Influencer and creator marketing has transitioned from an experimental tactic aimed at delivering brand awareness for products and services to a strategic performance channel.
Previously, established celebrities and aspiring creators used their strength of followers to create affinity towards FMCG and CPG brands. Brands have, over the years, shifted significant portions of their digital budgets toward actual creator partnerships, as these collaborations increasingly delivered measurable business outcomes, not just recognition.
In 2026, these budgets needed more justification, mainly due to frequent sales outcomes. Reach and vanity metrics like clicks, likes, and shares were no longer going to cut it, especially as Agentic AI made its way on the scene, competing with the creator economy.
“Creator marketing is now judged by Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), Average Order Value (AOV), and ROI, not just likes or impressions. Scalable systems for sourcing and tracking are what drive predictable growth in 2026,” a Dentsu Global Ad Spend Forecast announced in December 2025.
Surge in the creator economy.
According to Influencer Marketing Hub’s 2025 Benchmark Report, the industry surged to nearly $33 billion following a massive 36 percent year-over-year growth from 2024, when it sat at roughly $24 billion.
This was driven by a fundamental shift in how brands treat creators and social commerce integration, where platforms like TikTok Shop and Instagram’s shoppable reels turned influencers into ‘direct-response’ sales agents, creating a shift from awareness to actual transactions. These platforms allow brands and creators to sell directly through in-app videos, livestreams, and shop tab interfaces.
Many algorithms now prioritize User-Generated Content assets like videos, images, reviews, or forum posts created by consumers rather than brands, helping drive engagement and conversion, and boost performance relative to studio-produced brand ads.
Niche and micro-influencers enjoying 10k to 100k followers captured nearly 40 percent of the total creative economy market share, around $12 billion, with some brands favoring lower “cost-per-acquisition” compared to celebrities, but also the ability to drive high engagement, conversion, and commerce action compared to legacy advertising formats.
CPG targets and outcomes.
Similar to their expectations with paid media, consumer brands and CPG owners are now prioritizing KPIs and accountable results like click-through rates, conversion rates, cost per acquisition, and direct sales rather than simple impressions or surface engagement that creators generate.
Brands are no longer paying for one-off posts. They are paying for Creator Infrastructure—automated workflows for sourcing, tracking, and real-time payouts.
This structural shift from “reach to revenue” has been noted by analytics research, which highlights widening gaps in ROI between traditional influencer campaigns and more sophisticated, performance-oriented creator programs, giving rise to creator commerce, according to Business Insider.
This is where Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) comes in to algorithmically optimize CPG brands’ digital footprint.
“The digital shelf is where your product exists, i.e., retailer product detail pages, marketplaces, quick commerce catalogues, reviews, creator content, and your owned pages. GEO is the layer that makes that product truth legible to AI, whose answers are becoming an entry point into the shelf. You’re no longer competing only on visibility; you’re competing on recommendation,” said Hicham Auajjar, MENA operations leader at Heroiks, a France-founded growth strategy and media activation group with operations in the Gulf.
Creator budgets/ROI expectations.
In 2026, 74 percent of brands are moving budget into creator programs, according to Impact.com in their “Influencer Marketing Trends 2026: Performance Insights” report, published December 17, 2025. Impact.com is a leading global partnership management platform that tracks billions of dollars in creator and affiliate transactions.
“The most significant trend will be the holistic integration of the creator into the core marketing engine, which will see the traditional lines between ‘brand’ and ‘performance’ budgets finally blur,” said Sanchit Sareen, RVP of Influencers & Creators at Impact.com.
CPG brands, in particular, have shifted large portions of their social media budgets to creator partnerships that act as decentralized sales offices. HubSpot and Impact.com say leading CPG firms, specifically in the Beauty, Food and Beverage, and Personal Care sectors, are now allocating 30 to 40 percent of their total digital marketing budget exclusively to influencer partnerships that invest in strategic storytelling and creator-driven brand narratives.
Some CPG brands have pivoted to Hybrid Compensation Models, for example offering a base fee and 10–15 percent commission.
Data shows that CPG brands earn an average of $5.78 for every $1 spent on influencer marketing, roughly 11x higher ROI than traditional digital ads, according to Statista, 2026. Other sector sources estimate that top-performing creator campaigns can reach up to $18 per $1 spent.
Digital Voices, a leading global influencer marketing agency that recently acquired agencies in London and New York, said that by 2026, social commerce revenue is predicted to hit $919 billion globally.
But are ROIs from AI currently meeting their promise? “AI does impact the revenue, but segregating the exact volume is challenging—at least now. That’s why AI investment is most often justified as a means of protecting efficiency, accuracy, and operational resilience, rather than as a standalone growth stream,” Hussein Safiedine, Media Director at Al Rabiaa TV Network, said.
