Marketing & Advertising

Brands Spent Decades Learning to Be Trusted. Now They Rent Trust by the Post.

Creators have become one of the fastest-growing lines in the marketing budget. The more interesting change is what that spending says about where growth is stored, and who gets to keep it.

Ameer Albahouth

14 Oct 2026 • 5 min read

A license named after a feeling

When Saudi Arabia introduced its license for paid social media promotion in 2022, it could have chosen a dry administrative name. It chose Mawthooq, which translates as "trusted" or "verified." A regulator named a permit after the very quality that companies have spent fortunes trying to build into their logos.

The detail is easy to pass over. It is also a fair summary of the decade. Trust used to be the output of a brand. A company advertised, delivered, and repeated itself until its name meant something. Today trust is increasingly treated as a credential held by an individual, issued to a person, and then borrowed by a business for the length of a campaign.

That shift changes what the word "growth" means.

The old arithmetic

For most of the last century, the logic of brand building was cumulative. Every advertisement, every package on a shelf, every satisfied customer added a little to the meaning of a name. That meaning turned into memory, memory turned into preference, and preference turned into the ability to charge more than the competitor down the street.

The important part of that model was ownership. The equity stayed with the company. A campaign could end, an agency could be replaced, a spokesperson could retire, and the name would still carry what had been invested in it. Growth was something a business accumulated, like a reserve.

The creator economy works on a different arithmetic. Attention gathers around people, and people move.

Where the money followed

The scale of the shift is now visible in the data. In the United States, the Interactive Advertising Bureau found that brand spending on creators more than doubled between 2021 and 2024, from $13.9 billion to $29.5 billion, and projected $37 billion for 2025. That is growth of roughly 26% in a year, about four times the pace of the media industry overall. Nearly half of the ad buyers it surveyed called creators a "must buy," behind only social media and paid search.

Globally, Goldman Sachs Research has estimated that the creator economy could grow from about $250 billion to $480 billion by 2027, with brand deals making up the largest share of creator income.

The most revealing figure, though, is not a dollar amount. When IAB asked brands what mattered most in choosing a creator partner, the top answer, cited by 58%, was the creator's reputation. Audience fit came second. Brands, in other words, are not mainly buying reach. They are buying a reputation they do not have to build themselves.

What the Saudi numbers hide

In the Kingdom, the headline numbers look modest. Statista projected influencer advertising spend in Saudi Arabia at about $95.7 million for 2025. Mordor Intelligence put the Kingdom's total marketing and advertising market at about $3.02 billion for the same year. On those two estimates, creators account for roughly 3% of the spend.

That is a small slice of the budget. It is not a small slice of influence. Saudi Arabia has an estimated 38.6 million TikTok users, according to Kolsquare, more accounts than it has residents. Influencer Marketing Hub estimates the Kingdom accounts for around 40% of the GCC's influencer marketing market. The gap between how much is spent on creators and how much attention they command is the part of the story the market size does not show.

The estimates themselves also disagree, sometimes widely, depending on how each firm defines the category. A market that has not yet agreed on how to measure itself is a market still early in deciding what it is buying.

Regulation has sharpened the picture further. Mawthooq turned paid promotion into a licensed commercial activity. Non-Saudi residents must work through licensed agencies, according to guidance reported by Arab News at launch. Kolsquare's 2026 Middle East report, as summarized by Everything PR, estimates that the active pool of commercial influencers shrank by about 35% after the license was introduced. That figure has not been independently verified by Arabian Growth. If it holds, the effect is notable: fewer creators, each now a registered business, each with more reason to treat their own name as an asset.

Growth you cannot keep

Here is the uncomfortable question underneath the spending. When a brand grows through a creator, where does the growth go?

Some of it stays with the company in the form of sales. Some of it, perhaps the more durable part, settles on the creator. The audience's trust was attached to the person before the campaign and remains attached after it. The creator can take that trust to a competitor next quarter, or launch a competing product of their own. The brand has paid for growth that it does not fully own.

Companies are responding in a few ways. Some keep renting, accepting that creator spend behaves more like media buying than brand building. Some try to grow their own people, turning founders, executives, and employees into visible voices. That route moves the dependency inside the building rather than removing it. A company whose credibility rests on its chief executive's profile has simply changed which person it cannot afford to lose. A third group is moving toward co-ownership, building products and ventures with creators so that the equity is shared by contract rather than lost by default.

None of these models has settled into a standard. Each is an experiment in the same problem: how to keep growth when trust is portable.

An older logic returning

It would be easy to frame all of this as a disruption. In the Gulf, it may be closer to a return. Long before modern brand management, commerce in the region often ran on names. Family trading houses carried the family name, and a merchant's reputation was the guarantee behind the goods. Customers trusted the person first and the product second.

The industrial brand briefly reversed that order. It allowed a corporation to be trusted in the way a person once was, and to keep that trust after any individual had gone. The creator economy is undoing part of that achievement. Trust is drifting back toward people, now measured in followers and licensed by a regulator, but personal all the same.

That leaves companies with a different question than the one marketing departments are used to asking. The familiar question was how to grow the brand. The newer one is what, exactly, the brand still holds when the people who carried its credibility move on.

A company used to grow by making a promise in its own name. Increasingly, it grows by persuading other people to make that promise for it. The growth is real. So is the lease.

Sources

Calculation note: The estimate that creators represent roughly 3% of Saudi marketing spend is Arabian Growth's own calculation, dividing Statista's 2025 influencer advertising projection ($95.69 million) by Mordor Intelligence's 2025 Saudi marketing and advertising market estimate ($3.02 billion). The two firms use different definitions, so the ratio is indicative only.