What does it really take to influence someone in 2026? Not to reach them. Not that they were seen by them. It really changes what they think, hear, or buy.
Because the way most brands are approaching it now isn’t working, and the numbers make that uncomfortable to ignore. Creator marketing, when done well, brings in around £6.50 for every £1 spent. It is one of the most effective media formats. Brands know this, which is why creative budgets are increasing 171% year over year, the fastest growing line item in almost every media system in the world. However, despite that record investment, most of the money spent by creators does not bring any incremental returns at all.
How people actually find and buy in 2026
Before getting into what’s going wrong, it’s worth being honest about the environment we work in, because it’s changed a lot more than most media shows.
People scroll through the equivalent of 300 feet of content every day. They find products during the commute, during the conversation. The purchase decision no longer follows a pure awareness, consideration, arc transformation. It can happen in less than 90 seconds, starting a creator they’ve never seen before, in a place they didn’t even plan to use. They see your product in a creator video at 6am. They compare the products in the feed while watching TV for part of the evening. They changed in the middle of the night because someone said “this completely changed my schedule.”
In almost every touch point, the creator is involved. Platforms are a way to buy. Which means how you appear in all, and when, everything. Work today is not about planning your audience’s media schedule. It is to be ready for them at every important moment.
Most brands are not set up to do that. And that is the real problem.
Three reasons creative spending is wasted
It’s been called the creator success gap*, and there are three structural reasons we see it over and over again across the industry.
The first is the imbalance of the creator. The selection of creators is still largely based on fan count and beauty. Very few brands grasp whether that creator’s audience overlaps with their consumers. You end up buying demographics instead of relevance, which is exactly what performance marketing has moved away from over the past decade.
The second is the lack of a measurement framework. Most brands still measure creative campaigns by earned media value, a metric that was invented precisely because the industry didn’t know how to measure what mattered. There is no climbing. No CPA. There is no evidence that the money spent did anything the product could not have achieved with a different allocation.
The third is the information problem, and it is probably the most damaging. People who talk about social campaigns are probably not performance marketers who understand what converts. Briefs are created for environmental accessibility and product safety before a single frame is shot. The commercial objective is not in the room when creative decisions are made.
Three different problems. But the root cause of all three is the same: social and creative have been treated as separate fields, with different teams, different acronyms, and different tools. That separation is what creates the gap.
What it means to think like an influencer engineer
That divide is exactly what we set out to fix. Combining Brainlabs’ paid social practices and influence wasn’t a restructuring for its own sake. It was the only logical conclusion from what the data showed us: influence does not stay in one channel, and it cannot be created by different groups.
The first thing the shift opened up was a completely different way of thinking about who you were trying to reach and how to reach them. We use Bytesights, our social listening platform, to understand what audiences are actually engaging with on social media. It is not their demographic profile. What interests them, what they watch, what they share, what they spend time on. That intelligence guides what content we need to produce so that it appears in their feed not as a distraction, but as something they would have found anyway.
The practical difference is important. Take the product to financial services. The idea is to look for creators who talk about money. But right now, the ISA deadline discussion is gathering pace around the broader “fresh start” period associated with the spring season. A small business owner who creates content about crochet and creative work already has an audience that is early in their financial journey. That is not an obvious fit for a product creator. But it’s real, based on where the audience is, not where the demographic profile says it should be.
That’s really what it means to think like an influencer engineer. Mapping the small moments, conversations and displacements that you choose right now, and being shown there with the right creator before the window closes.
Public channels are where decisions are made
Another change is the way we think about what social media channels are for. It is not a media placement. They are influence programs. Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, these are platforms where decisions are made, where culture moves, where your product earns a place in someone’s world or not.
Building an influencer system means understanding where your customers are already, knowing what they interact with, identifying the right moment, and acting quickly. That requires paid and creative teams to work with the same data, talk together, and measure the same marketing results.
Building an influencer system means understanding where your customers are already, knowing what they interact with, identifying the right moment, and acting quickly. That requires paid and creative teams to work with the same data, be informed together, and measure against the same commercial results. An influencer is not an add-on at the end of a media plan. It’s the strategic layer that connects everything else.
Bottom line
The money spent by creators will continue to grow. The question is whether it is inclusive or destructive. The difference is not in the size of the budget or the fan counts of the co-creators. It’s because people who make forum decisions, rating decisions, and media decisions actually work together, from the same brief, against the same commercial goal. Most are not. That’s the gap, and it’s completely closed.
*SOURCE: IPA (Institute of Marketing Practitioners) 2025 Executive Conference
