I've had clients ask us to put usage rights in a contract, and 10 minutes into the conversation it turned out they wanted exclusivity too. We caught it early. If you don't, you find out when the creator you paid posts for a competitor 3 days before your own launch.

Most influencer marketing terms sound close enough to swap, but each one decides something different in your contract, your ads, your legal exposure or your report. Our industry made this worse by using these words loosely in pitches and decks for years, and I include myself in that…

Pretty often, a brand comes to us with a list of creators they already love. When I ask why those ones, the answer is usually that the feeds look great. Then I ask what the campaign is supposed to do, and it gets a bit quiet.

Honestly, a good feed doesn't tell you much. We look at the data behind every creator before they go anywhere near a shortlist: who actually follows them, where those people live, whether the engagement is real, and how their past brand deals performed. And then we hold all of that up against what the campaign needs to achieve.

A lot of brands have a type when they hire influencers. Big following first, ideally big enough to fill a stadium (or a few), plus a feed that looks like a Pinterest board. And the creator is almost always in their 20s, as if the algorithm checks your birth certificate before letting you onto the For You page. 

Kathryn Turner is a pretty good argument for throwing that stereotype out altogether. She has no Linktree with a media kit in her bio, or anything else that suggests she set out to become an influencer. Yet she's the one racking up views for Marks & Spencer Food.

IMDb (Internet Movie Database)  is where you go when you can't remember which movie you know that actor from, or to confirm whether that comedy everyone hated is actually as bad as they said before you waste two hours finding out. Turns out, creators have a place there now, too. 

Last month, IMDb officially stepped into the creator economy by adding a new professional category called "Digital Creator” with 6 sub-professions: Streamer, Vlogger, Video Essayist, Video Creator, Gaming Creator, and Influencer. Is Hollywood getting some competition? Maybe. Told you creator marketing was going places.

Scroll Instagram for a few minutes and there's a good chance the whole creator market somehow shows up in your feed: a UGC ad selling you the hot new portable blender, an employee taking you behind the scenes, and an influencer promoting protein pancakes from a kitchen so tidy you'd wonder if anyone lives there at all. 

There's no shortage of people who can make content for you. The question is: should you do the whole influencer marketing shebang, use all the different kinds of content all the time, and when is a lot too much? After more than 15 years in this industry, I have found: doing less, on purpose, will get you further than doing more with no clear idea why. 

I keep seeing headlines asking if influencer marketing is dead, or if the era is over, and every time, I have to laugh a little. In a way, it is. The version where a creator sounds like a person until the brand deal shows up is on its way out.

Being an influencer in 2026 isn't the same job it was 10 years ago. This one here is for brands: Keep running your campaigns the way you did five years ago, and you'll spend your budget on content your audience has already learned to scroll past. 

YouTube says it wants to reward active creators and open up more ways to make money across the platform. At the same time, it's made monetization harder to reach, changed what counts as a view, added pressure on Shorts creators, and reportedly offered millions to keep its biggest names off Netflix.

So which is it? Rewarding creators, or making creators work harder while the platform gets more valuable to brands? Here are my two cents.

Judging influencer marketing awards is a completely different experience from running the campaigns. I am judging award entries quite a bit, and each time I read the entries cold.

No context, no backstory, nobody in the room to explain what they meant. Just what the team wrote down and what the numbers say.

And somewhere around the 30th entry, a pattern shows up. You can tell almost immediately which teams decided what the work was for before they started, and which ones picked creators they liked and reverse-engineered a story afterward.

Two influencers email you on the same afternoon: one with half a million followers, the other with 7,000.

You already have a favorite. Many marketers do, and it's usually the bigger number. It seems like a safer bet, I get it. The budget should still go to whichever one matches your campaign objective.

Chase the follower count anyway, and the bubble bursts fast. What's left is a report full of reach and impression numbers. If that's what you needed, great. If it wasn't, good luck defending the spend to finance.

