With Instagram’s January 30, 2026 update, Meta is making it significantly easier for brands to discover, evaluate, and activate creators for partnership ads—using AI-driven signals, performance prediction, and transparent recommendations. So, What Is Instagram’s Creator Marketplace?
Instagram’s Creator Marketplace is a brand-to-creator discovery and collaboration platform, built to help advertisers:
- Find relevant creators
- Evaluate performance potential
- Launch partnership ads efficiently
- Access is available only to verified Meta business accounts.
What’s New in the January 2026 Creator Marketplace Update?
Instagram has expanded the Creator Marketplace access globally, beyond the original 19 countries—allowing more brands to activate creator partnerships at scale. This update will enable:
Faster creator discovery
Regional market testing
Cross-border creator collaborations
Now Creator profiles include an Ads Performance Indicator badge, highlighting creators predicted to drive high ad performance for a specific brand which help to reduce:
Trial-and-error
Creative risk
Time spent vetting creators manually
Select the speaker suite to introduce your business
The newly introduced Similar Creators search allows brands to find creators who share comparable audiences, content styles, and performance patterns to creators they’ve already worked with successfully.
By entering a creator’s name or Instagram handle, businesses can:
- Discover creators similar to top-performing previous partners
- Replicate success across new audiences and regions
- Scale creator programs without sacrificing relevance or quality
This feature is especially valuable for brands running ongoing partnership ad strategies, as it enables systematic growth rather than one-off collaborations.
Smarter Creator Recommendations
Instagram’s updated Creator Marketplace introduces a more intelligent recommendation engine designed to remove friction from creator discovery and decision-making. Instead of starting from scratch, brands are now guided by data-driven creator suggestion rails that surface creators who are already aligned with their brand.
These recommendations highlight:
- Creators who have tagged the brand organically in previous content
- Creators who have explicitly expressed interest in partnering with the brand
- Creators with proven ads experience and a track record of high-performing partnership ads
This shift helps brands move faster while reducing the risk of mismatched collaborations. By prioritizing creators who already demonstrate brand affinity or performance potential, marketers can focus on execution and scaling, rather than manual vetting.
How Brands Should Adapt Their Strategy in 2026
As creator marketing becomes more performance-driven and AI-enabled, brands must rethink how they approach creator partnerships in 2026 and beyond. The new Creator Marketplace features signal a clear direction: creators are no longer just awareness drivers—they are scalable performance assets.
To stay competitive, brands should:
1. Shift From Influence Metrics to Performance Signals
Follower count alone is no longer enough. Brands should prioritize creators based on engagement quality, past ads performance, and predictive indicators provided by the platform.
2. Integrate Creators Into Always-On Media Strategies
Creators should be embedded into ongoing paid media frameworks, not treated as one-off activations. Leveraging organic creator content and turning it into partnership ads enables faster testing and more efficient scaling.
3. Build Creator Pipelines, Not Isolated Campaigns
Using tools like Similar Creators search and recommendation rails, brands can build structured creator pipelines that support long-term growth across markets and industries.
4. Align Teams Around Data-Backed Creator Decisions
With access to creator performance insights directly in the marketplace, marketing teams can align creative, media, and growth stakeholders around measurable outcomes, not assumptions.
5. Prepare for a Creator-Led Performance Future
As AI continues to optimize creator discovery, matching, and performance prediction, brands that invest early in structured creator strategies will gain a significant advantage in efficiency, speed, and ROI.
Conclusion
Instagram’s Creator Marketplace updates signal a clear direction:
Performance advertising is becoming creator-led, AI-assisted, and system-driven.
Brands that adapt early will scale faster—with more trust, better efficiency, and stronger results.
Partnership ads outperform traditional ads because they combine:
Creator trust
Native content
Paid distribution scale
Average performance impact:
19% lower CPA
13% higher CTR
Can agencies use Creator Marketplace?
Yes, with the correct Meta Business permissions from the brand.
Available Countries for Instagram Creator Marketplace
Argentina
Australia
Brazil
Canada
Germany
Spain
France
United Kingdom
Indonesia
India
Japan
South Korea
Netherlands
New Zealand
Turkey
United States
