Opportunity Or Risk. How Social Teams should navigate the “Scale” conversation.
Is anyone else excited for the launch of Scary Movie? I personally can’t wait. To prepare myself I’ve decided to embrace another humourous/has potential to be scary, scenario that is happening right in front of our very eyes. Scaling influencer programs.
Here's what the agencies are telling you: influencer marketing beats paid brand creative. Sadly, as per usual they are forgetting a big caveat — it only beats it when you put paid behind it. In a previous role I watched influencer ads with paid amplification outperform brand creative by more than 3x. Strip the paid out and the picture isn't quite as flattering. Trust is down: 81% of consumers say they distrust social media content (yikes) [1], and trust in influencers themselves dropped five percentage points in a single year [2]. Paying a stranger to be enthusiastic about your product just doesn't hit the way it used to. What. A. Surprise.
Things started to get a little ugly about two years ago. TikTok Shop affiliate content saturated every feed to the point of parody. The gap between what was paid and what wasn't became impossible to miss. Brands were slow to spot it. Agencies were extremely happy to keep cashing the cheques.
Finally the correction is coming, approaching at the quickening speed of an influx of Cannes posts on LinkedIn. But credit where it's due — brands are the ones pushing back. 38% of US marketers now put the majority of their influencer budget into paid amplification [3]. Real money is moving. Influencer marketing is being asked to behave like a performance channel for the first time in its life, and to its credit, it can.
But the correction is creating its own mess: scale.
In the past fortnight I've watched two agencies launch products that promise to scale creator programmes to hundreds — sometimes thousands — of influencers. Negotiation, contracting, payments, all at the speed of light. Most of which has been technically possible for years. What's actually changed is the panic. Influencer agencies were never built to compete with paid media specialists, and the operational side of creator marketing — sourcing, negotiating, contracting — can be brought in-house with a decent tool and a competent intern. So to survive, agencies will lean on efficiency or creativity. Scale is the word brands want to hear, so you can guess which way that's going to go.
For brands, this is mostly good news. More creators, more ads, more engagement. Collaboration posts already outperform regular branded content across most brand pages — anyone who's looked at their own analytics knows this. So surely, more of this will lead to stronger output overall. Yes, it’s simple. But, in reality it creates another opportunty, or potential problem, depending on how brands engage with it.
About twelve months ago I started using the phrase community influence. I called it "real influence" at first, because I wanted marketers to admit something uncomfortable: paid influencers are not the most powerful force shaping a buying decision. They never have been. The more I dug, the more obvious it was — communities are. The comments they leave, the content they create, the reviews they share. That's where the actual decision gets made.
The data isn't subtle. 48% of consumers read social media comments to figure out what people actually think about a brand [4]. 91% of users spend time in the comments section [5]. There’s still the stats floating around that tell us friends and family have the biggest impact on our buying decisions. I don’t think that will ever change. But for now online communities and the comments section are the closest brands can get to creating real influence. That is where opinion is formed and reformed in real time, under every piece of content you've ever paid an influencer to make theres a community doing a lot of leg work. And most brands aren’t considerate of the extent of their influence in their weekly marketing meeting.
At Ardent we categorise community members on a scale of influence. At one end, Agitators. At the other, Advocates. Both hold real power, for different reasons. In the middle, the Neutrals — emojis, tag-a-friend comments, things that have nothing to do with your brand or won’t create influence. They're easy to ignore. The Agitators and Advocates are not.
This is the part the agency conversation is conveniently skipping. The same scale the AI tools are unlocking — hundreds of creators, millions of impressions — produces an avalanche of comments and even UGC that brands now have to deal with. Left unanswered, you miss the chance to influence at best, and you bleed budget at worst. One unanswered complaint is enough to plant doubt in a prospective buyer's mind. You can buy all the reach in the world; a single dragged-out negative thread under your top-performing post can undo a serious chunk of it. What I’m seeing in some social feeds is a clear lack of awareness from brands. The content exists in a spreadsheet somewhere, but the brand has no idea those comments exist.
We describe ourselves as a Social Innovation Studio for a reason. Earlier this year we developed Ardent ModAi — a community influence tool that lets our teams track, manage and respond to communities at the same scale brands are now being sold on. When creator content scales, client engagement scales with it. The goal; fewer agitators. More advocates. Every creator acknowledged like a human being and not an inventory item.
Some brands will respond to this new opportunity by investing in AI tools, but as we’ve seen in some comment threads, AI tools lack context which can result in even more negative sentiment. ModAi is a tool used by the team at Ardent to help speed up our workflows, identify opportunities and areas of focus. This helps us build creative, on-brand engagement at the speed brands now need it, without the risk of brand damage associated with a generic AI software.
Scale is the conversation everyone wants to have. Making sure scale doesn't destroy the thing that made social work in the first place — that's the conversation worth having.
If you'd like to see what that looks like in practice, get in touch.
SOURCES
[1] iStock, 2025 Marketing Trends Report, December 2024 [2] Morning Consult, The 2025 Influencer Marketing Guide [3] Linqia / EMARKETER, October 2024 enterprise marketer survey [4] Jungle Scout, Consumer Trends Report, via Marketing Charts [5] House 337 research, reported in The Drum, November 2025
