In First Creator Marketing State of Safety Report, CreatorIQ Finds Brand Safety Is the New Growth Imperative in Creator Marketing

As creator content scales exponentially, with 33x more creator-produced branded content than Fortune 100 owned social posts, brands are prioritizing reputation and authentic creator partnerships to unlock long-term growth

Los Angeles, CA — October 21, 2025 — CreatorIQ, the global operating system for creator-led growth, today released its first State of Safety report uncovering how brand safety and suitability have become core drivers of success in the creator economy.

According to the study conducted with Sapio Research, 74% of enterprise marketers say brand safety has become more critical in the past year, driven by the rise of AI-generated content, growing economic uncertainty, and increasing pressure to prove ROI. What was once considered risk mitigation is now a growth strategy—one that enables brands to scale confidently and sustainably.

“In the creator economy, brand safety isn’t about risk avoidance—it’s about tolerance, visibility, and governance,” said CreatorIQ CMO Brit Starr. “When that’s accomplished in a way that is brand-aligned rather than one-size-fits-all, it benefits all sides of the relationship—brands, creators, and consumers."

Brand Safety Unlocks Growth and Longevity

The report defines brand safety as the framework that protects an organization’s reputation through risk mitigation, suitability, and fit, while brand suitability focuses on the alignment between a creator’s content and a brand’s customers at the right moment in time. Together, they form the foundation of trust and operational maturity in modern marketing.

Key findings include:

• 72% of enterprise brands and 76% of enterprise agencies say brand safety has grown more important year-over-year.
  
  
• 82% of organizations that say brand safety has grown more critical saw higher ROI from creator programs than those who didn’t.
  
  
• 89% of enterprises value collaborating with creators who are low risk to their reputation.
  
  
• On average, creators produced 33 times more social posts than the highest-revenue brands generated on their owned channels, underscoring the scale—and responsibility—of the creator ecosystem.
  
  
• For the first time, both brands and agencies ranked “creator suitability or fit” as the most important factor in selecting new partners—outpacing performance, demographics, and follower count.

As creator content continues to dominate social platforms, safety and suitability are redefining how partnerships are built. 

A Proactive Approach to Safety

With 98% of brands now leveraging creator content across multiple areas of their business, the report highlights the need for proactive tools that can safeguard reputation at scale. Manual vetting alone no longer suffices: eight out of ten brands use multiple tools for creator vetting alone, reflecting the growing complexity of risk management in a high-volume, video-first landscape.

To meet this need, CreatorIQ has launched SafeIQ, an AI-powered brand safety and suitability solution that transforms oversight into strategy. SafeIQ goes beyond keywords, using multimodal AI to analyze text, audio, and visuals—capturing nuance, context, and cultural signals across languages.

“Brands that thrive strike a balance between mitigating risk and embracing rawness,” said Nate Harris, VP of Product Innovation at CreatorIQ. “SafeIQ helps teams move from reactive moderation to proactive reputation management, which protects long-term brand equity.” 

The State of Safety report situates brand safety at the center of what CreatorIQ calls the Era of Efficacy—a time defined by the need for measurement, business outcomes, and operational maturity in creator marketing. In this environment, oversight isn’t optional; it’s the foundation for scale, sustainability, and success.

Methodology

The State of Safety report is based on a global survey conducted by Sapio Research of 1,723 marketers, agencies, and creators across 17 industries and nine regions. It provides the most comprehensive view of how organizations are navigating this new era—where ROI, authenticity, and scalability matter more than ever. Access the full report here.