#influencer-marketing

#influencer-marketing

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.

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.

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.

Filed on September 16 in Los Angeles Superior Court, the lawsuit involves five anonymous contestants from MrBeast's reality competition show, Beast Games, which premiered on Amazon Prime in March 2024. Inspired by the extreme challenges for which MrBeast is famous, the show features over 1,000 participants competing for a $5m cash prize through various endurance and problem-solving tasks. It aims to be one of the largest and most ambitious reality competitions ever produced, per a report by We Got This Covered.

MemeHouse Productions is set to launch the 2025 Formula One Las Vegas Grand Prix weekend with a TikTok-sponsored creator campaign designed to connect younger viewers with the sport. The campaign is set to bring more than 20 influencers to the Strip as part of a brand trip organised around the TikTok Lounge. Creators are set to stream content live from the TikTok Clubhouse and promote F1 to a Gen Z audience across platforms.

AriZona Beverages founder Don Vultaggio touted the company's newest drink collaboration with a young TikTok star as being more successful than its inimitable Arnold Palmer on "The Claman Countdown" Thursday. "We've teamed up with a nine-year-old and we hit the marketplace, and we've seen tremendous success," Vultaggio told FOX Business anchor Liz Claman. "Candidly more so than we ever saw in Arnold Palmer at the beginning," the founder added.

Microsoft Corp., eager to boost downloads of its Copilot chatbot, has recruited some of the most popular influencers in America to push a message to young consumers that might be summed up as: Our AI assistant is as cool as ChatGPT. Microsoft could use the help. The company recently said its family of Copilot assistants attracts 150 million active users each month. But OpenAI's ChatGPT claims 800 million weekly active users, and Google's Gemini boasts 650 million a month.

Despite the AI boom, influencer brand deals are largely being written without clauses related to AI, intellectual property and copyright, which could leave creators and brands exposed, IP lawyers say. At least five creators (ranging in follower size and content type) Digiday spoke with confirmed no such clauses have been added to their brand deals this year. Those clauses could include usage rights limiting a brand's ability to use a creator's synthetic name, image and likeness, or curbing creators' AI tool usage in creative assets without disclosing use.

I've been deeply involved in influencer marketing since 2011, back when "influencer" wasn't even part of most marketing vocabularies. At the time, I was finishing a master's thesis on fashion bloggers while working as a media planner, and I noticed something that would shape the next decade of my career: Storytelling consistently outperformed traditional ads. People trusted creators more than banner ads, and authentic content built a type of connection that traditional media simply couldn't replicate.