#influencer-marketing

#influencer-marketing

"This is a great opportunity to reach new audiences by harnessing the power of Instagram to help fashion-forward women tell their stories through this inspirational platform. Our audience is one of career women, whose networking is mobile and on-the-move. It's important for them to keep up with the brands that inspire their ambition for life and this campaign firmly places Radley as a leader in this category."

"Human-generated content is quickly becoming the most valuable driver of brand discovery, but influencer- marketing solutions weren't built to scale for the enterprise," said Kristen Wiley, chief executive officer and founder of Statusphere, who began her career as a creator.

By utilising Brave Bison's data tools and direct relationship networks, we recruited influencers with the perfect profile to reach our intended audience and worked with them throughout the entire creative process, directing and producing video content featuring them within the pop up environments. We then shot a series of 22 videos raising awareness of and showcasing the immersive, artistic and technology-driven nature of the SK-II Wonderland activation.

Consumers increasingly rely on social-media personalities to recommend products and signal what to buy, avoid, and trust. This relationship rests on a fragile premise: that influencer opinions reflect genuine experience, not undisclosed commercial orchestration. While early regulatory attention focused on covert product promotion, a parallel practice has quietly taken hold. Brands are now deploying influencers to undermine competitors by casting doubt or discouraging purchase under the guise of independent opinion.

"Television still grabs the most people in the shortest amount of time," said Mike Visnick, CEO of TRNDY Social.

At $8 million for a 30-second Super Bowl spot, celebrities are expected to maintain their monopoly on Big Game commercials this year, keeping influencers and creators in the wing for social and experiential campaigns. "It's just viewership demographics. You cast a really wide net of people watching it, and you want as many people as possible to recognize the person you're putting on the screen," said Jerry Hoak, chief creative officer at The Martin Agency.

We don't know where the product is going to end up because the celebrity will pick the product,

Brooke Meister and Alex Dochter have unveiled new digital creator talent firm Link Management, which reps digital creators including social media personality Danielle Walter, NFL Majorette and lifestyle creator Chloe Holladay, viral TikToker Yolanda Diaz, and "Love Island USA" Season 7 vet Jalen Brown. Link Management, which began operations in 2025, was created to "go beyond transactional brand deals and offer personalized, holistic representation that helps talent diversify revenue streams, strengthen personal brands and build sustainable, long-term careers."

Even a casual mention of online lottery tucked into lifestyle chatter feels normal because influencers blend interests so effortlessly across posts, creating a steady flow of conversation that pulls you in. Fashion content has a now-or-never feel. Fashion choices are seen as they happen, rather than in a presentation. Fashion influencers are turning mundane environments into instant fashion displays. This authenticity inspires a whole new generation of fashion with a fresh look.

The payout the richest influencers earn for a single post on Instagram is staggering - often rivaling the price of a luxury home or what many people earn over a lifetime. And leading brands with big marketing budgets are more than willing to pay the fee to gain access to their millions of followers and high engagement levels reported by the site's metrics, while influencers become the face of their brand.

Certainly people's use of social media continues to increase, accelerated by the recent lockdowns. According to a recent report from Datareportal, the number of social media users worldwide increased by 13.2% between January 2020 and January 2021, nearly double the rate of growth in the previous year (7.8%). User numbers grew another 10% to January 2022, to a total of 4,623m. And people are spending more time on social media; the worldwide average is now two hours and 27 minutes a day.

In March, Fernández unveiled a new "influencer-first" strategy. He said the consumer-goods company would work with 20 times the number of influencers it had previously worked with. The owner of well-known brands such as Dove, Hellmann's, and Vaseline also said that it would spend half of its ad budget on social media, up from 30%. The result has been a galvanizing event for the influencer marketing space, according to marketing consultants and executives, talent agents, and influencer marketing insiders.

These storefronts promote products, yes, but they also anchor creators within the brand ecosystem by providing measurable, trackable links between content and sales. Both moves have ignited intense interest among marketers because they signal a clear shift: Ad dollars are flowing rapidly away from traditional paid channels and into creator-driven commerce. The Structural Shift In Ad Spend Creator marketing has evolved from a niche experiment into a core growth engine.

Advertising giants like Publicis, WPP, and Omnicom aren't the only companies deploying roll-up strategies and shaking up influencer marketing. Humanz, an Israeli influencer marketing platform that expanded to the US in 2024, is going "full acquisition mode" through 2026, CEO Liran Liberman said in an interview. The company exclusively told Business Insider that it recently raised $15 million from an undisclosed group of venture capital investors to fuel several M&A deals.

WPP Media will receive access to more data on YouTube creators and content as part of an expanded partnership with the Google-owned video platform, according to a press release. Proprietary creator insights will be used to help WPP Media match clients with the right talent on YouTube and drive more measurable campaign outcomes. The offering is available across the agency's marketing technology stack and through its dedicated influencer shop, The Goat Agency.

Affiliate marketing - a way to drive sales through links posted by creators or publishers - is expected to drive $216 billion in US e-commerce sales this year, according to data from EMARKETER. These links are a direct way to track the shopping that is actually inspired by influencers. ShopMy, a social commerce platform, enables creators to build shoppable landing pages and earn commissions from sales driven by their links on social media.

Though its origins are religious, you probably know the advent calendar as a humble grocery-store product that features chocolates hidden behind 24 perforated cardboard doors. That sugary countdown to Christmas dates back to the 1950s when the first chocolate versions came on the scene. Cadbury started mass marketing them in 1971 as tools to engage children with the Christian tradition of Advent, says Canadian marketing expert Robert Warren, who closely follows Christmas trends.

There is a direct correlation between our social presence, our community mentions, and the commercial performance,

Even in 2019, influencer campaigns were still seen as a nice-to-have, somewhere to allocate the leftover budget in support of the 'actual campaign'. We're living in a very different world today. Whether you're looking to spend millions of dollars to speak to tens of millions of fans via Christiano Ronaldo or Kylie Jenner, or tap into vast grassroots networks of nano-influencers who reach a few thousand consumers at a time, influencer marketing is an integral part of any modern communication strategy.

Age really is just a number when it comes to social media, as new research from Ampere Analysis shows that more than half of users ages 55 to 64 now watch influencer content every week. This number is up by 10 percentage points since 2020. In the U.K., the figure has also risen over the past five years, from 30% to 38%. TikTok and YouTube, in particular, are behind the growth-proof that Boomers' social media presence is no longer limited to Facebook. "The biggest surprise in our latest data wasn't how popular influencer videos have become, it is how rapidly this trend has extended to older audiences," Annabel Yeomans, senior research manager at Ampere Analysis, said in a statement on December 1.

In 2021, Prada created "Candy," an influencer designed to sell perfume. With an appearance rendered using then-state-of-the-art tools, Candy's not-quite-real vibe felt straight out of the Silicon (Uncanny) Valley. It was peppy, but cartoonlike, and it was hard to see how Candy could sell perfume it could never smell. Since then, technologies have greatly improved. A brand can now render any persona with a product, create movies with that model persona animated in a realistic way, and show them demonstrating products.

Social media, for many people, can be a way to stay in touch with friends, an ego exercise, or a vehicle to argue with strangers. But for some especially focused users, it can be a side hustle with income potential. Converting your feed into something that generates cash isn't the easiest side hustle-and it takes time. But if you can build a large enough following, it can be a lucrative side business.