Your Weekly Creator Marketing Update🚀
13.04.2025
📊WFA sees 54% of multinational brands boosting influencer spending — with more relying on agencies to find creators
TL;DR
According to a recent report by the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), 54% of multinational brand marketers plan to increase their influencer marketing budgets in 2025, with 61% acknowledging the growing importance of this strategy. To navigate the complexities of the influencer landscape, including issues like disclosure and transparency, brands are increasingly turning to specialized agencies. The use of influencer-focused agencies has risen from nearly 54% in 2019 to almost 74% currently.
🟢 THE YAY
Any news around the increase of influencer marketing budgets is an easy addition to the yay column. I was quite reluctant to share the quotes below - but the fact that these quotes are A) considered to be a value add to articles around the topic and B) labelled as increased sophistication in Q1 2025 does raise some slight concern on my end.
“We’re seeing brands approach influencer marketing with increasing sophistication, moving away from a reliance on mega-influencers towards more nuanced strategies,” — “Most brands are now focused on maximizing their investment by working with more mid-tier and micro-influencers vs. just a few macro-influencers.”
“I encourage all influencers and creators to thoroughly research and understand the products, services and brands they promote before promoting them,” —- “Prioritize audience trust over quick deals.”
🔴 THE NAY
There are a few things I would recommend brands be mindful of, especially in relation to specialized agencies. I do want to highlight that agencies play a pivotal and vital role in the wider creator ecosystem and are indeed able to add a lot of value both on a strategic as well an operational level.
1. Avoid over-reliance.
While specialist influencer agencies have very much been the backbone of the creator industry in the past decade, you will be paying a premium. Avoid over-indexing on internal talent rosters where possible, and push agencies to build out frameworks that are especially designed for your needs. In addition, I would always recommend for brands to try and engage - and lead - on direct to influencer relationships. If possible, avoid having agencies run point on your key content creators.
2. Always ensure in-house expertise
I think agencies have an incredibly important role to play in regards to the executional side of influencer marketing. They have the resources that in-house functions often lack, and come with a lot of influencer (market) knowledge. However, I would always recommend having specific - and senior - strategic influencer marketing knowledge available in house. Avoid outsourcing the blueprint of your unique influencer marketing strategy where possible.
I’d like to address this LinkedIn post I found last week. You can read the full post here.
He’s right - dropping the ball on influencer marketing could indeed kill your brand in the long run with wider repercussions.
Let’s be very clear from the start. Influencer marketing success can not be bought. More investment does not automatically equal more success.
Treating your influencer marketing department as a function that runs performance deals with the top 10% of influencers however will place eyeballs on your brand - and could very likely lead to quite an impressive number of initial sales. You might think you’ve hit the jackpot.
But that’s year 1. Maybe (if you’re lucky) year 2. The scene is set, the expectations are higher. Budgets are higher. Entire teams are trying to identify creators that are guaranteed to perform. It’s now time to identify more influencers and new audiences. Eyeballs to feed that pipeline.
The best way to have influencer marketing kill your brand (and the influencer department) is to think of influencers/content creators as media buys to help you short-cut the funnel and hack your way to quick sales.
My observation of influencer departments: more often than not there is no uniform understanding of what influencer marketing means to the business, and why it exists to support the business in the first place. Counter to that that everyone will have an opinion on what the best course of approach is.
What is often lost in the conversations around influencers / influencer marketing as a wider practice is the importance of building a relationship with the community and audiences that are being reached. Treating influencers as eyeballs instead of humans will lead to a decrease in efficacy down the line (not to mention the risk it poses to sentiment and perception). I’m of the opinion that we’ll see the “find out” stage come into (more public) play in the upcoming years - leading to a heavy decrease in investment and entire influencer departments will disappear.
My advice would be to over-invest in the person leading your influencer marketing department. They are an absolute make or break hire in the sustained success of your influencer marketing efforts. I see too many people with expertise focusing only on output roles - running into the direction that has been decided on for that month, only to course-correct the next.
Please don’t get me wrong, performance is a key part of influencer marketing and is the most likely driver for increased investment & buy in. However, when the only measure of success and reason to exist is for influencers to immediately drive directly attributable sales at all times - a race to the bottom will ensue, and reversing the damage done by not investing in the right runway will hurt the function, its people - and the brand.
🏭Industry Headlines
🚨Why creators are now a boardroom priority
The creator economy has evolved from a marketing tactic to a C-suite priority, driven by a cultural shift that positions creators at the core of brand strategy. Over the past decade, it has transformed from a niche segment of digital culture into one of the most powerful forces shaping modern businesses.
🤖How creators use automation tools to deliver authentic, monetizable content
“We’re focusing on empowering all creators with these automated tools to maximize their efficiency, so they can focus more time on creativity and amplify their impact without all the manual heavy lifting,” Allen said. “It’s all about that efficiency and authenticity driving results for creators and brands.”
🤫‘People get too stuck on their job title’: Confessions of an agency-based creator on challenges of the creator economy
In the latest edition of Digiday’s Confessions series, in which we trade anonymity for candor, we hear from this marketing associate and creator about the difficulty of the strictly-defined lanes that exist at agencies, why today’s social media landscape requires more flexibility than in the past and what she wishes the agency world understood about the creator economy.
💻Influencer Marketing Jobs
👉Hourglass Cosmetics > Manager, Influencer Marketing
👉Notion > Influencer Marketing
