ISBA Wants to Fix the Creator Economy—But Who’s Fixing the Marketers?

It’s Saturday and the ISBA—the UK’s advertisers’ club that still acts like TikTok was invented last week—has cooked up a ‘creator economy framework’ they promise will help marketers pick, measure, and scale influencer campaigns. Translation: they’ve produced a shiny PDF and expect everyone to treat it as gospel, as if this industry needs more playbooks written by boardroom types who’ve never DM’d a creator, let alone negotiated a UGC rate.

Let’s get real. The last time an ISBA framework did anyone any good, marketers were still bragging about their Facebook pages. This new initiative claims to help brands ‘choose the right model’ to manage creators. That’s nice. But it’s not 2021—there’s no shortage of talent or performance data. The real rot is in the agencies and in-house teams who still treat creators as line items instead of business partners, and who measure success by engagement rates that haven’t meant jack since the TikTok algorithm started playing 4D chess.

We’ve seen these frameworks before: a checklist here, a funnel diagram there, a 60-slide webinar with the word ‘authenticity’ used more times than actual creator fees paid on time. Meanwhile, the same ‘top 100 brands’ keep trotting out the same five creators, and every agency PowerPoint still worships at the altar of reach and impressions. The only thing these templates reliably scale is mediocrity.

If ISBA wants to “support future growth,” here’s a radical idea: force brands to share actual revenue data with creators, not just vanity metrics. Make agencies sign contracts that tie their compensation to actual business results, not just ‘buzz’. Or better yet, stop pretending you can rinse-and-repeat creator campaigns like it’s 2018 and start investing in relationships that don’t expire the minute a quarterly report is due.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: no framework dreamed up in a hotel conference room is going to save the creator economy from lazy, risk-averse marketing. The fix isn’t another toolkit. It’s burning the toolkit, ripping up the rate cards, and finally treating creators like the business partners they are—not just a line in someone’s Q4 deck.