Ask a social media manager what they did this week and the answer has changed. Five years ago it was content calendars, community replies and the monthly report. This week it probably included negotiating a creator's day rate, chasing a contract amendment, sorting usage rights and sitting through demos for creator management platforms.
That's talent agency work. And in most brands it landed on the social team without a title change, a pay review or a single new line in the job spec.
Follow the money
None of this is a mystery when you look at where budgets are going. The IAB puts US creator ad spend at $37 billion in 2025, rising to a projected $44 billion in 2026. It has more than doubled since 2021 and is growing around four times faster than the wider media industry. Nearly half of creator ad buyers now call creators a must buy, behind only paid search and social.
The IAB has started calling creator content a core media channel in its own right, and describes brands moving from one-off campaign partnerships to always-on creator relationships. When that much money runs through creator partnerships, someone inside the brand has to own the relationships. Nine times out of ten, that someone is the social media lead. They're closest to the platforms, the formats and the audience, so the work drifts their way.
The job nobody applied for
Look at what the work involves now. Negotiation. Contracts. Rate benchmarking. Briefing creative for people who don't work for you. Usage rights across paid and organic. Chasing invoices and deliverables. Recruiters describe the new wave of influencer relationship roles as closer to talent agent than marketer, and agencies are hiring for it full time. Inside brands it just gets absorbed.
We've watched this pattern before through the Social Media Career Ladder. Responsibilities creep into the role years before titles and salaries catch up. Paid social went through it. Community management went through it. Creator management is next in the queue.
If you run a social team
Name the work. If someone on your team spends a day a week on creator relationships, that's a function. Put it in the job description, because that's how it ends up in the salary review.
Build the roster like an asset. Relationship history, rates, performance by creator, renewal dates. If all of that lives in one person's DMs, it leaves when they do.
And decide who owns the budget. Creator spend is growing faster than almost anything else on the social line, and the person managing the relationships should have a say in where it goes.
The job has changed. Someone should probably tell the org chart.
Source: IAB 2025 Creator Economy Ad Spend & Strategy Report; IAB/PwC Internet Advertising Revenue Report, April 2026. Figures are US spend and include creator content amplified as paid media.