Influencer marketing scandals are not rare edge cases. They are a predictable consequence of moving fast, skipping due diligence, and treating social media reach as a proxy for trust. When a partnership goes wrong, brands do not just lose the campaign spend. They absorb the reputational fallout of someone else’s behaviour. The pattern is consistent:…
Choosing between an influencer marketing platform and an agency comes down to one question: do you need software to manage execution, or do you need expertise to drive strategy? Platforms give you access, data, and control. Agencies give you judgment, relationships, and accountability. Most brands need a clear answer before they spend a penny. Neither…
Influencer marketing strategy is the structured approach a brand takes to selecting creators, defining their role in the commercial funnel, and measuring whether the investment is actually doing anything useful. Done well, it reaches audiences that paid media cannot buy and builds the kind of trust that a banner ad never earns. Done badly, it…
Influencer marketing challenges are rarely what brands expect them to be. Most teams walk in worried about fake followers and walk out having lost budget, brand equity, or both, for reasons that had nothing to do with bots. The real challenges are structural: misaligned incentives, weak measurement, and a category that has industrialised faster than…
AI influencer marketing uses artificial intelligence to create, manage, or optimise influencer campaigns, ranging from fully synthetic virtual influencers to AI-assisted tools that handle creator discovery, contract management, and performance analysis. The category is growing quickly, but the commercial results are uneven, and a lot of brands are confusing novelty with strategy. The technology is…
Brand safety in influencer marketing is the practice of ensuring that the creators you partner with, and the content they produce, do not expose your brand to reputational, legal, or commercial risk. It covers everything from the values and past behaviour of individual influencers to the platforms they use, the audiences they attract, and the…
Silver influencers are content creators aged 50 and over who build audiences on platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, typically around lifestyle, travel, finance, health, and topics that resonate with older demographics. They are underused, undervalued, and in many cases, more commercially effective than the younger creators brands default to. The over-50s control a disproportionate…
FTC influencer disclosure rules require that any material connection between a brand and a creator, whether payment, free product, or a personal relationship, is clearly and conspicuously disclosed to the audience. The rules are not new, but enforcement has sharpened, the guidance has been updated, and the excuses brands were relying on have quietly run…
Influencer fatigue describes the growing consumer resistance to sponsored content, brand partnerships, and paid endorsements on social media. Audiences have not stopped following creators, but they have become significantly more sceptical about what those creators are paid to say. The data from 2025 reflects a channel that is maturing fast, and not always in the…
The FTC’s influencer disclosure rules got a significant update in 2025, tightening what counts as adequate disclosure and expanding who those rules apply to. The core requirement has not changed: if there is a material connection between an influencer and a brand, audiences must be told clearly and conspicuously. What has changed is how the…
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