Marketing Needs Its Own Payments Infrastructure

A brand gears up to launch an influencer activation with 30 top tier creators across the US, Canada and the UK. The creators are excited, the creative is approved and ready to go live. But before a single post goes live, the team is stuck. 

Each creator has to be onboarding into Coupa, manually submitting tax forms, and waiting on procurement to onboard these vendors Marketing will likely use exactly once. Three weeks later, the campaign finally launches. Luckily it was not too time sensitive, but that is not always the case.

This is the operational reality underneath modern marketing. And it happens every day.

Marketing has quietly become one of the biggest “supply chains” in the world.

Not for raw materials, but for creative work: creators, editors, production crews, designers, photographers, media contractors, affiliates, talent managers, and the small businesses that support them. The teams executing modern marketing look less like a traditional vendor list and more like a living network.

Goldman Sachs research suggests this creator economy is projected to reach $480 billion by 2027, roughly double its size just four years prior.

And yet the financial plumbing underneath marketing still assumes the old world: a small number of large agencies, long-term vendor relationships, predictable invoices, and slow-moving procurement cycles.

That mismatch is now one of the biggest constraints on marketing speed.

The creator economy operations challenge that nobody writes about

Most stories about the creator economy focus on culture, content, and distribution. The operational reality is messier.

Marketing teams want to move fast. Finance teams need control. Procurement needs auditability. Legal needs clean records. Meanwhile the people doing the work, creators and small vendors, just want to get paid on time without jumping through hoops. According to Remote’s 2025 Contractor Management Report, 85% of freelancers are paid late some of the time.

When that system breaks down, the symptoms are familiar:

• A new vendor takes weeks to onboard for a single campaign

• A team uses ad hoc payout tools that create reconciliation headaches later

• Compliance gets bolted on after the fact, right when a program is scaling

• Partners end up fronting money or improvising workflows that don’t survive audit season

None of this sounds like “marketing,” but it determines how fast marketing can actually operate.

In a world where creative cycles are measured in days, the back office can’t run on timelines measured in weeks.

Why generic payment solutions don’t work for the creator economy

When Marketing team struggle to get their influencers or creators paid, the default reaction is to reach for generic payment tools or AP automation. Those systems are good at what they were designed to do: routine, repeatable payables with B2B vendors.

The creators Marketing is working with are anything but routine.

Marketing money moves through messy, real-world pathways:

• Brands working through agencies and platforms

• One-time vendors and project-based work

• Creators who have never had a “real” job once their Tiktok or Instagram took off

• Payments split across multiple parties (talent managers, collectives, production partners)

• Cross-border payouts with local expectations

• High variance in volume, timing, and documentation

The result is that even well-run finance teams end up creating exceptions to apply their procurement and vendor process to support the long tail of vendors. Marketing ends up playing support staff trying to explain to creators how to navigate the finance system and answering emails about onboarding and payment status. Not a single legacy or modern AP system (Coupa, Tungsten, SAP Ariba, Tipalti, ZIP) was built with supporting hundreds of creators or a production coordinator who needs to pay talent on the day of a shoot.

It’s not that finance teams are doing something wrong. It’s that they’re trying to run a modern, networked marketing function on infrastructure built for a different era.

The shift that’s already happening

The most important change in marketing isn’t just that there are more creators.

It’s that marketing has become more operational.

According to the ANA, 82% of major brands now have some form of in-house agency or content capability, up from 42% in 2008. Agencies are building creator practices. Platforms are becoming workflow hubs. The work is increasingly distributed, always-on, and global.

Every other scaled ecosystem eventually hit this inflection point and required dedicated infrastructure to move forward.

Card payments got Visa and Mastercard.

E-commerce got Stripe and Shopify Payments.

Gig work got UpWork and Fiverr.

SaaS billing got Recurly and Chargebee.

In each case, the existing general-purpose financial rails weren’t wrong, they just weren’t built for the specific velocity, volume, and compliance needs of that ecosystem.

Marketing, despite the sheer dollars involved, is still piecing together its own payment and compliance workflows with duct tape.

What “marketing payments infrastructure” actually means

When I say marketing needs its own payment infrastructure, I don’t mean another way to send money.

I mean an operating layer that acknowledges how marketing actually works:

• Vendor Onboarding: A consistent way to onboard the long tail of marketing vendors: creators, contractors, and production partners.

• Standardized tax compliance: W-9s, 1099s, cross-border requirements) that doesn’t slow campaigns down or create compliance exposure at scale

• Payment rails that support global, high-velocity payouts without sacrificing the controls finance teams require

• A system of record that finance teams can reconcile without a spreadsheet fire drill at the end of every quarter

• Workflows that don’t force agencies or partners to carry financial liability they shouldn’t have

The goal is simple: let marketing move quickly while letting finance sleep at night.

Why this matters now

This isn’t only about efficiency, in the creator economy reputation is currency.

The companies that build the best creative networks win. And the companies that treat creators and small vendors well, including paying them quickly and reliably, build reputational compounding effects that show up in performance over time. In a market where top creators have real optionality about who they work with, payment experience is becoming a competitive differentiator for brands.

Marketing leaders talk constantly about speed, authenticity, and iteration. Those are operational outcomes. And operational outcomes require infrastructure.

The next evolution of marketing won’t be won only by better creative. It’ll be won by the teams that can operationalize creativity at scale — without breaking finance and compliance in the process.

The infrastructure moment for marketing payments is here. The teams that recognize it first will have a structural advantage that compounds over time.

Lumanu is building the payments and compliance infrastructure for modern marketing teams.