Search Console has always required a verified website: a domain you own, with a DNS record to prove it. That changed when Google introduced social media platform properties. Instead of verifying a website, brands and creators can now connect their social accounts and access Search performance data showing how content from those accounts performs in Google Search and Discover, including clicks, impressions, and search queries. 

Funny how loose workplace phone rules have gotten. There was a stretch when scrolling on shift got you written up, maybe docked your pay. These days Starbucks is paying select baristas to film TikToks while they work.

The coffee giant has teamed up with TikTok to test a new creator program built around its own employees. 

So next time your line is moving slow because your barista is filming instead of steaming milk, save the eye roll. That's the job now. 

A campaign wraps with 2 million impressions in its first month and everyone calls it a win. Six weeks later, the CFO asks the only question that matters: What did those impressions do for the business? 

The room goes quiet. By the time that question lands, it's too late to pick the right metrics.

KPIs chosen before a campaign starts, tied to one stated business outcome, survive a budget review. Grab whatever's easiest off the platform afterward, and you're just hoping nobody asks a follow-up question.

Every in-house influencer program looks the same in year one. A handful of creators, a few campaigns that land, leadership that stays out of the way. Everyone's happy.

By year three, that same setup is groaning under more creators, more markets, more spend, and a lot more scrutiny, straining under weight it was never built to carry. That's usually when the topic of hiring an agency comes back on the agenda and stops being hypothetical. Here's what each of these five signs are and what they mean.

A lot of campaigns end the same way. The wrap-up report is done and goes out; someone drops a thumbs-up in Slack, and by the next morning the team is already deep into creative and strategic thinking for the next round of activities with creators. But does anybody go back to check what happened in round one?

I get why. There's always another campaign due, another creator to book, another…

Cannes Lions wrapped last week. Creators didn't have to watch the action from the sidelines this time. Like Cinderella, they were at the center of the attention dancing the night away. The only difference, they didn't turn into pumpkins at midnight.

Until now, the festival's creator hub sat on top of the Palais, physically separated from the main action along the Croisette. 2026 it moved down to the Adobe x LIONS Creator Beach, alongside the beachfront activations that have defined the…

Influencers and UGC creators are often lumped into the same category, but there are fundamental differences between the two.

Both create content, and that's where the similarity ends. Confusing the two means you're either paying influencer rates for something that should have been a content-only fee, or under-investing in relationships that could actually build audience trust over time. 

Before you decide who to work with, answer a simpler question: Does this campaign need distribution, content, or both? The answer usually makes the choice obvious.

Influencer marketing draws more confident, contradictory advice than almost any other channel in marketing. Some swear it's delivered the best results they've ever seen. Others call it a black box nobody can prove. It's the easiest channel to scale, and just as easily the one that drains a budget dry. Go all in, or get out while you can, depending on who's talking. 

Somewhere along the way, a handful of these claims hardened into assumptions that people stopped questioning. Here are seven myths worth retiring, and what to do instead.

The creator economy has reached the point where education is now a product category. For brands, that matters because the people they brief, contract, and measure now operate as small media businesses, often with very little formal support around the business side of the job.

The Daily Influence reported on Bedford, a Los Angeles education company founded by Ben Newton, launching a six-week program for professionals who want to publish content with more consistency and commercial intent. Tuition is $3,750. The same story points to FiveTwoNine, Billion Dollar Boy's creator education platform, which has grown to more than 4,000 members globally and brought more than 500 creators into in-person events.

I get this question in almost every intro call: how long until we see results? Or even better, how many sales can we expect? The honest answer to the first question: depends on what you're measuring. An awareness campaign moves on a different clock than a conversion campaign. A one-off sponsored post moves on a different clock than a six-month partnership. And so on down the line. The second question almost always tempts me to say: How should I know? But I don’t. Instead, I am trying to explain that influencer marketing is not your silver bullet and it takes time.

Engagement can show up within days. Awareness and business outcomes take months. Bad news if you were expecting creators to wave a magic wand and pull sales out of a hat.