 40 percent pullback isn’t a referendum on creator marketing or CTV as formats. It’s a referendum on whether a given brand’s internal operations, measurement, vetting, and compliance can keep pace with how fast both channels have matured. The brands getting that infrastructure right are scaling. Everyone else is cutting, and mistaking a fixable operational gap for a dying channel.
Frequently Asked Questions
FAQs
Why are some brands cutting creator and CTV budgets by 40 percent?
Most cuts trace back to attribution gaps, not channel failure. Brands that can’t link creator posts or CTV impressions to actual sales tend to cut spend first during budget reviews, even when the underlying content is performing well.
Is CTV spend actually declining industry-wide?
No. CTV spend overall is still growing as linear TV budgets continue shifting toward streaming. The pullback is concentrated among brands with fragmented, hard-to-measure CTV buying processes, not the channel as a whole.
What metrics should replace reach when evaluating creator campaigns?
GMV, incremental sales lift, and conversion rate per creator tier are increasingly replacing reach and impressions as primary scorecard metrics, since reach has stopped reliably predicting sales outcomes.
How often should creator ad creative be refreshed to avoid fatigue?
Data shows measurable fatigue setting in around day 36 for many creator ad formats, so brands scaling spend typically build refresh cycles of four to six weeks into their planning rather than running one asset indefinitely.
Should creator and CTV budgets be managed as one combined strategy?
Yes. Brands that integrate creator content with CTV placements, using creator footage for CTV creative and short-form content for retargeting, consistently outperform brands that manage the two as separate, competing budget lines.
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