Forty-five percent of brands have mispriced a creator partnership, paying either more or less than fair market value, according to new research from Billion Dollar Boy. The survey, “Priced on Guesswork: The State of Creator Investment”, polled 1,000 marketing and procurement decision-makers at brands across the U.S. and UK and found a channel that has outgrown the systems built to price and govern it.
Mispricing is more pronounced in the UK, where 58% of respondents said their organization had paid above or below fair value, compared with 33% in the U.S. Among those who mispriced, 40% paid too much and 36% paid too little, indicating the problem runs in both directions rather than skewing toward overpayment.
The report locates the cause in tracking and process rather than creator cost. Seventy-three percent of respondents said they manage creator finances manually, with 49% relying on spreadsheets and 24% on email and shared files. Only 21% use purpose-built software, and 6% described their approach as a mix with no unified workflow. As brands scale to work with hundreds of creators at once across brand, performance, PR and regional teams, that lack of a shared system turns small pricing inconsistencies into repeated overspend, per the report.
Confidence has eroded alongside the tracking gap. Just 44% of decision-makers said they retain full confidence in their organization’s ability to negotiate fair market rates. Nearly every respondent, 99.7%, cited at least one operational or strategic concern when budgeting and pricing creators: 57% pointed to balancing pay against budget, 56% to determining fair pricing itself, and 49% each to proving ROI internally and managing budgets across markets.
The survey also found that most brands negotiate without specialist support. Eighty-one percent handle creator fee negotiations in-house rather than through an agency, and 21% manage them across siloed internal teams. That gap shows up in confidence levels: 60% of respondents said they are very confident in rates secured by external agency partners, against 40% for rates set by their own teams, a split that widens as programs scale across markets.
Becky Owen, CMO of Billion Dollar Boy, summarized the finding as a scaling problem rather than a cost problem. “The problem isn’t what creators cost. It’s that creator investment has scaled faster than the systems built to price and govern it,” she wrote in a LinkedIn post announcing the research.
The research was commissioned alongside the launch of Creator Investment Intelligence, a pricing and budget governance platform from Companion, a BDB Group company. Built from more than 180,000 verified creator deals and $173 million in campaign spend across 50-plus regions, the platform includes a Benchmark Algorithm that generates a suggested fee adjusted for variables such as platform, deliverables, usage rights, exclusivity, region and performance, and a Budget Tracker that centralizes creator spend into a single dashboard across teams and markets.
The survey was conducted by Censuswide among 1,000 procurement professionals and marketing directors at brands, not agencies, in the UK and U.S., with data collected between July 10 and July 16, 2026.
Image source: Billion Dollar Boy The full survey is available here
Dragomir is a Serbian freelance blog writer and translator. He is passionate about covering insightful stories and exploring topics such as influencer marketing, the creator economy, technology, business, and cyber fraud.
Forty-five percent of brands have mispriced a creator partnership, paying either more or less than fair market value, according to new research from Billion Dollar Boy. The survey, “Priced on Guesswork: The State of Creator Investment”, polled 1,000 marketing and procurement decision-makers at brands across the U.S. and UK and found a channel that has outgrown the systems built to price and govern it.
Mispricing is more pronounced in the UK, where 58% of respondents said their organization had paid above or below fair value, compared with 33% in the U.S. Among those who mispriced, 40% paid too much and 36% paid too little, indicating the problem runs in both directions rather than skewing toward overpayment.
The report locates the cause in tracking and process rather than creator cost. Seventy-three percent of respondents said they manage creator finances manually, with 49% relying on spreadsheets and 24% on email and shared files. Only 21% use purpose-built software, and 6% described their approach as a mix with no unified workflow. As brands scale to work with hundreds of creators at once across brand, performance, PR and regional teams, that lack of a shared system turns small pricing inconsistencies into repeated overspend, per the report.
Confidence has eroded alongside the tracking gap. Just 44% of decision-makers said they retain full confidence in their organization’s ability to negotiate fair market rates. Nearly every respondent, 99.7%, cited at least one operational or strategic concern when budgeting and pricing creators: 57% pointed to balancing pay against budget, 56% to determining fair pricing itself, and 49% each to proving ROI internally and managing budgets across markets.
The survey also found that most brands negotiate without specialist support. Eighty-one percent handle creator fee negotiations in-house rather than through an agency, and 21% manage them across siloed internal teams. That gap shows up in confidence levels: 60% of respondents said they are very confident in rates secured by external agency partners, against 40% for rates set by their own teams, a split that widens as programs scale across markets.
Becky Owen, CMO of Billion Dollar Boy, summarized the finding as a scaling problem rather than a cost problem. “The problem isn’t what creators cost. It’s that creator investment has scaled faster than the systems built to price and govern it,” she wrote in a LinkedIn post announcing the research.
The research was commissioned alongside the launch of Creator Investment Intelligence, a pricing and budget governance platform from Companion, a BDB Group company. Built from more than 180,000 verified creator deals and $173 million in campaign spend across 50-plus regions, the platform includes a Benchmark Algorithm that generates a suggested fee adjusted for variables such as platform, deliverables, usage rights, exclusivity, region and performance, and a Budget Tracker that centralizes creator spend into a single dashboard across teams and markets.
The survey was conducted by Censuswide among 1,000 procurement professionals and marketing directors at brands, not agencies, in the UK and U.S., with data collected between July 10 and July 16, 2026.
Image source: Billion Dollar Boy
The full survey is available here
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