Five Things We Learned About... The Increasing Influence of Creators

Influencers are on the rise at an exponential rate.

Whether it's being sold mascara on TikTok, the promotion of a skin care product, or a 12-part storytime with an ‘#ad’ in the caption’, audiences are now used to a constant state of being influenced. 

However, as the world of social media evolves and audiences lean-into technology for solutions, influencers are also inevitable. The latest research from World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) indicates that 60 per cent of marketers believe influencer marketing is becoming more important; Unilever is a business championing this approach with new CEO, Fernando Fernandez, announcing that it will be investing in a 50 per cent of its marketing spend on influencers, resulting in the hiring of 20 times more of them than today. 

It’s only a matter of time before other companies reveal they have followed suit. 

Influencers are often associated with social media; those with large online followings are worthy enough of having power over their followers’ purchasing decisions, actions and (sometimes) general behaviour, such as buying a Prime energy drink because KSI and Logan Paul are the owners, or even taking up fitness due to Joe Wicks inspiring the nation. 

But are these people becoming too influential?

“People trust and people know what brands they trust,” begins Rahul Titus, Ogilvy’s head of global influence, at Advertising Week Europe. “That’s why brands are allocating more budget to influence marketing.” 

For Titus, creators/influencers are paramount for brands to be able to remain up to the speed with culture - because who else knows digital platforms and what audiences want more than them? 

He continues: “We embrace creators; ‘Turn Your Back’ for Dove won a Grand Prix for creativity and effectiveness - we got the brief at 7am and were then live in eight markets in less than 24 hours. Can traditional advertising and production do that? Absolutely not.”

For Coca-Cola, Ogilvy has also worked on “hyper personalisation at scale” for its Coke meals work - a simple concept that a Coke and a meal is a ‘Recipe for Magic’, adds Titus. 

“What we did is work with thousands of creators to hyper-personalise that message across every single market. A Coke and a pasta in Italy or a biryani in India - all basically amplified at scale. 

“When work is created with creators and then boosted in paid media, as opposed to just putting everything into paid and then seeing what actually sticks, is a much more efficient and effective system as a whole.”

But there’s a dark side to influencers having power - and audiences don’t always realise they’re being held under the influence of a social media personality. 

“In the macro context of influencers, Donald Trump and Elon Musk are influencers,” claims Suzy Barker, strategy partner at AMV BBDO. “There’s a lot of evidence to site that sometimes they are inciting behaviours or things that maybe they shouldn't be, for example: the January 6 storm of the Capital, which you could say there's a lot of evidence that leads Donald Trump to inciting people. 

“The YouTuber Kai Cenat tried to advertise a PlayStation 5 giveaway and told everyone to meet him in New York City, resulting in a riot,” she continues. “There are dark effects when you give too many people a voice. I don't think giving influencers that reach is always a negative, dangerous consequence but sometimes it’s about who we're giving the right voice to.”

And it’s not just a handful of examples to support this point; there’s an epidemic of mistrust amongst global audiences, and within this umbrella of mistrust is people’s lack of it for influencers, according to Sabrina Francis, strategy partner at the7stars. 

“Professor Felipe Thomaz from Oxford University has spent his entire career looking at effectiveness,” she recites. “His latest study ranks 23 media channels by their influence on people across multiple categories. Influencer never ranks higher than 14, meaning TV, print out-of-home all beat them. Turns out influencers just aren't as influential as we think.” 

The spread of misinformation is a worrying domino effect that can ripple from the words of an influencer. 

“Authenticity has a slippery slope and there’s a lot happening with influencers that’s not authentic,” explains Barker. “Take the Netflix show Apple Cider Vinegar - there you see a woman who basically told her followers for many years she was dying of cancer and started all these products to help her be cancer-free. People were actually making health decisions based on what this woman was saying, and it turned out to be a lie: she never had cancer in the first place.

“There’s a dangerous slope when you get into the way people are talking about health,” she concludes.

While the debate has evidence on both sides, Titus is quick to explain that, like with any industry, there is going to be a handful of negative examples that don’t accurately represent the collective. 

“I can't stress enough,” he begins. “There are hundreds of millions of creators in the world 15 examples pointed out don't actually define the whole industry. You know that's gonna happen in any industry we work in.”

Here are five things learned from the debate: 

• There is an epidemic of mistrust amongst global audiences, and within this umbrella, only 22 per cent of people trust influencers. 

• Brands like L’Oreal is a prime example of investing in influencers to match the speed of culture, according to Titus. In the UK alone, the brand invested in 72,000 creators. 

• CeraVe and L’Oreal’s award-winning 2024 Super Bowl ad featuring Michael Cera was created off the back of Ogilvy’s metrics around reach awareness and fame from prior work with creators. 

• Influencers aren’t just Love Island stars - they can be advocates for positive change. Lucy Edwards, a blind creator, through her work with Procter & Gamble, influenced change in which all of its products of shampoo and conditioner have NaviLens codes on the bottles - a color-based scannable QR code for visually impaired people. 

• There are concerns about the lack of control with influencer power, according to Francis. “Nike built this entire empire with a singular, consistent brand story. Apple changed the world through bold, long term positioning, and now some brands are handing their entire narrative over to someone who just went viral for owning a pink Stanley Cup.”