Repeat partnerships are the most effective creator campaigns, and YouTube leads the way

Is there a “right way” for brands to work with creators? The Influencer Marketing Factory looked to answer that question with its 2026 Brand Deals Report.

The report produced a clear conclusion: Repeat creator partnerships produce stronger results than one-off collabs. That finding held true across YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, but influencer campaigns on each of those platforms have their own strengths and weaknesses.

To compile the 2026 Brand Deals Report, The Influencer Marketing Factory synthesized more than 300,000 promoted posts across YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. On each of those platforms, at least 2,300 creators were involved in the measured campaigns.

The Influencer Marketing Factory’s analysis favored a less common partnership type. 63% of brand-creator relationships are one-off deals, but the repeated collabs instill more audience trust and display stronger commercial signals.

“Single-post deals optimize for reach in a vacuum,” said Influencer Marketing Factory CEO Alessandro Bogliari. “They underweigh what actually compounds: influencer familiarity with the brand, audience recognition, narrative continuity, and the cumulative authority that turns a sponsored post into a recommendation people remember. The brands winning the next decade of influencer marketing will not be the ones with the longest influencer lists. They will be the ones with the deepest influencer relationships.”

If brands are going to prioritize recurring creator partnerships, YouTube is the place to go to execute those deals. Less than half of the YouTube posts measured by The Influencer Marketing Factory were one-off engagements, and nearly 20% of those posts 

were part of long-running brand ambassadorships. For comparison, on TikTok, more than 71% of the measured posts were one-offs, and fewer than 3% were part of ambassadorships.

But before brands start deploying all their marketing dollars on YouTube, they should keep in mind that no platform is perfect. TikTok has the highest percentage of the the dreaded one-offs, while Instagram has major disclosure issues. Less than one-third of measured posts on the Meta-owned app were properly disclosed. YouTube’s performance on that axis was a little better overall, but its small creators struggled to produce required disclosures. Under 20% of YouTube creators with 100,000 subscribers or less properly disclosed their brand partnerships.

The ultimate takeaway from the Brand Deals Report echoes a common refrain in the creator marketing industry: The best campaigns move across multiple platforms and formats. What’s more important, in the eyes of The Influencer Marketing Factory, is maintaining a diverse partner lineup that can provide product recommendations over and over again.