What does it actually take to influence someone in 2026? Not to reach them. Not to be seen by them. To actually shift what they think, feel, or buy.
Because the way most brands are approaching it right now isn’t working, and the numbers make that uncomfortable to ignore. Creator marketing, when it’s done right, delivers around £6.50 for every £1 spent. It’s one of the highest-performing formats in media. Brands know this, which is why creator budgets are up 171% year on year, the fastest-growing line item in almost every media plan on the planet. And yet, despite that record investment, a large portion of creator spend delivers no incremental return whatsoever.
How people actually discover and buy in 2026
Before getting into what’s going wrong, it’s worth being honest about the environment we’re operating in, because it’s changed more than most media plans reflect.
People scroll the equivalent of 300 feet of content every day. They discover brands mid-commute, mid-conversation. A purchase decision no longer follows a tidy awareness, consideration, conversion arc. It can happen in under 90 seconds, triggered by a creator they’ve never seen before, on a platform they weren’t even planning to use. They see your brand in a creator video at 6am. They compare products in-feed while half-watching TV that evening. They convert at midnight because someone said “this completely changed my routine.”
At almost every single one of those touchpoints, a creator is involved. The platforms are the path to purchase. Which means how you show up across them, and when, is everything. The job today isn’t to plan a media schedule for your audience. It’s to be ready for them at every moment that matters.
Most brands are not structured to do that. And that’s the actual problem.
The three reasons creator spend goes to waste
It’s been called the creator effectiveness gap*, and it has three structural causes that we see repeatedly across the industry.
The first is poor brand-creator fit. Creator selection is still largely based on follower count and aesthetic. Very few brands dig into whether that creator’s audience actually overlaps with their buyers. You end up buying demographics instead of relevance, which is exactly what performance marketing moved away from a decade ago.
The second is the absence of a measurement framework. Most brands still measure creator campaigns by earned media value, a metric that was invented precisely because the industry didn’t know how to measure what actually mattered. There’s no incrementality. No CPA. No proof that the spend did anything a brand couldn’t have achieved with a different allocation.
The third is the briefing problem, and it’s probably the most damaging. The people briefing social campaigns are almost never the performance marketers who understand what converts. The brief gets built for organic reach and brand safety before a single frame is shot. The commercial objective isn’t in the room when the creative decisions are being made.
Three separate problems. But the root cause of all three is the same: social and creator have been treated as separate disciplines, with separate teams, separate briefs, and separate toolkits. That separation is what makes the gap.
What it means to think like an influence engineer
That separation is exactly what we set out to fix. Bringing Brainlabs’ paid social and influencer practices together wasn’t a structural reorganisation for its own sake. It was the only logical conclusion from what the data was showing us: influence doesn’t live in one channel, and it can’t be engineered from separate teams.
The first thing that shift unlocked was a completely different way of thinking about who you’re trying to reach and how to find them. We use Bytesights, our proprietary social listening platform, to understand what an audience is actually engaging with on social. Not their demographic profile. What entertains them, what they’re watching, what they’re sharing, what they’re spending time in. That intelligence steers what content we need to produce so it shows up on their feed not as an interruption, but as something they’d have found anyway.
The practical difference is significant. Take a brand in financial services. The instinct is to look for creators who talk about money. But right now, the ISA deadline conversation is gaining velocity alongside a broader “new beginnings” cultural moment tied to the spring equinox. A small business owner who makes content about crochet and creative work already has an audience who are at the beginning of their financial journey. That’s not an obvious brand-creator fit. But it’s a real one, grounded in where the audience actually is, not where the demographic profile says they should be.
That’s what thinking like an influence engineer actually means. Mapping the micro-moments, conversations and nudges that are shaping choice right now, and showing up there with the right creator before the window closes.
Social channels are where decisions get made
The other shift is how we think about what social channels are for. They’re not media placements. They’re systems of influence. Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, these are the platforms where decisions get made, where culture moves, where your brand either earns a place in someone’s world or doesn’t.
Building a system of influence means understanding where your buyers already are, knowing what they’re engaging with, identifying the right moment, and activating quickly. That requires paid and creator teams to be working from the same data, briefing together, and measuring against the same commercial outcomes.
Building a system of influence means understanding where your buyers already are, knowing what they’re engaging with, identifying the right moment, and activating quickly. That requires paid and creator teams working from the same data, briefing together, and measuring against the same commercial outcomes. Influencer isn’t an add-on at the end of a media plan. It’s the strategic layer that connects everything else.
Bottom line
Creator spend will keep growing. The question is whether it compounds or goes to waste. The difference isn’t in the budget size or the follower counts of the creators you partner with. It’s in whether the people making the briefing decisions, the measurement decisions, and the media decisions are actually working together, from the same brief, against the same commercial goal. Most aren’t. That’s the gap, and it’s entirely closeable.
*SOURCE: IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising) Effectiveness Conference 2025