This is further ascertained by Imen Chatti, Founder, Intercult Brands, Paris, France, who said: “CPG leaders are clearly moving beyond AI pilots and into industrialization. McKinsey shows that 71 percent have already adopted AI in at least one business function, and 56 percent are now using generative AI on a regular basis. Things are moving fast. Organizations are scaling agentic AI systems across departments, and what I see on the ground is consistent: the first tangible wins tend to be productivity gains and faster decision cycles.”
Agentic ecommerce framework.
In 2026, Google co-developed and launched the Agentic Framework for Ecommerce in the US, allowing “AI agents” to handle the entire e-shopping journey, from click to sale.
“We believe in an agentic commerce future that is open and collaborative. Our new Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) establishes a common language for agents and systems to operate together across the entire shopping journey,” Vidhya Srinivasan, VP/GM Ads and Commerce at Google, said.
Morgan Stanley estimates that UCP has already captured 10–20 percent of e-commerce market share in the US.
While the US leads in Agentic Commerce, the GCC is a fast follower with a unique focus on bilingual AI, according to Lovetto Nazareth, CEO of Prism Digital, a leading AI-driven digital marketing agency in the GCC.
“By 2026, every successful CPG launch in Saudi will have a creator-led ‘storefront’ on Noon or Amazon as its primary conversion engine,” Nazareth said. He added that GCC CEOs are investing heavily in Sovereign AI to ensure that these universal protocols respect local dialects and cultural nuances, which global models often miss.
While automation is rising in the GCC, AI agents can only do so much for the time being. “They can optimize bids, timing, and targeting, but to even achieve an 80 percent automation feels optimistic. In this region, brand tone, cultural nuance, and media mix still require a human lens. Machines can scale decisions, but brand stewardship still sits with people who understand context,” Mohamed Itani, CEO, United Foods Company, said.
In the UAE and Saudi Arabia, Noon is integrating ‘Retailer-Creator’ tools that allow creators to build virtual storefronts.
This publication has published that in 2026, 86 percent of GCC creators are already using GenAI to power their content, outperforming global averages in “content velocity.”
GCC influencer economies
This rapid growth in GCC/MENA influencer economies is shaped by mobile-first consumers, high social media penetration, and youthful demographics.
In 2025, the GCC influencer marketing market was estimated at $315.5 million and projected to continue growing into 2026 and beyond, according to P&S Intelligence.
In specific Gulf states, the creator economy itself has grown sharply: from around 31,000 creators in 2023 to over 58,000 in 2025, driven by categories like lifestyle and travel that resonate with culturally relevant narratives and consumer identity, according to Qoruz, a leading influencer marketing and intelligence platform that specializes in MENA.
By 2026, the most successful brands will likely be those that integrate creators into commerce infrastructure, build long-term creator partnerships, and treat creators as performance assets with measurable ROI.
Within social commerce and the creator economy, social media and affiliate marketing together accounted for about 25 percent of holiday retail revenue in the US in late 2025, with platforms like TikTok Shop generating over $500 million in sales during peak shopping periods. According to Business Insider, these figures underscore how social platforms are no longer just discovery channels, but rather transaction environments where creator influence directly translates into revenue.
It said retailer-creator integration is further supported by trends in livestream commerce, a rapidly and globally expanding immersive format, where creators engage audiences, answer questions, and drive purchases in real time.
These are creating metrics about performance accountability within omnichannel frameworks, helping retailer-creator programs continue to evolve into core commerce engines.
One important aspect for all of this to work—for Human-AI collaborations to properly function—the right talent has to be available to manage, drive, and scale these technologies. “Key tech talent is increasingly becoming a top priority. Elda Choucair, Group Chief Executive Officer, Omnicom Media Group, said: “The name of the game now is…how fast we can upskill and adopt the new technologies that are continuously disrupting what we already have. This comes with a lot of investment into educating oneself.”
IDC, a premier global market intelligence company, estimated in 2025 that skills shortages may cost the global economy up to $5.5 trillion by 2026 in product delays, quality issues, missed revenue, and impaired competitiveness.
It said 94 percent of CEOs and Chief HROs identified AI as their top in-demand skill for 2025.
The demand for AI-related skills currently outstrips supply by a ratio of 3.2 to 1.
AI may be cancelling a lot of jobs, but lots of AI jobs are also opening up. Are the AI-skilled human floodgates about to break open? Many certainly hope so.
(For more such insightful articles, read the full special issue of the FMCG Crisis Playbook here)
