A management consultancy now owns a creator agency that has run more than $600 million in creator campaigns across 40 countries. That sentence would have read as a joke five years ago. It is the current state of influencer marketing.
Accenture Song agreed in June to acquire Whalar from Whalar Group, terms undisclosed. Whalar’s client list runs through Disney+, McDonald’s, Nike, Spotify, Gucci and Microsoft, and its team of roughly 170 people moved across, with co-CEOs Emma Harman and Jo Cronk staying in place. Whalar Group co-founder Neil Waller has described it as the largest creator economy transaction to date, though since the price was not disclosed that claim cannot be checked.
The interesting question is not whether the deal was big. It is what changes for a brand spending £3,000 a month on creators rather than £3 million.
What Accenture actually bought
Not creative talent. Accenture Song has plenty. What Whalar brings is scaled execution and, more importantly, measurement infrastructure that can push creator performance into the same media mix models a company already uses for television and paid search.
That is the whole strategic point, and it is stated plainly in Accenture’s announcement of the Whalar acquisition. The aim is to convert one-off influencer campaigns into always-on programmes that report ROI to the same standard as any other line in the media plan.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau projects US creator economy ad spend at $43.9 billion in 2026, against $29.5 billion in 2024. That is a projection from an industry body with an interest in the number being large, so hold it loosely. Even discounted heavily, the direction explains why a consultancy wanted in.
The three effects that reach smaller brands
Rates at the top get anchored to enterprise budgets. When a creator’s biggest client is running an always-on programme priced against television, their sense of what a post is worth resets. This is the effect everyone predicts, and it is also the least relevant, because brands spending small money were never competing for those creators anyway.
The middle tier gets absorbed. This is the one that matters. Always-on programmes need a deep bench, and the creators who fill it are exactly the mid-tier accounts that smaller brands have been quietly working with for years. Nobody publishes a price increase. The creator simply becomes unavailable, or available on terms that assume a twelve-month commitment.
The expected standard of a brief goes up. Creators working inside consultancy-run programmes get proper briefs, usage terms, approval timelines and payment schedules. Once someone has worked that way, a one-line DM offering a gifted product reads as unserious. That is broadly good for the industry and inconvenient if your process is informal.
The takeaway that is not in the coverage
The squeeze on small brands is about availability, not price.
Most commentary frames consolidation as a cost problem: big money arrives, rates rise, small brands are priced out. That framing assumes an open market where everyone bids for the same inventory. Creator marketing does not work like that. A creator with 80,000 engaged followers in a specific niche is not a commodity with a market rate, they are one person with finite weeks in the year.
When those weeks get committed to always-on retainers, the creator does not become expensive. They become booked. And the smaller brand finds out not through a rate card but through a slower and slower reply.
What to do about it
Take a hardware startup selling a niche kitchen product, working with six food creators on a per-post basis, roughly £1,200 each, two or three posts a year per creator. That arrangement has worked fine for two years. It is also completely undefended.
Three practical moves, in order of value:
- Convert your best two relationships into something with a commitment on both sides. Not necessarily a big retainer. A booked schedule for the next six months, agreed now, with payment terms in writing. You are buying calendar space before someone else does.
- Own the performance data yourself. Track creator-driven revenue with your own codes and landing pages rather than relying on screenshots of platform analytics. If a creator’s rate goes up next year, the argument you need is your own number, not theirs.
- Go one tier smaller and earlier. The 15,000-follower creator in your niche today is the 100,000-follower creator in two years. Relationships built at that stage tend to survive the growth. This is slower and involves backing people who will not all work out.
What can go wrong
Locking in commitments cuts both ways. A twelve-month arrangement with a creator whose audience shifts, or whose posting quality drops once the novelty fades, is money you cannot redirect. Six months is usually a better first commitment than twelve.
There is also a temptation to copy the enterprise playbook because a consultancy validated it. Media mix modelling and always-on measurement make sense at volumes where the statistics work. Applied to six creator posts a year, that apparatus produces confident-looking output from a sample far too small to support it, and you will make worse decisions than you would have from simply asking customers where they heard about you.
None of this is urgent if your creator spend is genuinely opportunistic, if you work with creators who have no interest in agency representation, or if your category is too small for a programme of that type to reach. Plenty of niches will stay untouched by this for years.
The practical next step
List the creators you have worked with more than once. Mark the ones you would struggle to replace. That is usually a shorter list than people expect, often two or three names. Those are the relationships to formalise this quarter, while the terms are still yours to set.
The brands that get hurt by consolidation are rarely the ones that could not afford the new rates. They are the ones that never wrote anything down.